Caught it on Netflix. I am having a hard understanding the lukewarm to modest praise in this post. Everything about this movie seemed amaeturish. cinematography ( spike if you are going to shoot digital you need to learn how to shoot digital), screenwriting, acting. I guess y'all are being kind because they are kids but those two kids were just painful to watch (and this is the same director that directed the magnificent cast of kids in Crooklyn).

I guess I can see the claim that Clarke Peters did a good job but he was dealing with such awful dialogue and otherwise his character made no sense.

And my suspicion that the films would be a hatchet job against the black church was confirmed. His agenda had him on such a one track mind that inserted a bomb shell that absolutely no sense in the context of the story. I was suspecting some subtle questioning of the role of the black church in the black community but there was nothing subtle about this at all. It just seemed strange to me that someone who admittedly never spent much time in the black church would go in so hard against the black church as part of the problem for poor black people. Of all the problems facing poor black folks, is the black church even in the top 20.

I love spike. Wrote my thesis on his collective work but if someone showed me this film as a new directors first film I would think that that filmmaker had no future in filmmaking.

No wonder spike mad at QT. in 2012 QT made the most talked about black movie of the year and he released this garbage.

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"naive as the dry leaves on the ground looking past the trees to the blue sky asking 'why me?'" -Blu