Word: wattstax
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...claim that he ran away because he couldn’t rectify the tension between the negative messages of his comedy and his desire to play a positive role in the world is surprisingly plausible. Although the movie is, according to the press notes, inspired by “Wattstax,” a legendary concert film starring Isaac Hayes, Richard Pryor, the Staple Singers, it also vividly recalls “The Last Waltz,” Martin Scorsese’s record of The Band’s last performance. Like “Waltz?...
...WATTSTAX...
...Wattstax, a record of the event, is as casually diverting as most rock-concert documentaries, but it is a little something more besides, a tentative attempt to gauge the feeling of a ghetto. Director Stuart uses the music as an expression of common feeling, and he intercuts concert footage with interview material shot on the streets of Watts. The result is necessarily superficial, but it does give the people a voice, and the tone is insistent and important...
Some six years after Watts went up in flames, the racial wounds still ache. "I been down so long," one black man says, "the thought of getting up never even entered my mind." Stuart links Wattstax together with some hilarious monologues by Comic Richard Pryor, who wrings laughs from such shared frustration and humiliation. His stories of everyday hassling, of being regularly rousted by the cops, are spun out in street jargon with a kind of furious cool. What makes the jokes sting is not punch lines but lethal accuracy...
...unfortunate that the Code and Rating Administration will not let kids see it in theaters unless their parents (or "an adult guardian") can get them past Wattstax's R classification. Such a harsh rating was assigned presumably because of the scruffy slang in the film, the sort of language street kids hear and use every day. It is a part of life that they all share, but one that the censors, by some convoluted hypocrisy, would forbid them onscreen...
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