Bamboozled | | Cast : | Damon Wayans, Savion Glover, Jada Pinkett Smith, Michael Rapaport | | Director : | Spike Lee | | Studio : | New Line Home Entertainment | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Dolby, Widescreen | | Released Date : | October 20, 2000 | | DVD Released Date : | April 17, 2001 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), English (Original Language) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | July 16, 2005 | | Summary | highly political movie full of noteworthy performances | Content
 | I just watched this film. Who says you can't be political in America. This story recalls the works of some of Africa's greatest writers such as Ngugi Wa Thiongo and Chinua Achebe. Spike Lee never beats around the bush as he talks about the taboo subject of the rampent racism in American media. The ending will blow you away. A beautifully compiled historial montage of African Americans in media will truly make you think. This movie is a must see for budding actors, directors and producers alike. Mos Def, Jada Pinkett, Damon Wayans give outstanding performances. Get it, watch it, tell your friends about it. |
| Rating | | | Date | July 11, 2005 | | Summary | SPIKE LEE WAS SENT TO US BY GOD. BLESS SPIKE! | Content
| TO THE COWARDLY BLACKS OUT THERE:
You all write books and justify use of the N word. Some of you all even think that you are not supposed to get mad about anyone being called the word.However, you will not challenge ASIAN, LATINO,ITALIAN or JEW rage when it hits the news that THEY are outraged about someones flippant use of ethnic slurs pertaining to their race or ethnic group. If it won't give you too big of a headache, THINK about what I just said here. Mentally, your self-esteem is so low, that you think that being Black means being treated like a doormat instead of having the righteous anger to see to it that the back of someones dome greets the sidewalk when you as a Black person or your ethnic group is disrespected. Don't tell me anything about these punk rappers who again explain away that they are "just trying to make a dollar." Anyone outside of the Black race reading my review here should know, that no matter how many gangsta rappers that you listen to, or how many "responsible" Blacks(?)that you socialize with,there are STILL a number of us BLACK MEN AND WOMEN WHO ARE HAPPY BEING BLACK, PROUD TO BLACK and we are not down with you coming around us thinking that you are "hip" using that word. A WORD TO THE WISE IS SUFFICIENT. As far as Hollywood goes, Black 1970's film star YAPHET KOTTO was recently contacted about doing a slave movie. Mr. Kotto was so upset that he actually called and spilled the beans to MINISTER FARRAKHAN. Kotto told the Minister that he had not intention of going backwards for he had to do those kind of shows already. So, this is America and white America has its mind made up about who we are. Nowadays though, we are not in slavery. We have SPIKE LEE. GOD had heard the prayers of Black movie goers, He sent us SPIKE LEE. |
| Rating | | | Date | June 19, 2005 | | Summary | "Is you is, or is you ain't? . . ." | Content
| Spike Lee's Bamboozled owes a lot to Paddy Chayefsky's story Network (1976), which owes a lot to writer Budd Schulberg's A Face in the Crowd (1957). All three movies are about TV personalities who become the personification of social or political movements.
In Bamboozled, Spike Lee makes his debt to Network explicit by having a black TV announcer tell his TV audience to go to their windows, open them, and shout to the world that they're "not going to take it any more," just as Peter Finch's Edward R. Murrow-type news anchor did in Network. Then the star of the TV show in Bamboozled collapses, like the news anchor.
In Bamboozled, the black dancer who stars in The New Millennium Minstrel Show loses his identity and becomes a stereotype. The network changes his name from Manray (an artist, like Man Ray?) to Mantan (after Mantan Moreland, the bulgy-eyed comic in old movies).
When Network first came out, everything it predicted was outrageous, but it's all reality (or reality TV) now. TV news departments are no longer subsidized by entertainment divisions - - news departments ARE entertainment divisions, or more precisely, news IS entertainment. Sibyl the Soothsayer in Network has become John Edward, crossing over between the spirit world and a country that finds superstition more comforting than science. (We're desperate not to be Left Behind.)
In an interview in Cineaste magazine (vol. XXVI, no. 2, 2001), Spike Lee tells why he dedicated Bamboozled to Budd Schulberg, the writer of A Face in the Crowd, the movie that made Andy Griffith a star.
