Frequent Playas
BILL COSBY'S recent commencement speech criticizing an indolent class of black Americans coincides with Spike Lee's complaints about the movie Soul Plane. Although both Cosby and Lee have political concerns, their statements are not the same. Only Cosby addresses the social circumstances black people face, while Lee repeats his regular grousing about other filmmakers' imagery of black people.
Soul Plane itself puts these remarks in illuminating perspective. It's a comedy about the first flight of NWA, a black-owned airline. You don't need to be told what the initials stand for if you've paid attention to what's been going on in black popular culture for the past decade. And if you can decipher that acronym, then you understand Cosby's point-and his sense of distress.
Where Lee goes wrong is in not understanding that Soul Plane is part of the same Hollywood exploitation that finances his own frequently questionable depictions of black American life. Soul Plane's screenwriters, Bo Zenga and Chuck Wilson (one was a Wall Street banker, the other holds an architecture degree), have sussed out the precise exploitive nature of contemporary black popular culture. Its "get paid" ethos values success over the social ideals Cosby was talking about. Success, in this sense, fulfills the lowest, wildest, most stereotypical fantasies.
Despite Lee's protests, Zenga and Wilson know the pulse of hiphop. Kevin Hart plays Nashawn, a homie from Inglewood, CA, who sued a airline company for killing his dog and won a $100 million settlement enabling him to fulfill his dream of owning an airline. But black entrepreneurship isn't sacrosanct. Zenga and Wilson satirize it by making Snoop Dogg the real star as NWA's pilot, Capt. Mack, who lounges in the cockpit, hangs fuzzy dice from the rearview mirror and sets his bobblehead Fred G. Sanford doll on the dashboard. "We ride spinners!" Snoop exclaims about the shiny hubcaps on the purple airplane's wheels. He hits switches as the plane taxis down the runway, making it rise and buck like a low-rider. "This is some shit fit for a real nigga!" Snoop confirms.
What Zenga and Wilson have done with this low-grade burlesque is snap the tension that traditional race men genuinely feel about the trifling behavior of today's black underclass. Cosby's generation used to think of black progress beyond financial or material terms, but the new breed of black entrepreneurs, from Spike Lee to Russell Simmons, has a different code.
Capitalizing on rancorous hiphop rebellion and its confused glorification of ghetto fabulousness (what black academics call "essentialism"), contemporary black entrepreneurship charms audiences away from the old social objectives. The fetishization of money and pleasure has encouraged a pre-civil-rights-era atavism. It's summed up in Nashawn's motto for NWA: "We Fly, We Party, We Land."
Soul Plane can't be "racist" as Lee suggests, not given the black images that are currently enshrined and rewarded in our culture. Bovine comedienne Mo'Nique puffs up her hot mama/harridan routine, taking license from the general acceptance of black carnality. Riding the edge of self-parody, she keeps on the vulgar side of embarrassing truth. Mo'Nique plays Jamiqua to Loni Love's Shaniece, a pair of loudmouth airport security guards who threaten customers going through the metal detector; they eagerly strip-search any fine black men. "We feds now, which means I can violate every one of your civil rights!" Mo'Nique brays, ready to perform a cavity check.
Soul Plane's humor is blunt and unrefined-as much a derivation of the 1980 Airplane! as of the late comic Robin Harris' black airline routine on his 1989 Be-Be's Kids album. It is a startling reminder that much comedy is based on undermining propriety, unloosening the politically correct stick that's up society's backside. Laughing in the face of superficial ethnic differences, a Soul Plane joke about white customers needing a "Caucasian Seat Adaptor" before sitting on the airplane's toilet works two ways: It parodies wide behinds and tight-asses.
