October 19–26, 2000

movie shorts

Bamboozled

recommended

Spike Lee’s ambitious, mostly brilliant new joint opens with TV writer Damon Wayans in his swank NYC apartment, where the bedroom "window" is a gigantic clock face, so the space is filled with sunlight and ominous shadows, cast by the clock’s hands and numbers. Unsubtle as this device may be — it’s time, as Samuel Jackson said so long ago in Do The Right Thing, to "wake up!" — the story that Bamboozled tells could hardly be more urgent or timely. Pressed by his obnoxious boss (Michael Rapaport), Wayans concocts a profoundly racist minstrel show, modeled on Amos ’n’ Andy and starring homeless locals Tommy Davidson and Savion Glover, as a means to get fired. When the show’s a surprise hit, the protests begin, and the problem of selling a media text based on its "controversy" becomes clear. Lee hits his targets hard — industry suits, spin doctors, "Timmi Hilnigger" jeans (he’s played by Danny Hoch), Da Bomb malt liquor, performers, writers and producers who will do anything to make a buck, including shucking and jiving, or proclaiming, as does Thomas Jefferson Byrd, that "Niggers is a beautiful thing!" Shot on digital video and respectfully borrowing from Network and A Face in the Crowd, the film is part melodrama, part grand spectacle. Though his assistant (Jada Pinkett-Smith) is skeptical, Wayans begins to exult in the glory, dancing at awards ceremonies and giving up his prize to Matthew Modine (the jabs at Cuba Gooding Jr. and Ving Rhames are hard to miss). The point is more that stereotypical images persist, in different, insidious and dangerous forms. As Prince puts it in his contribution to the soundtrack, "2045 Radical Man," "The day you wake up is when you get the real cream."

—Cindy Fuchs

(See Cindy Fuchs’ interview with writer-director Spike Lee.)