Episode 180 - Chi-Raq

From the outrageous minds of Spike Lee and his co-writer Kevin Willmott, comes this retelling of Aristophanes' 'Lysistrata' set in contemporary Chicago.  Shooting deaths in the South Side outnumber those in both Afghanistan and Iraq Wars combined.  One woman is fed up with these depressing statistics, so she enlists the female community to deny their men sex until the fighting stops.  On this broad canvas, Lee lets his imagination go wild, creating a self-indulgent film that suffers not from ambition but uneven pacing and a problematic depiction of the female characters as sex objects, not activists.  Andrew and Phil have a lot to say about this film. You can download the podcast here by right-clicking on the hypertext link and choosing "save as", or you can use the convenient player attached to this post.