About a month ago, Rachel noted in her daily Newsies column that Spike Lee and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel had exchanged cross words regarding the title of Lee’s new film Chiraq. The mayor was displeased with the term, a portmanteau that compares the epidemic of street violence in the Chi with the fraught militaristic climate in American-occupied Iraq. Emanuel squashed beef in a decidedly old-school manner, dropping science directly onto Lee with a comment accounting for the unduly negative reputation of Englewood, one of the city’s roughest neighborhoods: “He said that while the movie is about the neighborhood of Englewood, I was clear that I was not happy about the title,” Emanuel said. “I told him also that there are very good people that live in Englewood who are raising their family and there's a lot of positive things that are happening in Englewood mainly driven by the people that make up Englewood.”
Stone-cold OG that he is, Lee has not allowed production on Chiraq to be deterred one bit by the mayor’s player-hating. Today, a new report from Screen Daily brings new cast and plot details to the developing project, and it sounds like Lee’s going all in on an exciting concept.
Chiraq will take the form of a musical comedy modeled after Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata. In the canonical Greek play, the women of Athens withhold sex from their husbands in an effort to bring the Peloponnesian War to an end. Lee’s film will transpose the women’s gambit to the streets of Chicago, with the intention on bringing an end to black-on-black bloodshed between gangs. More exciting still, previously rumored stars Kanye West and Samuel L. Jackson have been confirmed, with John Cusack and Jennifer Hudson also joining the cast. I like to imagine that Kanye West will play a lightly fictionalized version of Kanye West.
Spike Lee’s last film, the oddball Ganja & Hess rework Da Sweet Blood Of Jesus, met with fair-to-positive notices. But it’s been a while since a film from Spike Lee really ruffled feathers in the public sphere. It’ll be exciting to see how many buttons Chiraq is willing to push.