Who is Spike Lee?
When [Green Book] won the Oscar for Best Picture, the stubborn old man who angrily got up and left the table; a playful and sharp response to griffith's film history classic [the birth of a nation] and the black "blade" of the history of the Ku Klux Klan with a "black party" joke and sharpness.
Thirty years ago, a film that echoed the black political movement of the 90s was used to rehearse the "insights" of the current racial conflict in the United States.
At the end of the film, hailed as "the greatest black film," a young black man is strangled to death by a white policeman strangled by a baton in front of the entire community, causing him to suffocate, almost intertextual with the current Freud affair.
[Do as it should be]
In almost every film, Spike Lee strives to create a truly "black film."
His latest film, Blood Five, is also a "black movie." It was born in the midst of the ongoing racial conflict sparked by the Floyd affair, and received the most attention and controversy. From the day it was launched on Netflix, there was a two-level differentiation of word-of-mouth trends.
Film critics love it. On professional film critic website Metacritic, [The Blood Five] received a media high score of 81 points, and the freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes was as high as 91%.
The Chicago Sun praised, "Lee created an immersive, violent and shocking scene, like a combination of [the deer hunter] and [the sands of blue blood], while at the same time lurking commentary on American society and politics."
For more general audiences, the film can be confusing. Correspondingly, the audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes is only 56%, and the imdb score is only 6.7.
The San Francisco Tribune commented that "it's a clumsy combination: an adventure film set in Vietnam and a racial manifesto for 2020, both trying to juggle but not dealing with it."
What the hell is going on with [The Blood Five]? After reading it, I can finally talk about it. One word to comment on, that is: ambitious, but also enough to procrastinate.
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If so, [the black party] responded to [the birth of a nation]. The [Blood Five] responded to the mainstream Vietnam War movies of [Apocalypse Now], [First Blood].
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Vis Stallone, the heroic white tough guy who can fight almost half of the Vietnam War movies. What about the black soldiers?
Stallone starred in the classic "First Blood", and the title of "Blood Five" is "Five Drops of Blood"
It may be unimaginable and little attention is paid to. African-American soldiers make up at least one-third of the battlefields of World War I, World War II, and Vietnam in the movies. Overall symptom rates and mortality rates are also much higher than those of whites.
But on the screen, there is no figure of these people.
Their forgotten or neglected sacrifices and sacrifices on the battlefield, and the racial discrimination they still have to suffer when they return to their homeland, have become the theme and ambition of the [Blood Five].
The first shot of the film comes from an interview with the boxer Ali in 1978:
"People of color, and poor people who are suffering from hunger in the mud, what reason do I have to shoot at them?" They didn't call me Black Guǐ, they didn't lynch me, they didn't let a dog bite me, they didn't strip me of my citizenship... And I don't want to be a black man sent by the white government to kill yellow people!"
That year, Ali was sentenced to five years in prison for refusing to perform military service. It also became a microcosm of the black soldiers who didn't want to go to war.
And what about the black soldiers who went to war? The film selects a group of 5 people, using the method of changing the frame and interpolation, telling the year and present of the group of 5 people.
The core and team leader of the group is Norman played by "Black Panther" Chadwick Bosman. Tall, handsome, calm and wise, he commanded battles on the battlefield and taught the black team members "the history of the blacks" on the battlefield.
Norman is in a sense a composite of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., and the "spiritual leader" that the other four trust and admire.
Decades have passed, and the clever young man on the battlefield has been carved by time into an old man with a big belly. And only Norman, forever young, always angular and blood-hot passion. Because he died in the Vietnamese battlefield, he also buried in that jungle forever.
The reunion of the four veterans at the Vietnamese airport becomes the beginning of the film's current time and space.
On the one hand, the four of them traveled to Vietnam to find the bones of Captain Norman and let him return to his hometown as a warrior. On the other hand, the Vietnamese jungle where the muskets were fired also buried a secret of 5 people.
When the format changes, to the proportions of television screens that covered the Vietnam War era, it means that the time goes back to the 1960s. The U.S. military is mired in Vietnam, and the country is in the midst of an anti-war movement.
A team of 5 people with Norman at its core received a new assignment. They looked for a crashed CIA transport plane loaded with salaries to be paid to local ethnic minorities as a reward for helping to fight the Viet Cong.
With the same classic sunset and helicopter footage as [Apocalypse Now], a gun battle begins in the rainforest. The helicopter was blown down by local guerrillas, and the group of 5 people fell behind the rocks, hid in the rainforest, and opened fire with the opposing guerrillas.
