Cobb

i can imagine that this film is going to be hardest on the film industry people. because unlike 'the player', 'bowfinger' or 'get shorty' it doesn't allow them to laugh at themselves. they are enemy, straight up. david edelstein, over at slate, has been the first critic (i suspect among many) who are going to fall into the spike lee trap. he criticises spike for not drawing out his characters into objects we can feel for, and ultimately be entertained by. if you want to be entertained by 'bamboozled' you essentially have to understand black humor, for everybody else, you'll never really know when or how to laugh. because it *is* a serious flick with a serious subject and the humor is all in the interstices, but not in the subtext. there are only a few ways to laugh at 'bamboozled' and if you don't get it, then its rough sledding.

even for me, busting a gut during the first half of the flick, it got pretty dry and heavy handed. spike has generally had a touch for giving his more dramatic lines a bit of tongue in cheek. but there is no famous 'spike shot' with people moving without walking. there are short soliloquies delivered with a kind of 'don't you get it?' attitude. if spikes characters are a bit flat, it's because they don't get it, and that serves the plot. it's not that any actor is sleepwalking through this film. it's well acted. nor that it is likely that anyone in the entertainment biz as portrayed by the characters is sleepwalking through their jobs at all. but 'bamboozled' is all about showing self-conscious frogs being boiled by degrees. everybody knows that something is going to pop, but they hope against hope that they can finesse the situation. there are no heroes, just the same old unbelievable shit, and that's hella realistic.

when things finally do go pop, the film takes a tangent which seems contrived. and it is that contrivance, a life or death situation, which makes his tale all the more real. there *are* no life and death consequences for the mistrelsy that is american entertainment. hollywood, madison avenue, and where ever the captains of fashion and booze ply their trades are wading comfortably in their boiling cauldrons. they have all their excuses so well rehearsed that when spike brings out the damage control media hack scene into focus, we know what she's going to say before she even says it. any beef you have with hollywood, be it violence, sex, drugs or rock and roll, is all implied here. this is how the boat floats - the show must go on.

'bamboozled' is only controversial, in my opinion, because everything hurtful happens to blacks due to the actions of blacks. and if you are unable to universalize the lessons, it overloads the significance of blacks and all the stereotypical devices in the coon show, as grotesque as they are. so moviegoers may end up twisted in knots thinking about 'the black thing' and what they are supposed to think of spike lee now. yes 'babmoozled' exploits a very particular venality of television vis a vis blackfolks and the america vis a vis the coon show. but there is something very deep and headbangingly harsh here in lee's critique of the business. and as didactic as many critics have called 'bamboozled' you would think more people will get it, but i think many will be stewing in their own juices.

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