WATCH: Spike Lee’s Satirical “Chiraq” Gets a Trailer

“I will deny rights of access and entrance.”
Film + TV
WATCH: Spike Lee’s Satirical “Chiraq” Gets a Trailer

“I will deny rights of access and entrance.”

Words: FLOOD Staff

November 04, 2015

Spike Lee in Chicago

Spike Lee‘s flawed, emotional Bamboozled tells the story of appropriation and race relations in popular culture in highly meta fashion—and, in what turned out to be a strangely prescient detail, it features The Roots in the role of house band for a late-night TV show (though we’re pretty sure The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon was created to share memes, not to intentionally provoke racial outrage, as is the show in Bamboozled).

Now, the New York filmmaker is preparing to release Chiraq, another satirical comedy that trains its focus on a highly emotional issue: gun violence in Chicago. The film, which is apparently a musical narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, takes its structure from the Greek comedy Lysistrata. In Lee’s version, the women of Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods conspire to withhold sex from their men until the shootings stop. And while the militaristic pledge they recite in the below trailer is played for laughs (“I will deny rights of access and entrance”), the sullen shots of people holding portraits of their loved ones suggests that comedy will be played in a decidedly minor key.

Along with Jackson, Chiraq stars Nick Cannon and Chicagoans Jennifer Hudson and John Cusack. It will have a limited theater run beginning December 4 and will subsequently be available on Amazon Instant Video.

(via Variety)