For a film that begins by presenting a damning social statistic-more Americans have been killed in Chicago in the last decade than in Iraq and Afghanistan combined-Spike Lee's "Chi-Raq" is curiously, but not pointlessly, lighthearted.

I just saw a determined woman struggling to succeed in a crumbling, backwards society. I didn’t think to question the book’s glorification of rape and slavery, even though they now seem like such blatant underpinnings of the novel.