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Movies Watched, August 2018

I try to post these roundups as soon as I can after each month closes but I’m barely getting this one in before October. And it does seem like a long time ago that I saw Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” at the theater, but the disappointment still lingers.

It’s not wise to walk into any of this director’s movies expecting perfection, but I’ve come to expect, at least, a kind of thrilling audacity, a go-for-broke sensibility that bends narrative and polemic together in unexpected ways. That’s what Lee’s 2015 film “Chi-Raq” was like: not altogether successful, but still wildly ambitious, and pretty amazing to watch.

By contrast, “BlacKkKlansman” is almost shockingly…conventional. Its crazy premise—an African-American cop fools the Ku Klux Klan into accepting him as one of their own—never reveals itself to be anything crazier than the way it’s described—no new layers are peeled back, no unexpected twists are presented. It’s just kind of boring, actually. And by the end, when Lee hastily motors through various plot resolutions and tries to tie the movie’s historical milieu into present day events, the total effect feels slapdash. A missed opportunity.

Here are all fifteen movies I watched way back in August.

If you’re interested, here is what I watched in July,
June, May, April, March, February and January. You can also see my complete list of everything I watched in 2017 and follow along with my film diary over at letterboxd.com.

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