Bamboozled, a Spike Lee movie

With Spike Lee, you are always challenged,

always treated to movie entertainment with an extra dose of socio-economic and political ideas. And above all, you are always treated to excellent cinematography and first-rate acting.

In Bamboozled, Damon Wayans plays Pierre Delacroix, an African American television producer who, with his assistant, Sloan Hopkins (Jada Pinkett-Smith), tries to keep up with the high demands of the industry. They make a great team, working really well together. But they are being pushed to produce a new and exciting show that will shake up the industry and put them on the map, for the network they work for is going under and needs a hit show desperately. From this point, Lee's film pays homage to the Mel Brooks classic, The Producers.

Delacriox, known to his friends and associates as Dela, is an angry man who wants to get out of his contract, so he creates a show that he hopes will get him fired - a surefire flop. He builds the new show around a theme guaranteed to be offensive to everyone - the minstrel show, but as with Brooks' earlier film, where his "producers" put together a musical comedy on the rise of Adolf Hitler, the show is so outrageous that it becomes an immediate and unaccountable success. At this point, Dela decides to "go with the flow."

The mainstream critics have mostly condemned Lee's effort, calling it an "obstreperous rant" (Entertainment Weekly), "heavy-handed lecturing" (Film Journal International), "a blurry catharsis" (San Francisco Examiner), "occasionally biting but excessively melodramatic" (Variety).

Black Entertainment, on the other hand, said it "makes regular life surreal, which is precisely what most corporate produced images of Blacks can be." And Popmatters put it this way: "Messy, outrageous, and mostly brilliant, Bamboozled is bound to make trouble. And I can't think of a more important trouble to make."

And the reason for this success, according to Spike Lee and his two protagonists, is an obvious one to any moviegoer: the deep-seated racism in the industry. Lee focuses on the world of the minstrel show as the example, par excellence, of the historic roots of racism in the entertainment business and how this racism continues with the same trends.

A key character in the film is the young network head, Dunwitty, played by Michael Rapaport. Dunwitty is a near maniacal TV executive driven by the bottom line of profit. Further, he is also the industry's expert on Black television programming.

Dunwitty is closely patterned after the director Quentin Tarrantino who, like Dunwitty, seems to go out of his way to use offensive racial epithets in his movies. In fact, he has been criticized by Lee himself for this. It seems no accident that Dunwitty, in trying to explain his position, uses exactly the same words Tarrantino used in an interview on PBS.

Savion Glover adds to the movie with his excellent performance as one of the "street people" enlisted by Delacroix to insure the program's failure but, like Dick Shawn in Brooks' movie, turns the program into a success by his outrageousness.

Lee gives the audience a lesson in racism in films as Delacroix studies old movies and television shows so he can "get it right." Memorabilia from these eras is also displayed prominently and there is a real history lesson here.

Lee's films rarely move toward an uplifting conclusion and one is left on a downer with this movie, as well. But there is little doubt that the "positives" by far outweigh the "negatives."

Clearly, Lee wants to entertain, but he also wants to challenge his audiences. In this movie, which he wrote, directed and produced, once again Lee does not disappoint. It is unfortunate that films like Lee's latest effort don't last long in the movie houses.

- Eric Greene