June 20, 2004|It happens this way sometimes: I'm surprised by a film, I write the review, and then I seek out an interview with the director to, in essence, commiserate on how surprising it all is–the liking, the desire to know more about the creation… Such was the case with Zack Snyder and his Dawn of the Dead remake, and I've done it again for Rawson Marshall Thurber because of his smart, incisive Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. It's funny where you find the shards to shore against your ruins, and it's exhilarating to feel like the first member of a cult. The desire to be a critic is tied at least in part, I think, to the desire to be the first fan in the club, as well as its most active recruiter. I spoke with Mr. Thurber on the telephone from Los Angeles the morning that his movie was released to surprisingly strong reviews; sounding a little tired, a little worried about how his debut will do ("I've got a few applications out to Starbucks, just in case"), Mr. Thurber proved himself to be as articulate and well-spoken as his film implies. A self-described "comedy snob," his desire to make films that don't cater to the slowest student in the class seems genuine and borne out by not only his feature, but also his classic short Terry Tate: Office Linebacker. With the imminent success of Dodgeball, the hope is that he'll continue to be allowed to make as many obscure references to Sappho and Lewis Carroll as he pleases.

June 6, 2004|Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song (1971) is arguably the most influential African-American film of the modern age, a zero-budget independent picture hailing back to a time in the early-Seventies when the term still meant something outside the studio boutique and the Weinstein brothers' Miramax Xanadu. The man behind the picture, writer/director/star Melvin Van Peebles, still has the sort of aura around him at the age of 72 that suggests just how good it is to be the king. A giant figure in any study of black popular culture (earning entire chapters in Donald Bogle's survey history Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Film and Black American Cinema, edited by Manthia Diawara), Van Peebles has interviewed Malcolm X, borrowed money from Bill Cosby, been nominated for three Grammys, won an Emmy, written a few books, collected no fewer than eleven Tony nominations, and received the French Legion of Honor. A kind of socio-political renaissance man, then, Van Peebles is still best known in the United States as the director of a curious little exploitation film that became, for a time, not only the highest-grossing independent picture in history, but also a polarizing force in spawning a race dialogue in American cinema, with an entire genre, Blaxploitation, flowering briefly in the aftermath of its release. Not a solution by any means, Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song represents a great start–the hope now that filmmakers like Antoine Fuqua, the Hughes Brothers, and Spike Lee can begin to/continue to bear up against the slings and arrows, the siren's call allure, of outrageously offensive mainstream fluff. (For a victim of temptation, look no further than John Singleton.)