Movies - Bamboozled

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	Movies - Bamboozled

Bamboozled is a 2000 satirical film written and directed by Spike Lee about a modern televised minstrel show featuring black actors donning blackface makeup and the violent fall-out from the show's debut. The title means "purposefully confused, tricked or led astray".

Overview

The content is indeed heavily satirical, with its show within a show featuring its characters all in blackface and in a rural setting in a cotton field with plentiful watermelons. The Roots have a role as the show's house band, The Alabama Porch Monkeys. The audiences within the movie, initially baffled, come to love the show, and after a few episodes even elderly white women show up in blackface and proclaim themselves "niggers."

One of Lee's tricks on the audience for his movie is that the performances of the show within a show are rendered with excellent musicianship, sharp timing, exciting dancing, all within the most stereotypical settings of cotton fields and watermelon feasts. This puts the audience (both on-screen and in the theatre) in the position of enjoying the performances, but being unsure whether it's correct to enjoy them.

The script, expressing rage and grief at media representations of black people, largely does so through the eyes of its moral center, the character Sloan Hopkins (played by Jada Pinkett Smith). It also satirizes many icons of black culture, including Ving Rhames, Will Smith, Johnnie Cochran, and Al Sharpton (Cochran and Sharpton appear as themselves in the film, protesting the television series).

The movie also stars Savion Glover as Manray (stage name Mantan, after Mantan Moreland), Tommy Davidson as Womack (stage name Sleep n' Eat, after Willie Best), Thomas Jefferson Byrd as Honeycutt, and Mos Def, Canibus, and DJ Scratch as three of the activist/hip hop group The Mau Maus. Mos Def's character, who calls himself "Big Blak Afrika" (refusing to spell the word with the "c" because "they don't even pronounce that shit!") is also Sloan's older brother.

Bamboozled was dedicated to Budd Schulberg.

Synopsis

Pierre Delacroix, played by Damon Wayans, is a Harvard-educated black man working for a television network that routinely rejects all of his attempts to get respectable, intelligent shows involving black people on the airwaves. He is further tormented by his boss Thomas Dunwitty (played by Michael Rapaport), a white man who proudly proclaims that he is more black than Delacroix and that he can use the word "nigger" since he is married to a black woman.

Faced with an ultimatium of either coming up with a hit black-centric show for the network or being fired, Delacroix opts for the latter on the basis that being fired will free him from his contract to the network and allow him to go to work for another network without having to go through the hassle of quitting and being sued for breach of contract. With help from his personal assistant Sloan Hopkins (played by Jada Pinkett Smith), Delacroix decides to pitch a minstrel show, complete with black actors in blackface on the belief that the network would reject it for being out-and-out racist and fire him on the spot.

With help from Sloan, Delacroix recruits two homeless street performers Manray and Womack to star in the stage show. While Womack is horrified when Delacroix tells him about the show, his best friend Manray willfully agrees to star in the show as his big chance to become rich and famous.

To Delacroix's horror, Dunwitty falls in love with the minstrel show concept and not only does the show get greenlighted but it also becomes hugely successful. Manray and Womack become big stars while Delacroix becomes a lightning rod of controversy over the show, which he defends as being satirical. Delacroix embraces the fame of the show while his assistant Sloane becomes horrified at the racist nightmare she's helped unleash. Meanwhile, Womack finally has enough of the show and its racist nature and quits much to the shock of Manray. This causes Manray and Sloan to grow closer, which angers Delacroix. Delacroix tries to break up Manray's relationship with Sloan by accusing Sloan of sleeping with Manray to further her career and then reveals that Sloan only got her position as Delacroix's assistant by sleeping with him.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Bamboozled ]

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Movies - Bamboozled

Overview

Synopsis

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