After a brief battle, they finally found the target on a lost transport plane—it was a full box of gold bars.
And Norman quickly made a decision: they wanted to "steal the gold bar for a pillar"! It's not "stealing", it's what the U.S. "owes" them!
"We blacks spilled our first blood for American independence. From the beginning, blacks have sacrificed for this country, hoping to one day be treated as they deserve. And all we get is bullying, go to them!"
After some generous statements, the 5 agreed to bury the gold and dig it up later when they had the opportunity to come back and use it to support the cause of black equal rights. As a result, this wait is decades later.
The journey of gold, accompanied by the motivation of the four people to find the bones and ghosts of the spiritual leader, together build the main line of the film.
The story of the film is not complicated, but it took a full two and a half hours to shoot. In addition to the camera's constant travel between the present and the past, it is also because of Spike Lee's ambitions outside the narrative.
As the New Yorker commented, "It's a history lesson wrapped up in adventure." [The Oath Of Five] is interspersed with a large amount of documentary material about the history of black Americans.
For example, a clip of Malcolm X's speech:
"When you let twenty million negroes help you fight, help you pick cotton, but never give them any actual compensation... Sooner or later, their loyalty to you will be exhausted."
Unlike Dr. King, who advocates the "nonviolent" movement, Malcolm is more like a noble and dangerous Panther. Promote the black Muslim movement, oppose "nonviolent" doctrine, and advocate the most thorough confrontation with violence and racial discrimination against black people in the United States.
In the film, norman, who is regarded as a "spiritual leader" by his black brothers on the battlefield, apparently draws more inspiration from Malcolm than Dr. King.
He complained about the injustices suffered by black soldiers: "The 11 percent black population of the United States has a 32 percent conscription rate!" ”
African-American servicemen, who endured racial discrimination (and apartheid), fought in all major battles from the Revolutionary War to the Vietnam War, shed blood for American independence and development.
From the first man to die in the Revolutionary War, Crispus Atax, to the brave and warlike "Buffalo Soldiers", to the 186,000 blacks who enlisted in the Civil War, and the 910,000 African-American soldiers who fought against fascism in World War II.
But in the end, the freedom and equality they were promised never got. Only the atrocities of racist police, as they have been the same for decades, have not changed.
In reality, Malcolm also complained angrily in his speech:
"The white man sent you to Korea, and you fought in blood!" They sent you to Germany and you fought bloody battles! They sent you to the South Pacific to fight the Japanese, and you fought bloody battles! Your blood is shed for white people! But the church in your hometown was blown up, your little daughter was murdered, and you didn't shed blood for them! You bleed because white people call you to flow, you bite because white people tell you to bite, you call because white people call you!"
Interestingly, [The Oath of Blood Five] also reproduced the radio content of the Vietnamese side shouting at black American soldiers.
The historically real "Hannah of Hanoi" was one of the famous radio female voices of the time. She would read out the list of American casualties in a cold and slow tone and broadcast the news in the United States. The soldiers of the time had to endure this in order to listen to an American folk song and rock music.
In the movie, there is a passage of "Hannah Hanoi" broadcasting the news of Dr. Kim's assassination.
"Black soldiers, your government has sent 600,000 troops to fight the rebels, and the black brothers living in more than 122 cities are full of anger. You are here to fight us, and your fellow blacks, who were brutally killed by the government thousands of miles away, need you."
This paragraph is extremely ironic, the group of 5 heard about the assassination of Dr. King, listened to the black civil rights movement in the country, and could do nothing but raise a gun to vent to the sky.
They shed their blood on the front lines of another country, but in their own country they are deprived of their freedom.
And even if they don't die on the battlefield, they return from Vietnam, as the episode "Inner City Blues" sings: they can't find a job, or are addicted to drugs, have no employers, are blinded by people, and are called "baby killers".
The shadow of war never went far around them, and no matter how much hope they once had, their lives were ruined.
In the film, Paul, a veteran with several other personalities, a broken family, a violent mood and schizophrenic tendencies, is a representative character with severe post-war trauma.
Spike Lee fantasized about a chest of gold to compensate them and to make the bar eventually distributable to fellow blacks in their hometown and to the black movement.
At this moment, the "black lives matter" movement on the screen almost resonates with the current reality in a shocking and violent resonance.
It is better to say that the film reflects reality, and history returns to the present. Spike Lee's ambition and sincerity in the film are evident day by day. However, the expression of filling too many private goods in two and a half hours does feel long and heavy.