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Oliver’s Love Your Mama (1989), which dared to be upbeat without ducking hard questions (and which, perhaps significantly, has still failed to find a distributor), and Jungle Fever, which I like less now than when I reviewed it last month, but which still strikes me as having a complexity and diversity of address overall that is greater than the sum of its (mainly) hidebound characters. Two exceptions to this general rule may be Ruby L. The currency and immediacy of these recent films is probably their strongest calling card, although it might be argued that these qualities tend to rule out the sort of conceptual originality that makes the earlier work so powerful. And most of the recent films are relatively didactic, issue-oriented talkfests more concerned with broaching black subjects than with radically transforming them. While the films of Gunn and Dixon are highly transgressive “blaxploitation” features - an intellectual vampire film and a politically subversive reworking of James Bond, respectively - the independent films of Burnett, Clark, and Woodbury (all UCLA classmates) are highly poetic and original depictions of particular areas of black life. Obviously it’s difficult to generalize about films that on the surface at least share only the race of their directors, but differences between these groups of films are striking. (The scripts of Ganja and Hess and Killer of Sheep, however, have recently been published by Indiana University Press, in a volume with four other scripts called Screenplays of the African American Experience, edited by Phyllis Rauch Klotman.)
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DOOKY BOYZ N THE HOOD TV
Sadly, few if any of these movies were ever shown in the neighborhood theaters that are now playing Jungle Fever and Boyz N the Hood, and none of them, as far as I know, have turned up on network or cable TV or on video. Bill Gunn’s Ganja and Hess (1970), Ivan Dixon’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973), Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977), Larry Clark’s Passing Through (1977), Burnett’s My Brother’s Wedding (1983), and Billy Woodbury’s Bless Their Little Hearts (1984) are all examples of movies that not only benefit from their glimpses into black culture but also transform our very perceptions of it. But compared to the best black-directed American features of the 70s and 80s, the half dozen of the new batch that I’ve seen so far strike me as both less revelatory and less durable.
DOOKY BOYZ N THE HOOD MOVIE
It’s also true that a sense of urgency in getting a message out gives some of these pictures a vitality and authenticity that they wouldn’t otherwise have even a movie as technically feeble as Straight Out of Brooklyn has some claim on our attention for this reason. In terms of the actors, life-styles, slang, and neighborhoods hitting the screen, they may have a point.
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Some reviewers have been treating this wave of black pictures as some sort of Golden Age. So far we’ve had New Jack City, The Five Heartbeats, A Rage in Harlem, Jungle Fever, Up Against the Wall, Straight Out of Brooklyn, and now Boyz N the Hood still to come are Livin’ Large, Talkin’ Dirty After Dark, Hangin’ With the Homeboys, True Identity, House Party 2, Juice, Go Natalie, Daughters of the Dust, Street Wars, Chameleon Street, Perfume, and The Three Muscatels. That’s less than 5 percent of the total number of features, but still more than the entire output of black-directed movies of the 80s. It’s been estimated that at least 19 pictures by black directors will be released in the U.S. With Cuba Gooding Jr., Ice Cube, Morris Chestnut, Larry Fishburne, Angela Bassett, Nia Long, and Tyra Ferrell.