We get way too worked up over trailers; will we care about the real issue?

So now, what are we supposed to think about film director Spike Lee and his upcoming project that supposedly will expose just how gruesome and grisly our wonderful city of Chicago truly is?

Many political people gained attention for themselves by trashing Lee back when his film crews were in Chicago shooting the footage that will eventually become the film that is scheduled to be released next month.

NOW, A TRAILER that will play in movie theaters for the next few weeks is promoting the film.

Like most trailers, it is a brief strip that depicts the “big name” actors who will be in the project and probably shows us all the highlights of the film – but in such a non-contextual way that we have no clue what the film truly is about.

After all, why should we see the film if the whole story got revealed in a 30-second video blitz?

Personally, the fact that actor Samuel L. Jackson is involved intrigues me enough to think this film might be worth some attention – although learning that actor John Cusack is playing a Father Pfleger-like priest makes me think it will be too over the top.

BUT FOR MOST people, I suspect the whole reason they’re getting worked up over the film is the subject material – an aspect of Chicago that some people like to blow completely out of proportion.

While other people want to go so far out of their way to ignore to as to assuage any guilt they ought to be feeling. If anything, it is those people whose skin Lee is trying to get under.

How else to explain the line of narration used in the trailer telling us that the homicide total in Chicago tops the casualty total of American Special Forces who served in Iraq?

That’s a loaded statement in and of itself. It should not be taken as a simple fact that cannot be questioned. It needs to be kept in its own unique context.

YET I HAVE to admit the real problem when it comes to urban violence in Chicago isn’t really that people in select neighborhoods are killing each other off.

It is that the rest of us (those of us fortunate enough to not live in a place like Englewood or North Lawndale) all too often are willing to accept those homicide totals – so long as they stay within the boundaries of those neighborhoods.

We may very well think on some level that “those people” just don’t know any better, or don’t really matter. So long as “real people” (like ourselves) aren’t impacted, we can live with those homicide totals.

Those news stories we see in Monday morning newspapers every so often about how the death tally took a jolt upward are something we think of as merely a part of the local color.

SO LONG AS none of the addresses of where those violent outbursts took place are anywhere near a place we have ever gone to, we tolerate it. That is the REAL problem our society faces, and I don’t know how successfully a Spike Lee film will be able to take this issue on.

For every notable moment in “Do the Right Thing” (I’m still appalled by actor John Turturro’s racist pizzeria worker, even though I know such people really do exist and pass themselves off as respectable), we get something so absurd as in “Bamboozled.”

Which is my own personal fear about “Chi-raq” – it could wind up providing such a ridiculous vision of what is happening in certain parts of our city that it makes the masses amongst us all the more that this is an issue that really doesn’t impact us!

Adding to the isolation that certain residents of Chicago could wind up feeling would be the ultimate low blow to their futures.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Excuse me for thinking it presumptuous to think anyone is going to get the allusions to Lysistrata – they’re more likely to think it is a film done partially in rap.

EXTRA: ‘Chiraq’ will only become lasting image if we let it become one

Learning that an alderman wants to penalize filmmaker Spike Lee if he persists with plans of making a movie about violence and action in inner-city Chicago to be called “Chiraq” makes me wonder why he has nothing better to do with his time.

The alderman in question is Will Burns of the 4^th Ward, who introduced a resolution this week that says if Lee really makes such a movie depicting black Chicago as overly violent and grotesque, then he should not qualify for the film production tax credits the city usually gives to movie productions.

BURNS IS CLAIMING he’s taking the moral high road by saying Lee can make any kind of film he wants and call it whatever name he chooses – even if the name he is considering is the derogatory label used by many black people to imply that Chicago has become the equivalent of an Iraqi war zone.

But all this is going to wind up doing is feeding into Lee’s self-righteous ego and personality and probably make him think he’s on some sort of crusade to expose the gritty and grotesque nature of some parts of our city.

Burns told reporter-types that such a film should lose tax credits because it would be derogatory to the city’s public image.

Nonsense! Not everything that makes it onto a movie screen (or in today’s way of viewing movies, onto whatever kind of screen one prefers to download their video entertainment) is “Up with People” positive.

HECK, MOST OF it is just downright stupid. Yet we don’t care.

I can think of a couple of Chicago-set films off the top of my head with images that are less than praiseworthy, but which no one in their right mind would complain about.

How about “Only the Lonely,” which starred John Candy and Jim Belushi as a couple of cops (although the CPD logos were conspicuously absent) who in one scene of the 1991 film decide to try to lower a dead body with a fire hose out of a window – rather than carry it down several flights of stairs (the elevator was broken).