Andy Griffith is like John Wayne. He only played one character on film and TV - - himself - - and Griffith's Lonesome Rhodes in A Face in the Crowd is like Wayne's Ethan Edwards in The Searchers. The cruelty in Ethan Edwards and Lonesome Rhodes is also there in every other character the two actors ever played, but we didn't want to see it. And after his success in A Face in the Crowd, Griffith never again dared showed the kind of contempt that Sheriff Andy Taylor must have had for the citizens of Mayberry. Giving us a glimpse of the monster is one thing, but Griffith knew America couldn't stand to see him every week. Exasperation with with Barney was as bad as it got.
So we got the phony Mayberry smile - - a kind of whiteface, another mask.
That issue of Cineaste is worth tracking down for articles on the reaction to Bamboozled and for Spike Lee's interview. Lee talks about what he calls the "magical n****r" in movies, "magical Negroes who appear out of nowhere" and use their powers "for the benefit of the white stars of the movies." Films like The Green Mile, The Family Man, and The Legend of Bagger Vance.
Now we're all tuned in to the Network and it's picked out A Face in the Crowd for us.
Everybody likes him when they meet him (God knows why, since he's such an obvious bully to people around him). He used to drink too much and got into some trouble, but he's turned his life around and, with the support of friends with money, he's become a national leader. The people who warn he's a fascist are just left-wingers "out of the mainstream" who hate America anyway.
Forget the Matrix, the United States has become Network. No definite article is needed to describe the all-embracing global corporate entity that is the military-industrial-entertainment complex. (Ned Beatty tries to explain this epiphany to Peter Finch at the end of the movie Network.)
And the United States is on its way to becoming the minstrel show Spike Lee shows in Bamboozled.
In Bamboozled, white people, Hispanics, and blacks all wear blackface to be in the audience and all answer yes to the question, "Is you a n****r?" Maybe the non-blacks are just "appropriating" a culture they have no right to, but it might be a good thing for people to realize they all have something in common.
Everybody's being bamboozled.
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| Rating | | | Date | May 15, 2005 | | Summary | Delacroix's Inferno | Content
| Pierre Delacroix is an angry television screenwriter whose "safe" black sitcoms a-la the Huckstables have not fared well on the "idiot box." His self-loathing (masterfully portrayed by Damon Wayans with a faux-Haitian upper class accent) is barely concealed as he conflicts with his hip, "ghit-to" white wannabe-black boss producer. As a last ditch, he concocts "Mantan", a live TV minstrel show in blackface and set in a watermelon patch, so racist and over-the-top Delacroix is confident it will get him fired. (A TV announcer cheerfully intones as jaws thunk to the floor... "Mantan and Sleep 'N Eat! A couple 'o Reaaaaal Coons!")
It is as if Byalistock in the "Producers" had decided to set "Springtime for Hitler" in Auschwitz with Jewish inmates as performers. To Delacroix's horror, "Mantan" is a hit. It also drives Delacroix, and those around him, stark raving mad.
"Bamboozled" was Spike Lee's most audacious take on racism in media, and unlike the now iconic "Do the Right Thing", Hollywood's glitterati did not know what to make of it, and the movie fizzled at the box office and with mainstream critics. Lee is unstinting in his thesis that the history of black culture is punctuated by exploitation and co-optation. His sledgehammer lands not just on the black performers who line up to perform in the retrogressive "Mantan" (including the extraordinary dancer Savion Glover), but the pseudo-revolutionary Mau-Maus who deaden any hope of real change consuming 64 oz chuggers of malt liquor sold by white multinationals. Spike Lee speaks through the advertisements slipped in the film as cultural commentary as well as one of the main characters, Slone, who like Delacroix "has bloody hands" in the creation of "Mantan."
At its heart, "Bamboozled" is an old-fashioned morality tale, a descent into hell which is not comedy but rather tragedy spiked by satire (a term carefully defined for us by Delacroix). Halfway through the film, anyone who still thinks "Bamboozled" is funny needs a stiff reading of Baldwin or Aptheker as a wake-up call. Spike Lee, like an old testament god, wreaks vengeance on the wicked, dispensing lessons along the way (note, for instance, how when the Mau Maus get their comeuppance, only the white wanna-be is spared by the LAPD). Were it not for the language and rather explicit sexual references, this would be a useful film for U.S. History or race relation classes.
