Name: Spike Lee’s Incendiary Satire BAMBOOZLED (2000) — 25th anniversary screening w/ Black Comedy Shorts
Start: 2025-02-22T19:00:00-06:00
Location: Arkadin Cinema & Bar

$Spike Lee\u2019s Incendiary Satire BAMBOOZLED (2000) \u2014 25th anniversary screening w\/ Black Comedy Shorts$

“Deserves to be respected as much more than a mid-career oddity in Lee’s filmography. It is a vital work that’s equal parts crystal ball and cannonball: glittering and prophetic, heavy and dangerous.” -Ashley Clark, Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled
With this blisteringly funny, unapologetically confrontational satire, writer-director Spike Lee examined the past, present, and future of racism in American popular culture, issuing a daring provocation to creators and consumers alike. Under pressure to help revive his network’s low ratings, television writer Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) hits on an explosively offensive idea: bringing back blackface with The New Millennium Minstrel Show. The white network executives love it, and so do audiences, forcing Pierre and his collaborators to confront their public’s insatiable appetite for dehumanizing stereotypes. Shot primarily on unvarnished digital video and boasting spot-on performances from Wayans, Savion Glover, Jada Pinkett Smith, Tommy Davidson, Michael Rapaport, Mos Def, and Paul Mooney, Bamboozled is a stinging indictment of mass entertainment at the turn of the twenty-first century that looks more damning with each passing year.
Come out early for an hour-long pre-show of comedy shorts by Black filmmakers starting at 6 pm.
This film is screening as part of Arkadin’s “Offbeat Black Comedies” series, a collection of wonderfully peculiar films made by African-American directors.