Whenever a filmmaker wins an Academy Award, fans and industry folks alike sit at the edge of their figurative seats and await the newly decorated artist’s next work.
In Spike Lee’s case, his 2019 Oscar win in the Adapted Screenplay category for BlacKkKlansman was a career history-maker, as it became his first competitive win (he won an honorary Oscar in 2015 at the Governors Awards). As someone whose work had been arguably snubbed for years, it was a long time coming.
Well, Lee fans don’t have to wait too long for his next “joint” because Da 5 Bloods is coming this summer and its trailer is now out!
The synopsis is as follows, per Netflix:
From Academy Award Winner Spike Lee comes a New Joint: the story of four African-American Vets—Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.)—who return to Vietnam. Searching for the remains of their fallen Squad Leader (Chadwick Boseman) and the promise of buried treasure, our heroes, joined by Paul’s concerned son (Jonathan Majors), battle forces of Man and Nature—while confronted by the lasting ravages of The Immorality of The Vietnam War.
I must admit, when I saw Lee tease the trailer on Twitter Sunday night, the grainy napalm-esque filter reminded me of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Lo and behold, there’s a reference to the 1979 film within the first few seconds of the trailer—because Lee looks at subtlety the way Mariah Carey looks at Jennifer Lopez. Plus, the use of The Chamber Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today” seems quite similar to the chaotic and uneasy effect The Doors’ “The End” had in Coppola’s film.
Also, Lee has a firm dedication to replacing ‘the’ with ‘da’ (he has a film called Da Sweet Blood of Jesus and he regularly uses it in his social media captions to this very day) so I have a theory that he actually invented the term that black folks have been using to refer to the coronavirus: Da Rona. Just a theory, though!
Da 5 Bloods drops on Netflix on June 12.