I’d been meaning to rent this, but it popped up on IFC the other night, so I recorded it.
For those who don’t know, it’s about the only black writer (Damon Wayans) on the staff of an independent network. His show ideas are constantly shot down (by the completely unlikeable Michael Rappaport (currently in the even more unlikeable “The War at Home”)). Wayans (a Harvard educated man) wants to get out of the business, but will lose his severance package if he quits. He decides to get himself fired by suggesting the most offensive idea for a show - basically a modern day minstrel show with black actors in blackface performing old racist songs and sketches. He is shocked when the idea is greenlighted and even more so when the show becomes a massive hit.
Lee is taking shots at the current (well, in the year 2000) ideas about blacks in TV (almost always in comedies) and touches on prejudices within the black community. The movie ends up in tragedy - one of the shows stars is kidnapped and murdered on live TV by a gang (including MC Serch of the white rap duo 3rd Bass). Wayans is accidentally killed by his personal assistant (Jada Pinkett Smith) whom he refers to as “the help”.
It’s my favorite Spike Lee movie - I think it’s just underrated as hell. Nobody else with the amount of exposure that Spike has has had the balls to make this statement, but it needs to be made. I think that the movie did so poorly commercially and critically because it touched on that nerve so strongly. I even noticed that both Tommy Davidson and Savion Glover seemed to have trouble finding work for years after the film - it’s like they were shunned for taking on those roles. Horribly unironically, the next thing I saw Savion in was a Twix commercial in which he was cooning - tap-dancing on top of a gigantic twix bar with a gigantic smile on his face (“show 'em those pearly whites!”).
The movie was eerily precient as well - I remember seeing a video from the short-lived rap group Nappy Roots appear a year later in which they were wearing overalls, straw hats, and rapping in a cotton field.
I hated it, but not because it may have hit any nerves. The choppy camera work (which was done on purpose to give it the “real feel”), the editing, cinematography, and Wayans’ bizarre accent all literally made me feel sick. The only other time I felt somewhat ill and disoriented from watching a movie was Hulk. I don’t know exactly what it is, but it takes me completely away from the movie.
The look of the film was due to the use of off-the-shelf digital cameras (to save money). Wayan’s accent sounded like an exaggerated “white guy” accent used by some black comics.
I was entertained by some of the Mantan sketches, but the rest of it was a lot of pretentious crap. The description of the Mao-Mao’s scheme as “brilliant” struck me as borderline offensive. Wayan’s radio-show anecdote about his Aunt Sister seemed interesting, but didn’t go anywhere. During the closing montage of old movie scenes of white entertainers dressing in blackface (and stereotype cartoons), one actor was putting on his makeup and said (as I recall):
“This stuff is hard to put on, and take off. [looks at black assistant’s skin] You know, you’re lucky.”
That one five-second bit had more insight into white cluelessness than anything Lee had in his movie.
This was one of Spike’s most frustrating movies for me to see, and I gladly include Girl 6 and She Hate Me in that assessment. Spike does satire – barely.
Spike’s scripted movies are largely extended vignettes strung together rather than a cohesive story. His stories meander, get stuck on segues and divergent issues and backtrack during character conflict before picking up the narrative thread and heading for a singular conclusion. They reflect the riffs of his perpetual jazz scores and his peculiar sensibilities. I knew without having to see the movie he was going to skewer Ving Rhames for handing off his 1998 Golden Globe to Jack Lemmon, and that Jada Pinkett Smith’s race-conscious assistant would end up killing the sellout played by Damon Wayans.
Wayans’ character was badly miscast in a part that by rights should have gone to someone like Laurence Fishburne, Andre Braugher, Omar Epps or Denzel Washington.
Bamboozled is deeply flawed on many levels but does speak a lot to people like me who tend to spot a lot of unspoken, unacknowledged and unrecognized racial rtensions in people who refuse to see it.
Instead of having it in just the end, he should have bookened his movie with those coon-friendly racial humor clips from movie reels of the early 20th century.
Like many of Lee’s movies, the ending was horrible (although the montage at the end was poignant).
The protagonist was completely unlikeable, IMHO, and it took viewing the movie a second time for me to realize that the minstrel show idea was initially a joke. But I did like Jada Pinkett’s character and even found comic relief in the Mau Mau’s outrageousness (their crazy-ass rap is the best thing in the movie).