Ice Cube's Friday After Next, Method Man and Redman's How High and even Scary Movie 3 all contain some first-rate, riotous humor. Soul Plane isn't up to that level. The white characters are lame targets. As the head of the Hunkee family, Tom Arnold's only good line halts the young black man with his daughter ("Hey, Kobe, she's only 17!"). Director Jessy Terrero's crude visual style betrays the risk-taking cast (especially the Mile High Club couple getting busy on a flipped-down diaper changer). With more style, Soul Plane might have hit the unruly heights of those Mad-TV skits where Debra Wilson, Aries Spears and Phil Lamarr enacted the cleverest black pop parodies ever seen-until Dave Chappelle. Mad-TV kept an extraordinary gauge of how black social progress collided with cultural insanity. That those performers have not been rewarded with Hollywood features diminishes us all.
Cosby might agree that it's better to have artists like Wilson, Spears and Lamarr light a fire under black indolence and white indifference than to simply bellyache about rudeness. But his comments came about because he is understandably exhausted from the high dudgeon of watching a social group participate in its own degradation. Soul Plane makes that fact undeniable. Nothing here is as depressing or false as the high-minded, unfunny Bamboozled. No filmmakers devise black caricatures more dishonorable than what's already offered for the public's approval and delectation by Lil Jon, Snoop Dogg or Denzel Washington. Typically, movie audiences never realize when they're really being insulted.
They also never seem to get it when blacks are exalted. If critics referred to Melvin Van Peebles' 1971 Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss! Song with the same generosity they show toward Baadassss!, then we'd have a smarter film culture. In Baadassss!, Mario Van Peebles recreates the story of his father Melvin's historic production of Sweet Sweetback that inspired the blaxploitation movement, thus causing Melvin much chagrin. (It's a radical yet insufficiently recognized film.) Mario might be gangsta, but he's a trivial stylist, letting camera moves and digital f/x get in the way of Melvin's revolutionary politics and esthetics. This admirable son/father feat is ultimately disappointing. In The Last Party, avant-garde comic filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., who made the Madison Ave. race parody Putney Swope, told his son, "I'm glad I know more about you than you know about me." Same applies to Baadassss!, unfortunately. Oedipus wrecks.
IN THE ASTONISHING FINALE of The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi, director, writer and actor Takeshi "Beat" Kitano is nowhere to be seen, but you can feel his presence. The sequence is a formalized dance routine featuring all the other actors from the film plus the musicians who performed its percussive score. As they celebrate together, tap-dancing amid thunderous drums, this curtain call is raucous and joyous. Evoking the almost-sinister elegance of Busby Berkeley's tap chorus in 42nd Street, it is a bizarre way to end a samurai-gangster movie. It's surely the oddest movie moment so far this year. I immediately realized why triple-threat Kitano is enormously popular in Japan: He understands his culture innately, deeply, across the boundaries of genre. Whether comedy, drama or musical, his cultural appreciation is palpable. It proves the problem with Kill Bill's genre-jamboree is pop-savant Tarantino's indifference to dance; he only knows a nerd's violent reflexes-thus nihilism.
Kitano has adapted this film (his 11th) from the famous Japanese serial about a blind swordsman that starred Shintaro Katsu. From 1962 to 1989, Katsu played Zatoichi in 26 movies and more than 100 tv episodes. Home Vision Entertainment has already released 14 Zatoichi films in vividly remastered DVDs. Any of them, say, Zatoichi's Vengeance (#13), illustrates a concept of entertainment that would seem obsolete if they weren't so emotionally satisfying. The nomadic Zatoichi resembles a hero in an old tv western; each encounter with a new set of characters puts him in a moral crisis where civilization is challenged by barbarism. Zatoichi has to weigh his own violent skills and crudest impulses against the need for justice.
The sweet twist of the series is the hero's blindness-a challenge to the movie audience's impetuous certainty of what is right and wrong. Zatoichi cannot see what the audience sees; he sees deeper. His samurai skills are awesome, yet they reprove our easy enjoyment. It's a short but crucial leap from violence to dancing. One is playful, the other releases frustration, yet is tragic. Bringing both together (especially in a geisha subplot), Kitano explores the depth of each. Zatoichi is a serious, euphoric cultural testament.