Review of Bamboozled (2000) by Andrewh. — 25 Mar 2007

This is the most moving film I've seen in years. We had a party at my college where students wore "blackface" and, you know, I couldn't figure out what to think about it. On one hand, they were well meaning kids just going for yucks and trying to have fun - and it was funny.

On the other, it seems like they, like the white tv producers in this film, perhaps love hip-hop culture themselves but as a joke they don't seem to quite even understand - and there's a certain horror in that.

Lee is criticized for not having a clear answer to his problem, well, and for not being clear in general. I disagree. There are certainly ambiguities along the way - Wayans' character development could've gone smoother.

But Lee's great strength in dealing with race, and what made Do the Right Thing so great, is that he portrays all the nuanced positions in the debate in relation to each other, so that all the truths and all the absurdities of positions you actually identify with come through.

The film is actually best (not worst) at its finish (although the action sequence is agreeably a bit much - perhaps fashioned after Natural Born Killers). In the very end, the tone we are left with is mournful.

Lee profoundly asks, "What would it take to grieve our past so that its ghosts no longer haunt us?" Those reviewers who felt the film was confused just think there ought to be easy answers. Do the Right Thing, one of the greatest films ever made, did much of what this film did better - but this is as close as Lee has come to repeating himself as prophetic, bittersweet, funny, charming, greek tragedian.

Underneath all the vitriol that gets tossed around is still the profound humanity of that film - but only in the end and "backstage". Is there a filmic sequence more poignant than when various members of the audience of the minstrel show, in black face (at first you are horrified they are in black face at all, and using the word nigger) stand and announce that they too are "niggers.

" You start thinking, well, it's not demeaning to black people then; it's a white fantasy and people are really joining together. But then that romanticized dream of universal-niggerdom comes quickly crashing down, when you remember the horror of what "niggerdom" actually means, when you realize the most authentically unique character in the film will be erased as a person by this movement.

It's just so heart rending you can't help but join Lee in quietly letting go of the judging anger, the tittering glee, the capitalist free-for-all, the romantic conformism and you just have to sit still and watch and allow yourself to feel grief.

He's got it nailed.