The movie is intriguing to me because the idea of a minstrel show taking off like that doesn’t seem so unrealistic. Guiltily, my favorite part of the movie were the scenes from the show, especially the tap-dancing. I also thought it was ironic that Tommy Davidson, who has never played an “uplifting” role in any movie and always plays the buffoon part, would be in this film.
Lee touches on the very “touchy” subject of black humor in this movie. Which came first? The minstrel coon or the buffoonish black man? Is it possible to be a buffoon without it arkening back to denigrating stereotypes? Further, is this type of humor inherently wrong, especially if it is produced and enjoyed by black people? These are questions that I got out of the film, but they weren’t really addressed.
The Mau Maus are not the hero in this story. They are an embarrassment just as much–if not more–than Davidson and Glover’s characters. I think Lee envisions the Mau Maus to be the polar extreme of the “coons” and leaves it up to the audience to decide where their sympathies should lie. Even the most sympathetic character in the movie, Jada Pinkett’s, ends up displaying “niggerish” behavior. I did think it was interesting to see Wayan’s character contrasted with his father’s, played by Paul Mooney. But I’m not sure seeing his father helped me understand Wayan’s character.
Overall, I agree with Lee that the black buffoon is too popular and should be retired. But I think he could make made this point a little better, without such a weird premise.
Bamboozled really works for me. I have a mixed response to his work; he’s best when he’s small and not so outrageous (25th Hour, Get on the Bus), and he’s nearly unwatchable when he’s loud and in your face (She Hate Me). Still, despite being among Lee’s shrill and obvious films, which means I ought not to like it, I still find Bamboozled somehow very effective, even one of his best.
Though I recognize it’s highly divisive. Lee’s movies aren’t for everybody. Heck, a lot of them aren’t for me.
Wrong. The film alternates between using consumer digital camcorders and “professional” 35mm film in order to show two different “realities” - the broke, “real” street lives of the two protagonists (handheld digital camcorder footage) and the “fake,” “professional” reality of television (the film segments).
Amen. The Mau Mau segments are my favorite parts in the movie, especially their RIDICULOUS audition of “Blak is Blak” for the show. I love the use of (white) MC Serch as “1/16th Black,” Charli Baltimore as “Smoov Black,” and Mos Def as “Big Black Afrika.”
In the near future, some filmmaker (hint - it isn’t going to be Al Jolson Jr., aka John Singleton) is going to make an incredibly hilarious and on-point “Spinal Tap” of Hip Hop, and it’s going to look a lot like those Mau Mau segments.
I know this is entirely unverifiable and non-citable, but I had a sit-down with Spike shortly after the film came out (he was doing a speaking gig at my university and I interviewed him for the school’s radio station), and one of the things that we talked about was the intentional use of the two different stocks to show “reality” and “TV reality.” I’m sure that it didn’t hurt the limited budget to use cheap MiniDV, but it was definitely an artistic decision rather than a purely financial one. I believe that this is also discussed in the film’s commentary, if anyone has the DVD (which reminds me, I need to pick that up!)
Interesting that it was 16mm film, though - it looks way better than that!
Still, that and CB4 were more strict parodies of that particular N.W.A. brand of early nineties gangsta rap. I’d like to see a more genre and culture encompassing parody, something that would especially skewer the whole jiggy movement and lifestyle.
Yeah, definitely. The only way I can think of it working is if we get a sort of everyman character that we follow through two decades of rap - we’d have to see him somehow go (or at least observe) from the Funky 4+1 and Sugarhill to Schooly D to the Native Tongues movement to gangsta to Jiggy.
Which one? To me, the biggest flaw with this movie is that Lee came up with at least three different ways to end the movie and, instead of picking just one, decided to include all of them–regardless of whether they contradicted one another.
Bamboozled was an interesting idea for a movie that was, unfortunately, poorly executed. Lee’s direction was too heavy-handed and humorless for a film that was supposed to be a satire. It ended up blunting the movie’s more comic moments and–ultimately–the point he was trying to make about racism in popular culture. Also, correct me if I missed something, but I couldn’t figure out why Wayons’ character, who deliberately came up with the most offensive concept for a TV show he could think of in order to get fired, would end up apparently embracing his monstrous creation.
Did he? I thought he did it to make a point, not just to get out of his contract. Actually, the motivation of Wayans’ character (as well as why he himself was in blackface near the end of the movie) is just another of the movie’s pointlessly confusing details.
I saw it when it first came out on VHS and didn’t know there were multiple endings. The ending I saw…
Pinkett’s character killed Wayan’s character, right after the Mau Maus were killed for killing Glover’s character. It was just a whole buncha killing at the end.
