Director: Spike Lee
Year Released: 2015
Rating: 2.5
With a huge number of casualties - including innocent children - as a result of gun violence in South Chicago, the women of the area, led by Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris), agree to withhold sexual favors from their lovers until peace is made. Lee, finally going back to doing what he became famous for (politically-aware movies about racial relations in the U.S.), borrows the setup from the play Lysistrata by Aristophanes to comment on gun violence, the Black Lives Matter movement, gangsta rap (he's never been a fan) ... albeit in a soap-box ranting manner: the lines are written in crude (sometimes infantile) verse, the preaching gets quickly repetitive and it ends in a Sex-Off Contest (?!) between Lysistrata and her very self-confident boyfriend Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon) and an unlikely resolution in which sanity is restored, the guns are taken away and everyone gets a job paying above minimum wage (suddenly ... Utopia!). For its (many) faults it's the movie Lee needed to make in present times, and it's more important for what it has to say (he's calling on African-American communities to police themselves) than how it goes about saying it. Never thought I'd hear Angela Bassett chant "No peace, no pussy!," but there you have it.
