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My personal view of "blaxploitation" is that it's a racist term. There's no such thing as a genre being Black.
Keenen Ivory Wayans, director of I'm Gonna Git You Sucka
I can't imagine who was being exploited. My checks cleared.
Fred "Hammer" Williamson, star of Hell Up in Harlem
JANUARY 17, 2004|With MGM collating five of their "Soul Cinema"-branded DVDs--Coffy, Cooley High, Foxy Brown, Hell Up In Harlem, and I'm Gonna Get You Sucka--plus a CD sampler in a new "best of" box set (one presumes that titles beginning with letters that come after "i" are being saved for a second volume), no time like the present to finally harpoon the great beast known as blaxploitation in these pages. Expect a fresh capsule every Saturday at least until our "Soul Cinema" well runs dry; if all goes smoothly, we'll also get around to Superfly and more.-Bill Chambers
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AUTEUR'S CORNER
also by Keenen Ivory Wayans
LITTLE MAN
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The body of a black man is discovered in an
alleyway. The cause of death? O.G.--"over gold." (Or over-gold: the
corpse is wearing a suffocating number of Mr. T. chains.) That's almost as
clever as I'm Gonna Git You Sucka gits, and it's a joke drilled into the ground with jackhammer repetition. Coming off Robert Townsend's breakout indie Hollywood
Shuffle, which dealt with the life of a struggling actor from the African-American perspective, writer-director-star Keenen Ivory Wayans makes good on that film's pulpit by reviving, however briefly and tongue-in-cheekily, the very genre reponsible for de-marginalizing black talent post-civil rights, in addition to the careers of some of its central figures. (Just don't call this genre "blaxploitation" around the touchy Wayans--the mastermind behind the homophobic "Men on Film" skits and Scary Movie's misogyny.) And yet, there's something ungrateful going on under the surface: when former Cleveland Brown Jim Brown (who's flat-out brilliant in James Toback's Fingers) asks Wayans' Jack Spade what qualifications he has for taking on an underworld syndicate, Spade cracks, "I was a football player"--I guess cake is better when you eat it, too. The source of I'm Gonna Git You Sucka's biggest yuks is not its verbal self-referentialism, but rather moments like the stunt-doubling of a black woman with a moustached white man, or Wayans giving a purposefully stilted performance in those scenes meant to be sentimental; as the short-lived "The Ben Stiller Show" would later illustrate, it's aesthetically-minded salutes like these that truly flatter the audience for a given parody, because they reveal conscientiousness beneath the mockery. MGM presents I'm Gonna Git You Sucka on DVD in an inoffensively bland 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer with an equally inconspicuous Dolby Surround soundtrack to match. The film's original theatrical trailer rounds out the disc. |
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1.85:1 (16x9); English Dolby Surround; French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-5; 89 minutes; R
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| There have been wiser marketing decisions: MGM leaves Black Caesar out of their Best of Soul Cinema set while including the film's sequel, Hell Up in Harlem. As I've not yet managed to see Black Caesar, I wondered if that's why Hell Up in Harlem seemed so inscrutable to me, but according to writer-director Larry Cohen in his DVD commentary, one of the best I've ever listened to, that ain't the half of it. In their infinite wisdom, AIP cashed in on a follow-up to Black Caesar so soon after its release that Cohen and "Black Caesar" himself Fred Williamson had to shoot it in tandem with It's Alive! and That Man Bolt, respectively. Since the productions were situated on opposite coasts, Williamson couldn't film his lead role in Hell Up in Harlem until one or the other wrapped, resulting in a shake-and-bake screenplay whose main dramatic consideration was how to get away with an abundance of over-the-shoulder shots of the star. (This is also why Williamson's character inexplicably decides to move to L.A., and why he boards a flight to Los Angeles at L.A.X. International.) Though Cohen is surprised that critics at the time didn't seem to notice how spotty the picture's plotting is, I think it's in his favour that nobody goes into a blaxploitation flick expecting a well-oiled contraption--and in abandoning logic entirely for a series of brutal, funny, and largely improvised set-pieces that let ex-football star Williamson loose on unsuspecting extras (imagine a Richard Lester movie where The Beatles are homicidal maniacs), the picture's second half more than atones for the creakiness of the whole enterprise. (Blessedly dropped at the halfway mark, too, is an ape on the spinning-newspaper aesthetic of Warner's early gangster pictures