Bamboozled (2000)

I want to like Spike Lee. He's an important film-maker whose work refuses to let us forget our past or ignore the present it's created. His career has been devoted to asking questions no one wants to answer, and such courage – rare in Hollywood - is something to value. What frustrates me is that his films rarely live up to the ideas behind them, and Bamboozled is no exception.

It presents his most interesting idea and biggest disappointment to date. Harvard-educated screenwriter Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) is frustrated. The sole black writer at his network, his ideas for shows featuring the black middle class are rejected one after the other. His white station manager wants something more real – real meaning poor, undereducated and armed, the kind of `real' we see in gangsta rap videos. In reply, Delacroix creates The New Millennium Minstrel Show, a black-face variety show that will fail so badly and outrage so many he'll be freed from his contract. Hosted by Mantan and Sleep ‘n' Eat, the show is set in a plantation‘s watermelon patch, filled with sketches where the duo steal chickens from their overseer's coop. The pilot is a hit and suddenly Delacroix finds his creation out of his control.

Bamboozled was a hard film to finance and its struggle points to its importance, but despite its wealth of ideas the execution is poor and reeks of an opportunity missed. Much of its failure comes from the central performance by Wayans, a frankly bizarre turn that irritates from the first word. His Delacroix, uncomfortable in his skin, has changed his name and much of his accent. What remains is an impression of an upper-class white man which is just that – an impression. It's a superficial performance, a pantomime out of place among the more subtle performances that surround it. I appreciate its point, that Delacroix is ashamed of his origins, but it misses the target and does nothing but grate.

Beyond that, Bamboozled is underwritten and feels under-rehearsed. The character development is sloppy, huge changes in personality coming without warning and with little credibility. Add to that a clichéd friendship-not-surviving-success subplot and big ideas apparently lifted from The Producers and Network, and there seems little left to praise.

But while it fails on many levels, the good ideas remain and allow Lee to explore two main themes – the past degradation of black performers and the position they hold today. We learn that black artists in minstrel shows or movies had little choice but to degrade themselves if they wished to pursue a career in entertainment. They were only allowed to be greedy, lazy, bug-eyed buffoons, stripped of their dignity so white audiences could enjoy them without addressing their prejudices. Willie Best, an actor from the 1930s who himself performed under the name Sleep ‘n' Eat once asked 'What's an actor going to do? Either you do it or get out."

Addressing the status of today's black performers in a number of interviews, Lee has accused gangsta rap of being `the 21st century minstrel show'. It's an interesting argument, seeing that its lyrics and videos give overwhelmingly negative images of contemporary black culture that are lapped up by young white audiences. Theft, drug use and abuse, violence against women, murder as entertainment; these are the means by which the rappers degrade themselves for their listeners. The Mau-Maus, the gangsta rappers in the film who take issue with the Ne

Fmovies: This could have been a brilliant film. The problem I had with this film is that Spike Lee had too many ideas he was trying to pursue, and should have kept to the single focus. Yet, there were some brilliant scenes. We see a black gangsta group of hip-hoppers and one scene shows a member drinking out of a bottle shaped like a rocket. Later on we see a commercial for this product. Subtle and interesting. The film clips from old films and the display of of toys during the endtitles, were fascinating and could have made an interesting documentary.

One thing I didn't like, besides the stereotypical white bigots, was Lee's focusing upon 40s black comedian Mantan Moreland as the epitome of black humiliation. Moreland was a brilliant comic who stole the show from the white actors of the day. Whites and Blacks turned against Moreland during the civil rights movement and the man could hardly make ends meet. Before he died in the early 70s, opinion changed again and he was seen as a pioneer. He once again managed to get some work in films and tv before his death. A better target for Lee should have been Stepin Fletchit, who made a career out of playing a lazy black freeloader.

I have to agree with Lee on hip-hop as a minstrel show. The gold chains, oversized sport jerseys, and baseball caps worn sideways are clownish and not far removed from the olden days when blacks played buffoons to entertain white people. The show is still going on....

Being white, and european, I'm not really sure about the point of this movie seen in an american perspective. But as a european it really opened my eyes to a strange fact: if your only knowledge about black America comes from television, you WOULD really think, that all afro-americans were gangsters, rappers or Urkel-like comedians, that is: stereotypes. You very rarely see an american show, or movie, where a black american is portrayed as a complex human being. And that really IS scary.

