I just wanted to promote an underappreciated film that's time has come, I believe. Originally released in late 2015, Chi-Raq is, in my opinion, director Spike Lee's finest work. It offers a masterfully-crafted and perversely fun look at the intersection of gun violence with racial oppression and the social construct that is masculinity: an intersection that has been raised anew by the recent March For Our Lives.
It's a rhythmic story about the issue of gun violence in Chicago's South Side. The tale revolves around a group of women who organize a sex strike demanding that the gangs put down their weapons. The strike soon expands worldwide until finally world peace is achieved through global disarmament. It's quite awesome. One of my all-time favorite movies.
Unfortunately, it's release met with the wrong timing, right in the middle of the Black Lives Matter movement, so it didn't catch on at the time. But with the recent March For Our Lives yielding the largest turnout of any protest event in American history, I think Chi-Raq's time has come! Wanted to promote the movie anew as relevant to our current national dialogue about gun violence and how it relates to other issues of social injustice. Here's a trailer: