Cinema Dispatch: Digger

Digger and all the images you see in this review are owned by Warner Bros. Pictures

Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu

Boy howdy, is this a contentious one! I certainly wasn’t expecting the film to be so polarizing given the talent behind it, but this seems to have hit a lot of people the wrong way. I guess I should have seen it coming given how silly it was for the initial trailer to be about Tom Cruise’s career that also just so happens to end with a teaser for the movie, but I guess if you’re gonna go for the Oscar, you might as well go as big as possible. I’m certainly still looking forward to it, perhaps even more so now that it’s become such a huge miss with a lot of people! Will I be one of those who will find greatness in Tom Cruise’s latest attempt to prove he can do more than jump out of planes, or is this an absolute train wreck that can only happen at the highest levels of Hollywood talent and creative hubris? Let’s find out!!

As long as the world needs oil, there will be men like Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise); an oil baron with the world at his fingertips and the US President on speed dial. Now typically, a man with that kind of power is rarely put in difficult positions, but that all changes when the one thing he can’t control, Mother Nature, gives him and the rest of humanity a kick to the gonads as one of Digger’s extraction sites in Greenland explodes and releases an ice shelf that’s on a one-way path to Europe. Not exactly the best PR for an oil company, but Digger is not about to be buried in controversy when he still calls the shots and keeps the modern world spinning. Of course, it’s not going to be an easy game of 4-D chess as everyone, from his head of environmental safety (Riz Ahmed), to his sister with a Green Energy company (Sandra Hüller), and even the very cranky President of the United States (John Goodman) is breathing down his neck to either fix the problem or make it someone else’s. With the facts of the situation so overwhelmingly against him, can Digger steer the narrative away from his company’s failings and make himself the hero of this crisis? Just how much damage can be expected from this icey torpedo of death, and is there any hope of stopping this disaster before it’s too late? Is this something that can be fixed with a few folksy stories about his grand-dad, because Digger certainly has a lot of those!

“Back in my day, a global catastrophe was just another word for opportunity! Now someone get my submarine before we’re all inhaling salt water and fish urine!”
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Cinema Dispatch: BlacKkKlansman

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BlacKkKlansman and all the images you see in this review are owned by Focus Features

Directed by Spike Lee

There’s a lot going on right now and as much as I’d honestly like to take a step back from the heavier subject matter to focus on terrible horror films and laughable thrillers, well… there’s a bigger story that needs to be told and at the very least I can try to stay engaged with the films that are being made because of it.  Fortunately the films this year that faced issues of racism, white supremacy, privilege, and state sponsored oppression have been pretty great so far with The First Purge being a worth addition to one of the best film series we have today, Sorry to Bother You feeling like the kind of gonzo shot in the arm film making that will inspire others to think outside the standard feature film model, and Blindspotting being a supremely empathetic examination that’s palatable and poignant for any audience member.  However, it’s time for the king to return to his throne as Spike Lee has spent his entire career (barring Oldboy) speaking on these very issues that the rest of Hollywood is just catching up to and is now throwing their weight behind these artists.  Did Spike Lee make the definitive film of our turbulent times, or has his style gotten tiresome in the face of newer voices in his political circle?  Let’s find out!!

The movie follows the strange yet true story of Detective Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) who joined the Colorado Springs police force in the seventies and not long after joining the force started a sting operation against the KKK in the area.  With the help of a fellow cop Detective Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) he managed to impersonate a white supremacists over the phone while Flip would pretend to be him in person; a plan that was so successful that they even managed to dupe KKK Grand Wizard David Duke (Topher Grace) who had several conversations with Ron never realizing he was in fact black.  As the investigation goes along though, things start to get complicated as certain members of the Colorado chapter of the KKK start to suspect their newest recruit, and Ron start to find it hard to live not only a double life as a fake white man, but also the dichotomy of being a black man and a police officer in that period of time; especially when he starts falling for the President of the Black Student Union Patrice (Laura Harrier) who is just as militant against white systems of power as Ron is determined to use his position in said system to take the KKK down a peg.  Will Ron and Flip manage to stop the KKK from whatever it is they’re planning without getting caught in the crossfire themselves?  How far will the KKK members go to assert themselves as a threat to be taken seriously, and who do they plan to hurt in the process?  Just how many white people jokes can Ron get away with before David Duke becomes suspicious!?

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“Let me ask you this, my pure white brethren!  How many KKK members does it take to screw in a light bulb?”     “I don’t think we covered that in the manual…”

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