Word: minstrels
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Bamboozled's fictional TV network, Harvard-educated Pierre Dela-croix (Damon Wayans) is the token black executive. His abrasive boss (Michael Rappaport) charges him to devise a hot, edgy new series. Angry and desperate, Pierre proposes a minstrel show--a format "so negative, so offensive and racist" that it will prove his point about the lack of ethical or aesthetic standards on TV. Aided by his skeptical, ambitious assistant (Jada Pinkett Smith), he hires as his stars a homeless tap dancer (Savion Glover) and his pal (Tommy Davidson). Renamed Mantan and Sleep 'n Eat, they are given a supporting cast...
...blackface charade is on the air! A troupe of darkies in their field-workers' clothes and prison garb are singin' and dancin' and funnin' away, in a skewed, bitter, made-for-TV version of the old minstrel show. The feet flash, the banjos are pummeled; the energy level ascends in megavolts, moving beyond satire into irresistible entertainment. And suddenly a weird thought creases the moviegoer's skull: TV could use a comedy-variety show with a self-lacerating edge; and Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show--the defiantly offensive TV parody that is at the heart of Spike...
...despite its sternest intentions and laudably high squirm content, the movie is often fun. Just as Mel Brooks had to turn the Springtime for Hitler production number into a giddy riot of goose steps, the polemicist in Lee occasionally surrenders to the entertainer in him and allows his sour minstrel travesty to effervesce. He points fingers but can't help snapping them...
Social and cinema history back him up. The first great movie epic (The Birth of a Nation) and the first talkie sensation (The Jazz Singer) wallowed in racial derision, personified by white actors in blackface. Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, Fred Astaire and Bugs Bunny defaced themselves in minstrel cork. Egregious stereotyping can still be heard, most mornings, on Don Imus' and Howard Stern's radio shows--aural blackface. Somebody had to shout, "Enough," and, whaddaya know, it was Spike...
...hindsight we scorn the whites who loved minstrel shows and pity the blacks who had to play in them. But there are shades of culpability. Astaire, donning blackface for his Bojangles of Harlem number, probably thought (from ignorance, not malice) that he was paying sincere tribute to the great dancer Bill Robinson. As for Mantan Moreland, the black comic whose bug-eyed mugging in Charlie Chan films earns Lee's particular ire, he also was the star of films made for, and presumably appreciated by, the black audience. Perhaps we all have 20/20 vision of the past...