Wednesday, March 5, 2003

THE LEGEND OF BAGGER LATIFAH: I love harsh movie reviews. I've had fun highlighting the critical daggers thrust at The Life of David Gale and Roberto Benigni's Pinocchio, among others, in recent months.

To that list, I've been expecting to add Bringing Down The House, the Steve Martin/Queen Latifah movie debuting this week that, based on the trailer, struck me as being yet another awful Magical Negro Movie.

[You know the genre by now -- movies like Bulworth, The Green Mile, The Family Man, Ghost, Jerry Maguire, Men of Honor, What Dreams May Come and The Legend of Bagger Vance -- movies in which black people with deep spiritual skills have nothing better to do with their lives than help white men with their problems. Of Bagger Vance, Spike Lee has noted: “How is it that when your brothers are being lynched, your sisters are being raped, Jim Crow is at its height in the state of Georgia, how is that the only thing this guy is worried about is teaching Matt Damon a golf swing? Where do they get these people?”]

[For more on the genre, go here.]

"It won't be a bad movie," Jen said to me when I expressed my fears. "Well, it shouldn't." After all, she noted, Steve Martin had a pretty good track record in picking his movies (except for this, this and this, perhaps), and Queen Latifah is really funny, and she wouldn't stand to be in a degrading movie like that.

Unfortunately, it seems, she has. The early reviews are out, and it ain't pretty.

After noting the structural "similarities" between this movie, Martin's Housesitter with Goldie Hawn and the Phil Hartman/Sinbad comedy Houseguest, the Associated Press gets down to business on this "baffling" movie:
[I]t's chock full of outdated racial stereotypes. All the white people are uptight, racist WASPs, all the black people are ghetto fabulous, and none of them resembles a human being. . . .

Despite his initial disdain, Peter [Steve Martin] forms a friendship with this woman, chiefly because she functions as a Magical Black Person — a cinematic character, like Will Smith in The Legend of Bagger Vance and Don Cheadle in The Family Man, who swoops down, solves everyone's problems and provides clarity. . . .

No, this is not funny. And it doesn't get funnier when Peter goes to an all-black nightclub, dressed in baggy clothes with bling-bling draped around his pasty neck, and takes part in a break dancing contest. (This wasn't terribly amusing when Warren Beatty did a similar thing in Bulworth back in 1998, either.)

From the Philadelphia Weekly, still more early warning:
Bringing Down the House is both unbelievably stupid and unbelievably racist, though I'm guessing everybody involved -- from the filmmakers to the stars to the studio execs -- are praying people will dismiss it as the former.

Call it a case of bad timing that Queen Latifah follows up her Oscar-nominated, firing-from-all-cylinders performance in Chicago with this flagrantly unglued race farce. Basically a sitcom pilot stretched out into a 105-minute guffaw-a-thon, House shows white people that if you bring a loud, rambunctious sista into your life, you'll see how much you've been missing out on. . . .

Martin and Latifah do their best to mine raucous laughs out of clashing race relations, but the whole thing just ain't right. Director Adam Shankman goes about the nasty business of making racism and bigotry look, well, cute. But the movie ends up being the kind of insulting Hollywood bullshit comedian Dave Chappelle mercilessly skewers on his new Comedy Central show.

edited to add: The Onion's A.V. Club helpfully jumps onto the pile:
"Dignity... Always dignity," Gene Kelly espoused as his motto in Singin' In The Rain, shortly before a sequence illustrating the depths of humiliation that had made his career. Or, to put it another way, as Steve Martin did on one of his comedy albums: Comedy is not pretty. Which is fine as long as it's funny, but when it's not funny, it's just sad. Falling firmly on the sad side of the equation, Bringing Down The House is yet another comedy that suggests someone should take Martin aside and remind him that he can do better. Suggesting a big-screen version of the Nell Carter sitcom Gimme A Break! . . . . (blah blah blah plot summary) . . . .

To be fair, the movie has a good nature that could allow it to pass as the most enlightened portrayal of race relations of the 19th century. At one point, Martin even suggests that with her intelligence, savvy, quick comprehension, and ability to de-ghettoize her speech, Latifah could someday become a paralegal. Oh, the dizzying heights. "A girl has to get her cheese on," Latifah exclaims at one point, and it's not hard to hear the actress behind the character.

More on Friday.

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