This is one of those rare films that bears repeated viewing and thinking about. It is more complex than "Do The Right Thing", since "Bamboozled" is a film about film, and as such is asking the viewer to test his or her reaction to what is in the screen. When we see, at the end, the montage of scenes including the young Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney putting on blackface, do we say that is racist, or excused as genuine culture? And what will we say about today? |
| Rating | | | Date | May 03, 2005 | | Summary | Wow--an amazing eye opener! | Content
| I finally saw this film recently after reading an editorial that mentioned this film in regards to how the racial stereotypes perpetuated in Minstrel shows continue this day in any rap video you see. This film is a much needed eye opener, a satire with a deeper message. The use of satire is often necessary to bring to people's attention the underlying truth that most cannot accept at face value. This film perfectly draws out on our society's racism and race relations.
A few years ago, I remember coming across an advertisement for a Minstrel show that my church congregation put on in the 1950s. Considering that there are few African American members of my church to begin with, it was a complete shock to me who these nice elderly people could do such a thing. With "Bamboozled", Spike concludes the film with an excellent montage of images from movies, TV shows, cartoons that all featured the worst stereotypes of African Americans as bug-eyed, big lipped, ants-in-pants, cannibalistic animals, who sang and dance, shucked and jived, all kinds of terrible traits. These images were taken from Shirley Temple movies and films with Bing Crosby, Mickey Rooney, and Judy Garland. It was an eye opener. Even Warner Brothers cartoons of my recent youth (1970s) contained racist images in the guise of Bugs Bunny in some of his antics.
I've been meaning to watch all of Spike Lee's films someday, as I like the statements he tries to make in his films. He has amassed an interesting body of work, though some were more successful than others. For me, "Malcolm X" and "Do The Right Thing" are his best works, and this one would be third, ahead of "Jungle Fever". I loved the performance of Michael Rapaport as the cool talking head honcho of CNS Television, who has an expressive way with words and sounds more "black" than the faux intellectual nerdiness of Damon Wayans, who plays Pierre Delacroix, which we learn in the film is a pretentious name he gives himself to distance himself from an embarrassing past. I also liked Jada Pinkett Smith in this film, as Delacroix's assistant who doesn't agree with the direction he's taking with his show idea.
The premise is that Delacroix can't quit his job, so he comes up with a plan to make the most racist show he can imagine that will cause CNS to fire him. He proposed a new Minstrel Show for the New Millennium, featuring two African American street performers (the excellent Tommy Davidson and Savion Glover) in black face make up. Rapaport's Mr. Dunwitty loves the idea and claims that the show would be even bigger than "Friends". They shoot the pilot show to an unsuspecting audience who don't know if its okay to laugh. Tommy Davidson plays "Sleep n Eat" and Savion Glover plays Mantan, the tap dancing idiot. Their variety show features schtick anyone who has ever seen "Hee Haw" would be familiar with...lame brain one liners, idiot people, and exaggerated stereotypes.
The satire is that the studio execs love the show and pick up 12 episodes, and when it airs on TV, it becomes an instant smash show. Soon audiences are showing up each week in black face and proclaiming their pride in being "n------", even though nearly all of them are white. The film is so over the top, poking fun at our double standards (how many claim not to be racist because they listen to rap or watch basketball). The truth is...we expect African Americans to entertain us (in music and sports), but beyond that, we don't take them seriously as people. True, the hip hop community is quite influential in the language and style of our advertising and pop culture, but how many African American CEOs and Mayors and Governors and Senators are there? In the financial matters of our country, we still impose a glass ceiling on anyone not part of the white male demographic...so what is our minstrel show of today? Spike Lee made a point in the commentary track that you don't have to wear black face to have a minstrel show. It goes on without people being aware of it. For that reason, I'm grateful he made this film. Just seeing the disgusting collectibles from the past century (such as the "jolly n----- bank" or the Aunt Jemima dolls) is a reminder of our racist past. We mustn't forget even as we move on to greater inclusion and burying old stereotypes, allowing people to be who they are regardless of race.
I want to give this film 5 stars, but because the film veers into a strange tangent for about 10 minutes near the end of the film, I simply thought Spike Lee got lazy with how he wanted to end this film. It was a cheap and lazy way to go, even though he explains his reason on the commentary track. I disagree, because if done right, his ending would have punched up the meaning of this film. I'm at least glad that the montage at the end saved this film on a somewhat redeeming note. If anything, this film serves as a reminder of our recent history and how overt racism really was. The film succeeds as an awakening to the forms into which the Minstrel Show of the last century has morphed into something a little bit different, but accomplishing the same devastating effect. I know I'll never be able to look at another rap video in the same way again. Thank you Spike Lee! |
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