that, combined with a cast bedecked in borderline-anachronistic fedoras, can't help but make Hell Up in Harlem seem like a warm-up for the Michael Keaton spoof Johnny Dangerously.) Cohen, whose eye for locations and guerrilla courage to roll without a permit lend his potboilers a vérité quality that owes more to Jean-Pierre Melville than to Roger Corman, deserves points for rising to the challenge, even if the outcome is mostly risible. MGM's 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen DVD is on a par with Foxy Brown's (see below): yes, Hell Up in Harlem was a popular picture, but that hardly guaranteed it wouldn't wilt in storage. The 2.0 mono soundtrack is strong, if the songs therein aren't: as Cohen details in his feature-length yakker, when contract negotations broke down between AIP and James Brown, the singer took back his already-completed score, only to put it out on a record--"The Payback"--that ironically became his most successful, in addition to one of the most sampled albums in history. (Apparently, some music cues were changed for this version of the film--none are specificied.) Teaser and theatrical trailers for Hell Up in Harlem round out the disc. |
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1.85:1 (16x9); English Mono, French Mono; French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-5; 94 minutes; R
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| Although the Coffy facsimile Foxy Brown is prototypical of the copycats that follow in the wake of an unexpected hit in that it puts all the pieces in the wrong place, the difference between it and, say, every film that wanted to be E.T. is that Coffy's own writer-director did the cloning. Foxy Brown drops the nurse angle and makes Pam Grier a vigilante by day, vigilante by night--apart from that, she once again adopts a secret identity as a prostitute after a pimp-slash-drug dealer ruins the lives of her loved ones and finds herself placed in captivity when plan A goes awry. Coffy has its campy aspects (i.e. a catfight from which the participants emerge topless), but it respects itself; with its Tennessee Williams appellations (Miss Katherine, Misty Cotton, Link Brown), Maurice Binder-spoofing title sequence, and epithetical refrains (choicest: "Let's shoot some niggers"), all of it rendered in a completely inexpressive aesthetic, Foxy Brown dubiously embraces its inner minstrel show. With Coffy, the Caucasian Hill knew nothing about black culture going in, but he seems a bit too comfortable in the role of honky anthropologist this time around, a possible by-product of having to hack the script out on a tight schedule. The movie is also aggressively homophobic (Foxy nicknames every henchman "Faggot," while the compulsory girl-on-girl brawl unfurls in a lesbian saloon exclusively populated by bull-dyke stereotypes), thus devaluing what little social conscience it has. There's a bold comparison drawn between drugs and slavery, and I guess Foxy Brown gains some interest in the context of the racist James Bond films produced around the same period (Live and Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun): it gave black audiences a chimerical Bond where the hero was an ebony female, the villain was an ivory female, and the violence was equally ludicrous but flavoured with an urban edge--a plane doesn't just crash into a house, its propellers slice and dice a guy on the runway. But even from his nastiest foes, 007 never had to put up with being called a "big-jugged jigaboo." Inherently bland visuals aside, MGM's 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen DVD presentation of Foxy Brown, taken from an immaculate source print (save the expected speckling during opticals), is breathtaking. More evidently vintage is the Dolby 2.0 mono mix, though it meets low expectations. Hill doesn't do the film any favours in a depressive commentary track in which he sounds ashamed of his script, his direction--pretty much everything but the actors. (He's typically fawning of Grier, who is indeed a born movie star.) If there's a lesson to be learned, it's that there's no such thing as brownie points in Hollywood, not even at the independent level: according to Hill, the success of Coffy only made AIP tighten their leash on the auteur. An amusing trailer rounds out the platter. |
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1.85:1 (16x9); English Mono; French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-5; 91 minutes; R
