Word: shaft
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Jennifer: But its Latino-stereotype bad guy is going to make some people very angry. They may have tried to balance it with Shaft's sidekick, Carmen Vasquez, but she's played by Vanessa Williams, and aside from her name there's nothing particularly Latina about her - unlike the bad guy Peoples, who is a screamingly camp, caricatured Dominican drug dealer. But when the original came out you didn't have the culture jam-packed with images of black athletes, actors and musicians defining what was cool. Back then, the very fact of having an aggressive, rebellious, stylish, smart black...
...white characters of the original "Shaft" were the "blue-eyed devils" of the young Malcolm X. By contrast, the new film balances each baddie with a goodie of the of same ethnicity...
...Tony: Yeah, Hollywood hasn't ever gotten over its taboo about black sexuality. This Shaft was a boy scout compared with his uncle. It was like the role was written for Denzel Washington, who always gets these parts where he saves the girl but there?s no sexual tension - especially when she's white...
...Tony: The original "Shaft" came at a time when black America was almost invisible in Hollywood. A black hero was unthinkable, let alone one so contemptuous of the pretensions of white society. It promoted this radical morality in which a black man could only do the right thing by stepping outside a corrupt and racist justice system - it was the quintessential Black Panther movie. Of course a lot's changed since then. But instead of challenging prevailing attitudes, this "Shaft" seemed was trying to appease the prevailing political correctness by having good and bad whites, blacks and Latinos...
...Tony: True. And I guess there was nothing politically correct about Shaft's pummeling that corner drug dealer. Usually, in movies, you have to see a baddie being really evil onscreen in order to justify a good whupping. But here you're simply told that this guy is a drug dealer and that he's using a 12-year-old to run his errands, and then the next thing Shaft is gleefully beating him into a bloody mess...