Spike Lee's Miracle At St. Anna is at times beautiful and compelling, but more often than not, the film is convoluted, mean-spirited, flat-out confusing and contradictory. Spike Lee has always been guilty of trying to correct every wrong ever done in the history of black film-making in just one film. In this film, he tries to make up for every single time the stories of black soldiers have been overlooked and it shows, this movie is just too damn long and tries to tell too many different stories. At 2 hours and 46 minutes, I was seriously considering reaching for the remote and the fast forward button on numerous occasions.
The film looks awesome and the acting is top-notch, but the storyline is monstrously weak and overcooked. The romance isn't a romance, it's more of the same old Spike Lee misogynistic take on women that has ruined many of his films. The mystery is corny and another attempt on Lee's part to lift a plot device from the superior, The Last Emperor. Fights and disputes suddenly breakout between the characters, then get dropped, characters seem to know things that they could not possibly know, and characters do things that are completely illogical.
I have hated nearly every film where Spike Lee was clearly working overtime to get an Oscar nomination. All those films were overdone and overreaching in terms of content and presentation. Malcolm X, He Got Game, Get On The Bus, and Bamboozled would be other examples. Should you watch Miracle At St. Anna? Yes! You should. Just make sure that you are well rested and start the film with your dinner. The one truth about a Spike Lee Joint is that there is always something of interest, even when you don't like the complete product.
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Every blue moon or maybe it's every full moon, somebody sets off a ruckus about women of color who blog and consider themselves feminists, struggling to find their voice and a little bit of space in the predominantly white feminist blogosphere. 
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