(aka HOW TO GET THE MAN’S FOOT OUTTA YOUR ASS)
*** (out of ****)
Starring Mario Van Peebles, Rainn Wilson, David Alan Grier, Ossie Davis, Khleo Thomas, Saul Rubinek, Vincent Shiavelli, Joy Bryant, Terry Crews, Paul Rodriguez, John Singleton and Adam West
Directed by Mario Van Peebles & written by Mario Van Peebles and Dennis Haggerty, from the book “Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song” by Melvin Van Peebles
2003
108 min R
Sometimes it takes a right bastard to get a movie made. Back in 1971, the bastard to make “Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song,” a boundary-breaker in both African-American cinema and independent film, was Melvin Van Peebles. The work of Melvin’s son Mario, “Baad Asssss!” is the mostly factual telling—or so Melvin claims—of how “Sweetback” got made. It is an endless trial of malevolent unions, broken cameras, bouncing checks, uncooperative studios, a crew in jail, and a hundred other things that go wrong. Holding it all together is a guy who is too determined and just plain mean to let it fall apart.
In case you didn’t know, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song,” despite its rather peculiar title, is a serious film, and in its day a breath of fresh air for people who didn’t usually get to breathe at the movies. “Baad Asssss!” gives us credit and expects us to be familiar with “Sweetback;” it is not an advertisement for that film, or a remake or a rehash of “Sweetback’s” ideas. Instead it’s an ode to the determination of artists everywhere who see something missing from popular art and decide to correct that, despite the odds. Although it’s played for laughs, there is a telling scene in which a white actor who’s been long in the closet feels Melvin’s pain and is eager to fund “Sweetback,” although his aggressive approach is ill-advised.
We join Melvin (played by his son Mario, who was Malcolm X in Michael Mann’s “Ali” and directed “Posse” and “New Jack City”) fresh from the success of his film “Watermelon Man.” He is eager to make a movie about the America “Norman Rockwell never painted.” We are treated to several montages, brief but effective, of how blacks were primarily portrayed in films up to this point: all the steppenfetchits, all the “yes suhs,” all the shuffling. A quick visual survey of non-white characters played as bumbling nincompoops by white actors of course yields Mickey Rooney in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
Melvin hammers out a script and then proceeds to bulldoze through every obstacle. The studios won’t fund him? Fine, he’ll get private funding. He can’t get private funding? Fine, he’ll put up his own savings. The filmmaking unions are entirely white and too expensive? Fine, he’ll pretend he’s making a porno because that’s a non-union industry. He can’t rent fire engines or police cars? He’ll just blow up a car and wait until the last possible moment to show the authorities his special effects permit, after he’s filmed all the ensuing emergency vehicles. Through all this his hippie producer (Rainn Wilson) stands by him, often warily, mostly as an unheard voice of reason, while his young son (Khleo Thomas) watches everything and possibly gets warped.
Melvin’s a tough guy to like, what with all the womanizing and abuse of his crew (“Baad Asssss!” is one of the few movies I’ve seen that actually shows the physical effects of hedonism, with a tremendous laugh to boot). Melvin’s not above using the exact same systematic racism that he hates to get his way. At one point we find him telling his producer to put on his “best white boy suit” when getting the incarcerated crew out of jail. His decision to write a love scene involving a thirteen-year-old boy and an older woman is unsettling enough. But when he puts his own son into the scene and justifies it by saying “I know my own son better than he knows himself” it’s downright creepy. But we side with him anyway because he’s just so determined and his obstacles are so vast.
Two things make “Baad Asssss!” very much a film of today. First of all, like so many recent hits on the independent circuit, it’s a “dram-edy.” Part comedy and part drama, “Baad Assss!” features jokes about porn back-to-back with social commentary; it shows racial barriers being broken one moment while in the next the guy doing the marquee has to recount the Ss in “Baad Asssss.” More than the quick switches between the serious and the silly are the scenes that are both, where we laugh and cringe and aren’t sure which we should be doing.
Secondly, it is a film in which we see no overt racists. Spotting closet Klansmen in movies is kind of like seeing a guy with a black hat twirling a mustache: it’s too obvious, too unsatisfying. It lets us off the hook by saying that society’s ills are the work of isolated weirdoes. No one Melvin meets says that “Sweet Sweetback” is a bad movie or that blacks shouldn’t be making films. But studios, executives, and theater owners are stingy because they feel the movie-going public is irredeemably set in its close-minded ways and the big-shots aren’t willing to take a bath on the movie. This is how we hurt each other now, not directly, not through activity, but through inactivity.
Mario Van Peebles is a fine actor often squandered in films like “Highlander 3” and “Gunmen.” Here, playing his father, he is boastful, arrogant, insecure, impossible to like yet impossibly likeable. Bandanna-headed, he roams L.A. on a motorcycle with the look of a bad ass and the eyes of a nervous child. As director, Mario fills the movie with phony interviews of the cast and crew that joined his father along the way, including the camera operators and soundmen who ended up in the clink. Melvin’s interracial crew is a beauty to behold, with minorities eager to get into films while the white pros pass on their expertise. Both Mario and Melvin’s films say you can’t fight racism with racism, and perhaps “Baad Asssss!” gets a little saccharine in places, like when the Black Panthers come in droves to buy tickets. This is not exactly how you expect a movie to get sugary.
For anyone who got a kick out of reading Robert Rodriguez’s “Rebel Without a Crew,” about how “El Mariachi” was shot for almost nothing, here is a movie for you. There have been plenty of movies about making movies, but few have shown the joy not just of changing the world socially but of simply getting out a form of expression that had never been there before. Few movies about movies have been this much fun.
Finished April 22nd, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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