News You Can Bruise for 2019 December 8

Weird detail probably caused by incoherent 1960s sexism: Julie Andrews's character is some kind of space scientist, like her fiancé, but she's treated like his secretary, down to the level of how much she's expected to know about his project: not nothing, as would happen if she worked on a different project altogether, but not so much that the East Germans can get the information from her instead of Paul Newman's character.

I originally wrote the two main characters are "married", because the film starts with them in bed together, but that's Alfie, always pushing the boundaries of film. Whether it's flushing a toilet or implying that people who are almost married are having sex, he's giving a big "shove off, mate" to the squares!

A while back I said that you can't make social change by making a movie, but Bamboozled seems to show it's possible, if the society you're trying to change is Hollywood. The same crossed wire that leads filmmakers to romanticize 'the movies' makes them susceptible to arguments delivered via movie—arguments that will not affect the moviegoing public as a whole. Bamboozled is pointing out a lot of problems with Hollywood, most of which are structural, but there is one simple thing that even a lowly bring-me-coffee screenwriter can take to heart: blackface gags are evil and you need to stop it.

Roger Ebert's review of Bamboozled notices the film's systemic critique but says the blackface bit is so offensive as to obscure it. I agree with this, but in 2000, mainstream Hollywood movies were still doing actual blackface gags! A year ago I was shocked to see one in O Brother, Where Art Thou?. I admit the first time I saw that film, it didn't register, just like it it didn't seem to with Ebert.

After seeing Bamboozled I went looking on IMDB, as well as Screen It ("Movie Reviews for Parents"), and it looks like after an O Brother-esque bit in Zoolander (2001), Hollywood blackface gags died out. This surely would have happened eventually, but I'm gonna argue that Bamboozled is the reason they stopped when they did. Movies with systemic critiques are not uncommon: Bamboozled is unusual in that it got some results.

Of course, artists are always pushing the boundaries, and the easiest way to address a topic that becomes taboo is to slather on a layer of indirection or irony. So we do see Jack Black play a character who angers his neighbors with a blackface act in Be Kind, Rewind (2008). We see Robert Downey Jr. play a character who goes way too deep into Method acting in Tropic Thunder (also 2008) and apparently some damn thing or other is going on in The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassas (2009). But that seems to be about it.

In these post-Bamboozled cases, real people are making a movie in which a fictional character makes the bad decision to wear blackface. (That's the joke.) Then the real people are saying "That wasn't me, it was the dummy!" to soften the blow.

Pre-Bamboozled, the blackface itself was generally not the joke. It was a way of creating a fictional construct, a kind of ventriloquist dummy, that could be used in other jokes. See Silver Streak in last month's Roundup for an example. Bamboozled is saying, over and over with no subtlety, that it is an act of real-world evil to create that ventriloquist dummy, and that any jokes you might have it tell are drawing from a well of evil, not from your comedic genius. So just don't build the evil ventriloquist dummy.

This is why I'm saying so-bad-it's good. To succeed artistically, Bamboozled has to be a bad movie. If it was somehow good, it would enact the nightmare scenario it depicts. As it is, I think there were a bunch of scripts in the early 2000s where a white producer read a draft and said "uh, hey, did you see Bamboozled (2000)?" and long story short, there was a rewrite. Around 2008, Hollywood figured out a workaround: have a fictional character build the evil ventriloquist dummy, just one of many bad decisions a fictional character might take. But it didn't get a lot of traction.

However, why not watch a stylish 1960 movie that's also really funny, like The Apartment? Oh, look, there's Shirley Maclaine, showing up for a cameo in this movie while filming The Apartment. I'm not saying people should always watch The Apartment instead of watching this, because you gotta have variety, but... maybe the Soderbergh remake is better.

Every major character in this movie has a big beefcake/cheesecake scene. Sometimes it's played for laughs: Harrison Ford's changing shirts in his office and all the Wall Street secretaries are looking through the plate glass window like "aww yeah." The public demands tasteful skin!

Content warning: this film includes harrowing recorded-live TV footage of 9/11, which is how I ended up seeing the second plane hit the tower after 18 years of successfully not seeing that footage.

Unfortunately, nearly every character not in the League was tiresome. If they'd spent ten more minutes running around the movie set (great Blazing Saddles bit here) or figuring out how McDonalds works, that would have been ten fewer minutes spent with the tiresome characters.

While doing research for this post I discovered a big conceptual problem with the nerd wish-fulfillment in this movie. While watching the movie I saw the formation of the League as a magical time-travel thing that brought real historical figures forward in time. But when writing this Roundup I learned that Chen Zhen is a fictional character. I'd assumed that Kwok-Kwan Chan in Kung Fu League was playing Chen Zhen as a parody of Bruce Lee's Chen Zhen from Fist of Fury, but he's playing the fictional character Chen Zhen come to life.

Huo Yuanjia was a real historical figure, but within Kung Fu League he's the Batman to the fictional Chen Zhen's Robin: another Fist of Fury reference. And he and Wong Fei-hung (real person) are rivals for the heart of Thirteenth Aunt (fictional character from Once Upon a Time In China). So I give up on the time travel idea, and figure the magical event at the center of this movie actually calls forth Last Action Hero-style versions of these fictional/fictionalized legends from the Shared Cinematic Universe they all inhabit.

Except a) the nerd in this movie is a comics artist, not a filmmaker, b) at the end of the movie the Kung Fu League "goes back" to... being fictional? and c) there's a joke I don't get about Ip Man which is probably really funny but which seems to make it impossible to formulate any coherent explanation at all. Which, I must admit, good job leaving it all on the field, comedically speaking.