Member review

Bamboozled is a gritty piece of satire which shows the selfishness and collateral damage which comes with being an Uncle Tom, while also grappling with the dynamic Spike Lee himself faces by being a black creator who creates using money from white people. Ironically, this was one of Spike Lee's most controversial and scathing movies, and it tanked in the box office because it was too controversial as well as being uncomfortable for white audiences.

It centers around 'Pierre Delacroix', or rather Peerless Dothan if you use his real name. He is a black television writer who has alienated and distanced himself in every way from his race and family. Becoming fed up with the way that his company treats him, he creates a show so outrageous it will get him terminated from his contract. The show is a mistrel show involving blackface worn by black people, but his plan fails

The movie does a great job at showing what it wants to display, and in many ways it's not subtle about it. It's very much clear and in your face, and everything about the movie hits hardest in the wide array of intense, charged scenes, where the actors really get to shine.

The dark spiral Pierre and some of the other characters go down is hard to watch(in a very good way), and is totally gripping. It does a fantastic job at showing the slippery slope Pierre locks himself to by continuing to create the show.

Some problems I have with the film are that Peerless' boss, played by Micheal Rapaport, felt a bit on the nose as a character. The film does this with a lot of the characters, speicifically the white characters, which usually fits in wonderfully with the movie, but Micheal's character feels too 2-dimensional. The character's archetype is that he grew up in a black area and so thinks he knows more about the culture than Pierre does. Pierre, never wanting to make a fuss, ignores it, but it is plain that hatred and contempt is all Pierre and anyone else feels for the man because of his arrogant and misinformed narcissism. But the character keeps going on and on about it, and it becomes a little excessive to me.

As well as this, there is a radicalist rap group featured in the film who strongly oppose the show, and they are presented as foolish and uneducated in a lot of ways. However, the things they rap about and their actual points, although not ground-breaking or super insightful, aren't invalid or stupid, and the movie's depiction of them as foolish detracts a little from their points. This kind of steps on the entire point of the movie, but it's not egregious.