Word: baadasssss
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...appropriate that blaxploitation's theatrical tribute came this summer from a pair of popcorn movies: Undercover Brother and Austin Powers in Goldmember (with the foil fatale, Foxxy Cleopatra, played by Beyonce Knowles). But now director Isaac Julien aims to put blaxploitation into the canon with the documentary BaadAsssss Cinema (IFC, Aug. 14, 10 p.m. E.T.), which unashamedly argues that those movies had artistic merit and political force...
...appropriate that blaxploitation's theatrical tribute came this summer from a pair of popcorn movies: Undercover Brother and Austin Powers in Goldmember (with the foil fatale, Foxxy Cleopatra, played by Beyonce Knowles). But now director Isaac Julien aims to put blaxploitation into the canon with the documentary BaadAsssss Cinema (IFC, Aug. 14, 10 p.m. E.T.), which unashamedly argues that those movies had artistic merit and political force...
...view to their antipodes - militant groups like the Black Panthers. Blaxploitation didn't have a dream; it had a shotgun. And if many of its heroes were pimps and pushers, at least they could do the pushing without getting punished for it onscreen. Melvin van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's BaadAsssss Song (1971) - "Rated X by an all-white jury," bragged the poster - stunned audiences simply by showing a strong black man who fought, had explicit sex and tangled with white cops, yet didn't get killed for it by the end of the movie. Blaxploitation's heroes, men and women...
...BaadAsssss also examines the music, which the larger (i.e., white) audience probably knows better than the movies. There is archival footage of Shaft's director, Gordon Parks, coaching Hayes as he records the movie's funk-legend theme, and critic Elvis Mitchell explains how Curtis Mayfield's antidrug score for Superfly subtly rebuts the movie's pusher-glorifying plot (the same tension as exists in much gangsta rap). The documentary confirms blaxploitation's lasting influence on music and movies by interviewing Afeni Shakur (mother of late rapper Tupac) and Quentin Tarantino, the white boy whom blaxploitation made. The Oscars...