But when the hose tears halfway through the effort, the body comes plummeting down to earth; with many dozens of spectators nearby.

THEN THERE’S “RUNNING Scared” from 1986, with Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines as a pair of undercover Chicago cops who wind up chasing a notorious drug dealer (played by Jimmy Smits) to the Thompson Center state government building, where they wind up thwarting his efforts by dumping his cocaine stash all over the state government building’s floor.

I can’t envision the Chicago Police Department thinking much of either image. At least I want to think they’re both over the top to where we can’t take them seriously.

Which ultimately is the problem with what Lee may wind up doing with his attempt to make a film set in Chicago, but which he says has violence conditions similar to places such as inner-city Philadelphia, Baltimore and his own home of New York.

Is the real problem that some political people just don’t want to have to address the reality of modern-day Chicago? It certainly is obvious enough that some people think we can get away with ignoring certain neighborhoods and focusing all attention on the tourist sites.

AS THOUGH THE people who actually live in Chicago and are native to the area are of lesser importance.

But trying to address those problems is complex, and bound to address certain people who are still offended by Lee’s 1989 production, “Do the Right Thing” and how the character “Mookie” could possibly turn on his boss, Sal, near the film’s end.

I guess ranting and raging about tax credits is a less complex issue to complain about.

Which, in the end, may be the real problem – our willingness to try to pretend that no one who isn’t exactly like ourselves even exists – that faces our society.

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Rahm win, inner-city Chicago both get pot shots aimed at Second City image

I couldn’t help but notice a pair of Chicago Tribune stories about entertainment industry personalities taking their shots at the public image of our fair Second City.

Jon Stewart, the actor and soon-to-be former person who anchors the “fake news” Daily Show on Comedy Central, did a commentary this week denouncing the people of Chicago.

OR AT LEAST the 56 percent of those who bothered to vote for mayor who cast their ballots for the re-election of Rahm Emanuel for another four-year term.

Does this mean the 44 percent who wanted Chuy Garcia as mayor, along with the roughly 60 percent of registered voters who didn’t bother to vote and the just over half of Chicago who aren’t even registered to vote are somehow forgiven for what was done to them in the name of Democracy?

Stewart, who in the past has mocked the idea that his entertainment-oriented program is viewed as serious news programming by anybody, said on Wednesday that Emanuel has “a terrible record and a universally recognized abrasive personality.”

Which is all true enough. Although I don’t think that, in and of itself, makes for a compelling argument of condemning Chicago as a whole for his re-election – which just about anyone with sense saw happening.

THE ONLY REAL question is with the opposition being unable to garner enough support to win the run-off election held Tuesday, why couldn’t Emanuel just get enough voter support back in the original municipal election on Feb. 24?

If it was going to be nothing more than a repeat of Rahm for “four more years,” why go through the hassle of the second election? At the very least, I’m sure the past few weeks aggravated the ulcers of a few politically-oriented Chicagoans.

Although I don’t think Chicago was really being lambasted all that much. Stewart plays his material for laughs – even if it is at the expense of public officials. Whom quite frankly are often people who are worthy of our public derision!

If anything, Stewart’s funniest line might have been at Garcia’s expense – pointing out that had he won, he’d be the fourth-most prominent Chuy in the United States. Behind the Chewbacca character, chewy granola bars and the dwarf that third-rate entertainer Chelsea Handler often uses as a punch line for her own material.

BUT I’M NOT concerned about Stewart’s blow as much as I am about the announcement that film director Spike Lee has a new Chicago-oriented project he’s making – one that will feature actor Samuel L. Jackson, along with area natives Jeremy Piven and Kanye West.

It’s going to be called “Chiraq,” as in the name that many inner-city residents have taken to using to refer to Chicago. It plays off the name “Iraq” and is meant to imply that our city’s level of street violence is comparable to the Middle East war zones where U.S. troops have died.

It may just be a movie. It may just be a work of fiction.

But Lee is invariably going to be turning public attention to the segment of Chicago that many of us like to pretend either doesn’t exist or is somehow isolated enough from the rest of us that we don’t have to think about it.

THE REV. MICHAEL Pfleger has pointed out that Lee was in Chicago at his Auburn/Gresham neighborhood parish church back in January and spent a day interviewing local residents who have to cope with street violence every day of their lives.

Regardless of how over-the-top the Spike Lee film may wind up being, there’s going to be a touch of reality reflected in the project – some of which was noted in Stewart’s denunciation of Emanuel voters.

That reality may wind up hurting us far more than any rant from Stewart; who is, after all, the clown who thinks there’s anything particularly special about pizza in New York.

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