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Bamboozled



With this blisteringly funny, unapologetically confrontational satire, writer-director Spike Lee examined the past, present, and future of racism in American popular culture, issuing a daring provocation to creators and consumers alike. Under pressure to help revive his network's low ratings, television writer Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) hits on an explosively offensive idea: bringing back blackface for a "new-millennium minstrel show." The white network executives love it, and so do audiences, forcing Pierre and his collaborators to confront their public's insatiable appetite for dehumanizing stereotypes. Shot primarily on unvarnished digital video and boasting spot-on performances from Savion Glover, Tommy Davidson, Jada Pinkett Smith, Michael Rapaport, Mos Def, and Paul Mooney, Bamboozled is a stinging indictment of mass entertainment at the turn of the twenty-first century that looks more damning with each passing year.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 2K digital restoration, supervised by director of photography Ellen Kuras and approved by director Spike Lee, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary from 2001 featuring Lee
• New conversation between Lee and film programmer and critic Ashley Clark
• New interviews with choreographer and actor Savion Glover, actor Tommy Davidson, and costume designer Ruth E. Carter
• On Blackface and the Minstrel Show, a new interview program featuring film and media scholar Racquel Gates
• The Making of "Bamboozled" (2001), a documentary featuring members of the cast and crew
• Deleted scenes, music videos for the Mau Maus' "Blak Iz Blak" and Gerald Levert's "Dream with No Love," and alternate parody commercials created for the film
• Poster gallery and trailer
• PLUS: An essay by Clark

This looks like an amazing package and I shouldn't look such a gift horse in the mouth (this is hands down my favorite Lee), but I wish they could have included Ethnic Notions in this package as the film wouldn't exist without it. Hopefully the interview with Lee will talk about Riggs' influence.

knives wrote: Mon Dec 16, 2019 10:55 pm This looks like an amazing package and I shouldn't look such a gift horse in the mouth (this is hands down my favorite Lee), but I wish they could have included Ethnic Notions in this package as the film wouldn't exist without it. Hopefully the interview with Lee will talk about Riggs' influence.

Interesting! I hadn't heard that before. Has Lee talked about Riggs or Ethnic Notions elsewhere? Some quick googling shows the two mentioned in the same breath a lot, but at a glance I don't see anything attributed to Lee himself.

In the meantime, Ethnic Notions is available on Kanopy...

As far as I know Lee hasn't talked about it, but several of Bamboozled's most effective moments are taken wholesale from Riggs and the overall discussion of black representation in the film owes Riggs a debt.

The film is a great one with Riggs being one of the greatest filmmakers killed before his time. A lot of queer and colored representation since then owe a lot to his groundbreaking which still feels groundbreaking. His amazing Tongues Untied would make a great double bill with Paris is Burning as an explanation of the queer Harlem we see. If any American filmmaker deserves to have a revival in popularity it is him.

knives wrote: Tue Dec 17, 2019 1:09 am As far as I know Lee hasn't talked about it, but several of Bamboozled's most effective moments are taken wholesale from Riggs and the overall discussion of black representation in the film owes Riggs a debt.

The film is a great one with Riggs being one of the greatest filmmakers killed before his time. A lot of queer and colored representation since then owe a lot to his groundbreaking which still feels groundbreaking. His amazing Tongues Untied would make a great double bill with Paris is Burning as an explanation of the queer Harlem we see. If any American filmmaker deserves to have a revival in popularity it is him.

He has had at least a bit of a revival lately, it seems. Admittedly, I live in the market for it, especially with Riggs having been a local, but Tongues Untied has played multiple times in the Bay Area in the past few years, there were complete retrospectives in Brooklyn and Berkeley this year, and the BFI has Tongues Untied + some shorts coming out soon. Which makes it even more of a shame they didn't include Ethnic Notions here, if it's that obviously an influence.

I’m delighted - although not surprised - that Ashley Clark is heavily involved with this release (to a greater extent than his credit in the specs would imply), because his championing of Bamboozled over the years (including a book, which I warmly recommend) has been an exemplary demonstration of how to productively fly the flag for a film you personally adore but which you think has been grossly underrated.

It’s in very safe hands.

Like Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee will autograph copies bought from his own site.

Fascinating article! I’m not sure I agree with all the post-processing they did to the DV, but I’m not the cinematographer, so...

That last section does probably also explain why the release was a little delayed.

Wonder why Dr. Svet skipped* this one and it didn't get a review until now? I sure could speculate!

*As in, did not opt to review it

He probably originally didn't care much about it (he probably got the disc late Feb - Early March), but in the meantime, it turned into a more practical than usual springboard to spread his worldviews. It's likely that without the recent tensions in the USA, the release would have stayed unreviewed.

Pro-B didn’t review it, though I can see how Mfunk’s wording could suggest he did

I was about to edit my post, congratulating him to have at least a tamer than usual political leaning in his review, I guess that's why !