By
Bob Curtright
The
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Spike Lee's "Bamboozled" is a vicious
satire about an
It's a film that resurrects outrageous black stereotypes and racial epithets that make us cringe as much as laugh. It's a measure of how far we've come in the past 30 years that most of us -- regardless of race -- will be uncomfortable even as we recognize Lee's often brilliant fervor.
Interestingly, "Bamboozled" doesn't really deal with the usual black/white conflicts. Instead, it's about chasms within the black community itself.
As a result, the film is probably Lee's most controversial since "Jungle Fever" (about the schism between black women and men over interracial dating) and "School Daze" (about the hierarchy of "blackness" among college students).
There are moments of hilarity at some of the absurdities. Lee skewers pompous black intellectuals who collect "quaint" slave memorabilia, as well as fashionably streetwise whites who celebrate their own "blackness" as the latest status symbol.
Incredibly, there are even some guffaws from hoary minstrel jokes (which later became Polack jokes and now are dumb blonde jokes).
But Lee doesn't seem to have a clear vision where he's going with this diatribe. He ultimately lashes out in so many directions that he creates a sort of angry, ugly chaos rather than supporting a point.
I felt myself leaving the theater with an incredible sense of sadness, a nagging frustration that bigotry (of all shades) has become too much of an ingrained psychological game. Nobody -- including Lee -- would know what to do if it ever disappeared.
Damon Wayans, the most dramatic of the comic Wayans brothers, plays an Ivy-League educated black television programmer named Pierre Delacroix who is so frustrated that he can't sell his network on a sitcom with positive black images that he plots to sabotage it by doing just the opposite.
Wayans concocts "Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show" with actors in black face shuffling, tapping and telling "coon" jokes just like they did in the 1840s. The hook is that he uses black actors in blacker face for "satire."
At least, that's what Delacroix assures his white boss (Michael Rapaport), who prides himself on knowing all of the current slang and street lingo and who infuriatingly struts around "keepin' it real."
Instead, the programmer plans to offend so many people with the show that he will create a new, national uprising and consciousness raising.
He is astonished, then horrified, when the show backfires to become an instant hit, ballyhooed as "brave" and "cutting edge" by critics and turned into an audience hit through anti-PC backlash.
Instead of defusing the old stereotypes once and for all, he seems to have given them new 21st-century life.
Even his performers (headed by the wonderful Savion Glover and Tommy Davidson) are so thrilled at suddenly being stars that they are like his personal Frankenstein monsters out of control.
Can he stop what he started? Dare he even try?
Filmmaker Lee seems as much at a loss after unleashing this film as his
fictional programmer.
Review
"Bamboozled"
Rating: R
Starring: Damon Wayans, Savion Glover, Jada Pinkett, Tommy Davidson
and Michael Rapaport
Written and directed by: Spike Lee
Parent's note: Rough swearwords, some graphic violence, adult themes