You ve been hoodwinked. You ve been had. You ve been took. You ve been led astray, run amuck. You ve been bamboozled.
So said Malcolm X, as quoted by Spike Lee in the production notes to Bamboozled, his perplexing new film. To Malcolm, the bamboozlers were white people in general, but in Lee s films they re the television executives, black and white, who bamboozle themselves in the mindless quest for ratings. The film is a satirical attack on the way TV uses and misuses African-American images, but many viewers will leave the theater thinking Lee has misused them himself.
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That s the danger with satire: To ridicule something, you have to show it, and if what you re attacking is a potent enough image, the image retains its negative power no matter what you want to say about it. Bamboozled shows black actors in boldly exaggerated blackface for a cable production named Mantan The New Millennium Minstrel Show. Can we see beyond the blackface to its purpose? I had
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La La Anthony Enlightens NYC Students on Newest Episode of ‘In the Classroom’ Learning Series
March 8, 2021 GMT
La La Anthony Enlightens NYC Students on Newest Episode of In the Classroom Learning Series
NEW YORK - March 8, 2021 - ( Newswire.com )
As a part of their ongoing educational programming, and in celebration of Women’s History Month, the I WILL GRADUATE Program will release its latest episode of ”
In The Classroom ” Learning Series, featuring La La Anthony of
Starz’s hit television show, ”
Power ”, and Showtime’s, ”
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Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods,” released last summer on Netflix, is the story of four friends who served together during the Vietnam War. Decades later, the group played by Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, Isiah Whitlock, Jr., and, in what may be the performance of his career, Delroy Lindo returns to Vietnam, in order to reclaim a treasure that they left behind. The film is a pointed and melancholy meditation on warfare, memory, mammon, and trauma undiluted by time’s passage. To watch it is to be haunted, in multiple ways. First, by a soundtrack that leans heavily on Marvin Gaye’s classic protest album, “What’s Going On,” making Gaye, with his wistful cynicism “Are things really getting better like the newspaper said?” almost a character in the film. And then there’s the sight of Chadwick Boseman, who died not long after the movie’s release, at the age of forty-three, of cancer. Boseman plays Norman, the unofficial and unsubtly Christlike lead
In an interview with
Rolling Stone, the Laker Girl-turned-pop star listed her
Coming to America scene as one of the top moments of her choreography career. “This was one of my moments of having to really prove myself, because I was still pretty new in my career as a choreographer,” Abdul said. “John Landis, the director, wanted the person that choreographed Janet Jackson. I was still a Laker Girl. I went in and he looked at me and said, What are you, a teenager? And I said, Yes, I am! He basically was telling me, What do you know about African dancing? And this is my whole thing when becoming a choreographer: I ll just tell everyone yes, I know exactly what I m doing, and then I ll figure it out later. ”
Last modified on Sun 7 Mar 2021 07.50 EST
Did we need a sequel to Eddie Murphyâs fish-out-of-water 1980s romp Coming to America â with the word âtoâ transformed into a â2â? Will this trigger wacky sequel ideas for Bergmanâs Face to Face, or Kurosawaâs To Live?
The original movie, directed by John Landis, had Murphy as the discontented Prince Akeem of the fictional African state Zamunda, obedient to his sonorous father the king (James Earl Jones), but yearning for a modern, independent-minded bride. So he travels to Queens, New York with his pal Semmi (whose name doesnât get the obvious gag despite the nonstop sexual innuendo), played by Arsenio Hall. Posing as students, they encounter various latexed comedy characters â barbers, barbershop customers, etc, played by Murphy and Hall themselves â and Akeem finally finds happiness with Lisa, played by Shari Headley. A TV pilot in 1989 starring In Living Colorâs Tommy Davidson