Film
Bamboozled
- Director
- Spike Lee
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 135 mins
This may not be Spike Lee’s most coherent offering, but for its provocation, its sincere anger and often shockingly non-PC imagery, it’s a genuine talking-point movie. Lee’s starting point is the crassness of US network TV, which isn’t really interested in dealing with the real issues of African-American lives in any dramatic context. Sporting a bizarrely affected French accent, Damon Wayans is the TV executive who comes up with the idea of a minstrel show so obviously offensive it’ll open up a whole new debate about the state of race relations in the US. The satirical zinger in Bamboozled, however, is that, much to Wayans’ dismay, the programme’s a big hit and suddenly blacking up is the height of fashion. The longer it goes on, the more the film becomes tangled in its own over-active plotting, slipping into repetition and over-emphasis, familiar Lee foibles. Yet the fearlessness with which the movie conjures up its ‘gollywog’ iconography makes it compellingly uncomfortable viewing.
It’s on screen in Come the Revolution’s No B/S series, which celebrates black comedy as part of the BFI’s Comedy Genius season.
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