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MGM has reprinted Cooley High's jacket art to freshly splay it with their "Soul Cinema" banner, but of all the films collected in "The Best of Soul Cinema" box set, this is the, pardon the expression, black sheep, less blaxploitation than teensploitation. Greenlighted to cash in on the success of American Graffiti but not necessarily made for the same reason, the film casually follows the exploits of best friends "Cochise" (Lawrence-Hilton Jacobs) and "Preach" (Glynn Turman) during those discombobulating last few weeks of school leading up to graduation. Cooley High opens with a fiercely melancholy montage of Chicago's inner-city landmarks set to The Supremes' "Baby Love" (maybe it's the fact that there's no street noise layered in), which doesn't exactly psych one up for the raucous comedy that ensues, but as misfortunes accumulate and the point-of-view gradually shifts from Cochise, the more handsome, academic, and all-around popular of the two, to Preach, a poet and aspiring screenwriter determined to do whatever it takes to get out of the ghetto except apply himself in his studies, the film's resistance of pathos starts to feel not just counterintuitive, but also a little ghoulish. While part of this has to do with Turman's grating presence (he seems to grow more and more lecherous), mostly it's the nature of an autobiographical screenplay--"What's Happening!!" creator Eric Monte based the script on his own coming-of-age--by an avowed class clown. Still, a jump-cut to a parked hearse is as stinging as any of the losses smuggled into John Singleton's affecting Boyz N the Hood, a film that owes its basic framework to Cooley High. The disc's fullscreen transfer is open-matte, but that's no excuse for denying the film a release in its original aspect ratio. That aside, though definition is soft and shadow detail wanes, this is the cleanest and brightest I've ever seen Cooley High look. The Dolby 2.0 mono sound is shrill and sometimes hissy, with less to recommend it than the video. An insert booklet of notes on the AIP production fills out the platter. |
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1.33:1; English Mono, French Mono; English, French subtitles; DVD-5; 107 minutes; R
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It's impossible today to avoid viewing Coffy through the prism of Quentin Tarantino's work, but more interesting than singling out their common iconography--and I've always wished that someone would challenge Tarantino's poignant but hypocritical recycling of Roy Ayers' Coffy anthems "Vitori's Theme - King is Dead," "Exotic Dance," and "Escape" in Jackie Brown, since the auteur went on a tear about Dirty Dancing's usage of "Be My Baby," a song that ostensibly "belonged" to Mean Streets--is noting just how tender and tactful the controversial Tarantino is in the context of his influences. In many ways, Coffy is the opposite of Jackie Brown, each of which stars Pam Grier as a career woman cornered into playing criminals against one another; banal but accurate to say that Coffy sees the glass, unlike Jackie Brown, as half-empty. Coffy herself is one of Travis Bickle's purest antecedents, a vigilante by night who confides in men incapable of deciphering her cryptic confessions (she compares feeling rage to sleepwalking) and divulges the full pathology of her anger with a pit-stop to dig up a shotgun buried in her front lawn in anticipation of a bloody showdown. If anything, race takes a backseat to gender in Coffy, a picture likely to win as many female fans as detractors: while Coffy's revenge scheme against the flamboyant lowlifes behind the ruined lives of her loved ones costs her sexually, her foreknowledge of that price calls her motives into question, and the ending simply, if ruthlessly, reduces Coffy to the green-eyed monster of countless he-dun-me-wrong country ballads. There's no denying the film's savage power, however, as typified by the harrowing comeuppance of a pimp (Robert DoQui) in a difficult sequence that conspicuously traffics in imagery we associate with the Civil Rights era. MGM's "The Best of Soul Cinema" set contains their one and only DVD release of Coffy from 2001, a 1.66:1 non-anamorphic presentation that will captivate those refusing to hold its lack of 16x9-enhancement against it. Detail is somewhat hazy, but the source print is clean and colours are vivid. Though noticeably aged, the Dolby 2.0 mono sound is clear and often dynamic. Director Jack Hill's humble feature-length commentary, the disc's only extra besides Coffy's trailer, is invaluable, although the auteur seems pooped long before crossing the finish line. Every aspect of the film's existence is addressed, from AIP's desire to make a revenge picture as metaphorical payback for having Cleopatra Jones stolen out from under them to the same studio's shoddy treatment of Hill--he had next to no involvement in post-production and was babysat throughout the shoot by uptight executives. I didn't know prior to listening that Allan Arbus (mob boss Vitori) is photographer Diane Arbus' ex. |
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1.66:1; English Mono, French Mono, Spanish Mono; French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-5; 90 minutes; R
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© Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.
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