Word: sweetback
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Jump to Hollywood's blaxploitation era in the 1960s, when blacks suddenly were allowed to make movies told from our point of view. Melvin Van Peebles' 1971 Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song--an ode to a wronged black man on the run from the cops--introduced the lead character as a "baadasssss nigger coming back to collect some dues!" And that "nigger" in the film, as Van Peebles tells it, snapped the streak of "liberal, sort of nice movies where we always ended up dead...
...comparatively obscure first feature: “The Story of a Three-Day Pass.” Van Peebles remarked in a question and answer session after the film: “People who call me the godfather of modern black film are referring to ‘Sweetback,’ but that wasn’t the beginning. You have to go back a couple of films to get to my first feature. Which, ironically, was a French film...
...Peebles has never shied away from controversy or charges of radicalism. His later film “Sweetback,” after all, is about a black gigolo who goes on the lam after killing several racist police offers in the defense of a Black Panther Party member...
...else, it shows that the hip-hop record business has all these milieus beat: people shoot, get shot, squabble over contracts and end up in the hospital! Straight-arrow Jackson Rhames (Jason George) and his streetwise brother Grady (Sticky Fingaz) have a dream job--running the independent record label Sweetback--but they also have a few problems. Their top act, an Eminem-like white rapper, is a thug, and his last record tanked. If they poach a rival label's star, it could start a literal blood feud. Oh, and neither they nor anybody else in the record business knows...
...explains. "I mean like sexy bitch.") There is dialogue--alternately inspired, funny and contrived--about how black men use whites' fear of them and whether it "uplifts the race" for a black man to hook up with a white woman. Even the label's name borrows from Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, the seminal blaxploitation movie. Platinum asks, Who's blaxploiting whom...