Boots Riley hit a home run with his left-leaning motion picture debut Sorry to Bother You. Except it coincides with another politically-themed film that just came out, the latest Spike Lee joint BlacKkKlansman. To say Boots Riley isn't much of a Spike Lee fan would be an understatement. Boots wrote a response to the film in the form of a three-part essay on Twitter, where he referred to BlacKkKlansman as “a made up story in which the false parts of it try to make a cop the protagonist in the fight against racist oppression.”
Boots regretted to inform his Twitter audience that he forgot a significant omission to his essay, the fact that Spike Lee reportedly received $200K from the NYPD, subjectively speaking. He also mentioned that the book of which the film was adapted was written by a COINTELPRO/FBI informant, thus rendering the story baseless. COINTELPRO is reputed to have played a part in causing the break up of the Black Panthers and other radicalized movements in the United States.
As for Boots' accusation of Spike Lee's collusion with New York cops, he suggest that his elder filmmaker accepted the payment as compensation for his role in the production of an "ad campaign that was aimed at improving relations with minority communities." Spike Lee has yet to respond directly to those accusations, or the essay itself.