Bamboozled fmovies. I was lucky enough to see the Philadelphia premiere of this movie at the U. of Penn, with Spike Lee in attendance, and I left the theatre feeling almost speechless. I've seen most of Lee's films and have mixed emotions and reviews of each of them; however, this film is truly a MASTERPIECE of filmmaking. Without giving away the many-layered plot, which must be experienced to be appreciated, the subject is a touchy one --- controversial and poignant, embarrassing and humiliating, enlightening and insightful. Mainstream white audiences ( of which I am a part ) may find the subject to be uncomfortable --- obviously one of Lee's goals here --- and all audiences will find certain parts of the movie to be terrifying. Besides the storyline, the acting is wonderful across the board, and Daman Wayans deserves an Academy Award for his over-the-top role. Spike Lee's "Bamboozled" should go down in history as one of the most important films about race vs. social status and the misconceptions and stereotypes that surround them, as well as being a magnificent movie about popular culture and the almighty dollar. It is alternatingly hysterical, contemplative, witty and violent, and I left the theatre in tears, totally speechless. Unfortunately, this will probably be a short-lived film in your local cineplex, but hopefully it will gain enough serious attention to win the accolades it deserves, as well as open some closed eyes and minds.

I am absolutely embarrassed right now that I have never watched a Spike Lee film before. I have always wanted to see Do the Right Thing, which is generally considered his best film, and I even rented it once, but never got around to watching it. When Bamboozled opened last year, it sounded very interesting, but after the critics dismissed it as a failed attempt at satire, I decided to catch it later on, perhaps after I saw Do the Right Thing. Then I saw it was going to be played on television, so I found the time and sat down to watch. What I saw was something absolutely amazing.

And that's not to say that Bamboozled doesn't have its flaws. I would personally deem it a flawed masterpiece, a very flawed masterpiece. The critics were right: Lee's satire is misplaced. He's far too hotheaded an artist to have realized this immediately, but he should have when the New York Times refused to run the movie's add, which depicted a sambo character eating a watermelon, because they feared protests. Bamboozled asks us to suspend our disbelief - a disbelief which Spike Lee may not have had himself - and accept that a TV network would produce the New Millennium Minstrel Show and that the public, a la Mel Brooks' The Producers, would eat it up. Lee's argument in the press is that this was already happening. His targets were rap videos and a show on the WB network that only produced something like 6 episodes (the show was about Abe Lincoln's black servant who single-handedly ran the country; Lincoln was the buffoon). The reason that the New York Times didn't run Lee's add is the exact same reason Lee wrote the film in the first place: African American political activists, including Lee, often have very knee-jerk reactions to such things. The show about Lincoln, which Lee argued was set during the "holocaust" of his people, actually showed the white people to be the buffoons and the blacks to be their manipulators. He missed the point (which could very well have been due to the fact that the show sucked anyhow). Add to this the fact that, besides clips of Good Times and The Jeffersons, both of which, I ought to add (in my own opinion), Lee is taking out of context (he would have been much better off to feature Diff'rent Strokes, which is somewhat offensive), all of the clips he uses to demonstrate the abuse of his race must have been downright difficult to dig out of film archives. None of these cartoons or movies that are shown, nor most of the sambo toys, have been seen for some thirty years or more, most probably not since before Spike Lee was born. We all know they exist, and, as Sloan (Jada Pinkett Smith) says in the film, we oughtn't to forget whether we're black or white, but it doesn't work as satire to show these things. They aren't at all harmful now, not until you drag them up again. Then they're only offensive when knees start jerking.

None of this matters, in fact. Not to me, anyway. In my opinion, film today has become far too complacent. Bamboozled is an enormous jolt to our current, apathetic world. The fight may be misdirected and wholly fabricated by a paranoid man, but Spike Lee is indeed a masterful director. In fact, I would very favorably compare this film to Jean-Luc Godard's Le Week-End, which was also somewhat misdirected in its satire. Both of these films are excellent. Bamboozled moves with a speed and passion almost completely foreign to the world of filmmaking today. It's angry, it's brazen, and it makes your heart poun

This is Lee's best film. It isn't heavy handed despite the explosive topic. In fact I would argue that the images in this film are less offensive then some of the depiction of African-American life seen on MTV or BET. Less heavy handed then some of the vulgar depiction of my community that is allowed to be foisted on my community as entertainment. The modern minstrels show can be seen any night of the week on America's cable music networks. Which is more embarrassing Lil'John, 50 cent or Mantan? Which has had a bigger impact on the daily lives of African-American children, images of Step- N-Fetch it or Lil'John? Which are the stereotypes that are used to justify racial profiling in the larger public of the country in 2006, Gangstas or minstrels performers? It is a film about the power and responsibility of black America to control the images that define it.

I think Lee for the first time in a long time had a story he actually wanted to tell. The script was solid if not great. As usual Spike had a tough time with his female characters. The women in his films tend to be two dimensional. All good or all bad. It wasn't a perfect film but I think it will be remembered as one of Spike's most interesting.