The mother-freakin’ magnum opus of all blaxsploitation parodies, “Black Dynamite,” will be hitting theaters (no word on how many yet, jive ass suckers like me are not to be privileged with such information), this Friday. I praised it mightily back in June, but to get you in the mood, I offer the following.
Just so there’s no confusion, this is not from “Black Dynamite” but is the very real “Disco Godfather” from 1979 starring Rudy Ray “Dolemite” Moore.
For more information on fighting hard drugs among our nation’s preschoolers and first graders, see the FSITO website.
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Now, before you decide to come after me for giving free publicity to really sketchy charities, be aware that this is a nice bit of viral marketing for the upcoming seventies blaxsploitation spoof, “Black Dynamite,” which I was fortunate to see at the Los Angeles Film Festival two months back. From cowriter/director Scott Sanders and cowriter star Michael Jai White (“Spawn”), it’s easily the funniest and best made comedy genre homage in a very long time, and its marketing isn’t bad either. The movie’s official site is worth a look, too.
The Los Angeles Film Festival ended Sunday and I’m not sure what I want to say about it. I saw several films and wanted to see more, but circumstances, and trying to blog about most of what I did see, kept me to a one or two movie per day average on the days I attended. Most of the films were as good as their buzz at least, but most of them had already screened at Sundance.
For me, the highlights were “Black Dynamite” — which was by far the most fun screening all around despite happening within hours of Michael Jackson’s death (which happened to be a less than a mile from where I was working on my posts) — and “We Live in Public” which was simply the most interesting film with the most interesting post-screening discussion. “Branson” was a highlight of another sort for the electrifying performer/one-man-drama, Jackson Cash. The film geek/native West Angeleno in me went moderately wild for a film I haven’t written about here, Curtis Harrington’s melange of romance and dark fantasy “Night Tide,” which was shot in late fifties Santa Monica and Venice.
Los Angeles is, of course, an extremely large city with strong neighborhoods but no true urban core (which is not to say that we aren’t trying to grow one) and a place where all kinds of movies screen all the time, if you know where to find them. It’s also, of course, the place on earth with the largest concentration of people involved with actually making movies or doing things related to making them. Getting them to spend a lot of time actually watching new films probably requires enticing them to go elsewhere and break their usual, already way too busy, routine.
One side benefit of the busy, slightly weird and somewhat fouled-up time I’ve been having at the Los Angeles Film Festival is that I’ve only had time to watch films I’ve especially wanted to see. That’s prevented the joy (so far) of making an unexpected discovery, which is definitely part of the fun of film festivals. On the other hand, I’ve liked all the films I’ve seen (so far). “Black Dynamite,” a spoof of the seventies blaxsploitation genre, is one I’ve been wanting to see since the filmmakers’ commendably aggressive PR people sent me a trailer — and a very cool (but inexpensively seventies-esque) t-shirt — a couple of years back via my personal blog.
Fortunately, the wait, the slog through Hollywood traffic on the somewhat spooky evening of Michael Jackson’s death (not as bad as it could have been, actually), and even some technical problems on the first attempt to run through the film all proved to be very much worth it. Directed by Scott Sanders and co-written with actor and martial artist Michael Jai White (“Spawn,” “The Dark Knight“), this is just your basic story of a superhuman ex-CIA agent, able to take out a roomful of bad guys and satisfy a roomful of women, who sets out to avenge the death of his brother, stop the scourge of hard drugs at orphanages, and also deal with a brand of malt liquor that turns out to have a truly disturbing side effect.
The brilliance of Sanders and White’s approach here is the faithfulness they maintain to their source material while sending it up shamelessly. It happily exaggerates the cinematic flaws of actual blaxsploitation and its often unbelievable plots and absurd dialogue, taking several increasingly silly turns as the film unspools, but always with a completely straight face and an apparent complete lack of irony. The approach propels the comedy far further than less disciplined spoofs.
In a video interview conducted with writer David Poland after its debut at Sundance, Scott Sanders said he and White approached it not so much as a movie starring Michael Jai White as Black Dynamite and directed by Sanders, but a movie featuring Michael Jai White playing seventies-era ex-football player Ferante Jones playing Black Dynamite, and directed by Sanders “playing” a seventies director.
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