CLEOPATRA JONES AND THE CASINO OF GOLD is the second and unfortunately last Cleopatra Jones adventure. In the first one she was a glamorous globe-trotting secret agent who came back to the hood to clean up the streets. In this one she’s on a mission in Hong Kong, so it’s the type of shit she was used to dealing with before coming home. A typical couple days in the life of Cleopatra Jones. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘blaxploitation’
Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold
Friday, July 31st, 2009Black Belt Jones
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
From the director of ENTER THE DRAGON comes Jim Kelly as BLACK BELT JONES. Black Belt Jones is a cool, afro-sporting karate expert and sometimes government agent. He doesn’t have any other first name, but you can call him “B.B.” if you want. He tries to stay out of conflicts but then a crime lord named Pinky (Malik Carter) kills the owner of the karate school, Poppa “Pops” Byrd (Scatman Crothers). The government or somebody wants the land, so the mafia pushes Pinky, so Pinky is after the karate school. Pops wills it to a daughter nobody knew about named Sydney (Gloria Hendry from BLACK CAESAR), they use threats and kidnapping to try to force her to give it over, Black Belt helps out, etc.
Obviously it’s a silly movie and at times it’s sloppy, but it has many of the funny and absurd types of moments I look for in a movie like this. A couple of my favorites:
1. Robert Clouse’s directing credit is over a freeze frame of Black Belt aiming his gun at a dude who’s running away. When it unfreezes the bullet hits the guy in the ass. (more…)
Black Dynamite
Sunday, June 7th, 2009
(Originally posted at The Ain’t It Cool News.)
Vern is down with BLACK DYNAMITE
I’ve missed some potential good ones at this year’s Seattle International Film Festival, but I was not about to miss the midnight show of BLACK DYNAMITE. If you don’t know what this is, it’s a retro blaxploitation movie where Michael Jai White (also co-writer) plays the title character, an ex-CIA, Vietnam vet, kung fu practicing, five-women-at-a-time-fucking badass motherfucker trying to find out who killed his brother. (more…)
Johnny Pate-a-thon
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
In case you’ve had your fill of straight-to-video action and shit, I’ll give you an alternative. Today we’re having a triple-feature of ’70s blaxploitation movies with scores by Johnny Pate. You know, I’m trying to find one of those real accessible topics everybody can relate to.
Johnny Pate is a Chicago-born bassist and arranger. He says his first and biggest love is jazz, but to me he’s a legend because of his comparatively brief detour into R&B in the late ’60s and early ’70s. He worked with many Chicago labels of that era but most notably alongside the one and only Curtis Mayfield – Pate was an arranger for the Impressions and for Mayfield’s label, Curtom.
I’m not as detail-oriented about music as I am about movies, so I probaly wouldn’t know about Johnny Pate except that I happened to pick up his 1970 funk instrumentals album “Outrageous” when it was reissued last year by Dusty Groove. Then I found out he scored SHAFT IN AFRICA so I finally got around to watching those sequels and loved them. At least half of my love for blaxploitation movies comes from the music, and of course SUPERFLY and SHAFT are the two most legendary blaxploitation soundtracks. Here’s a guy who kind of connects them together – he arranged Superfly for Mayfield, he scored the third SHAFT movie, and even played with the original Isaac Hayes SHAFT themes when he scored the short-lived (and not on DVD) SHAFT tv series. (more…)
Shaft in Africa
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009The third and final episode of the original Shaft trilogy is a little less classy without the direction of Gordon Parks, but it’s a hell of a fun sequel. After you’ve done one chapter that’s a good variation on the first one, might as well get crazy and fly off to another continent for part 3. You know Shaft has really earned his black James Bond stripes when he gets to go on an international adventure.
Early in the movie Shaft comes home to his building and somebody tells him some Africans are looking for him. He sees a guy in an African robe and ducks out of the elevator and seems proud of himself as he goes unmolested into his apartment. He hits his punching bag once and struts in but before he can relax the door is kicked down and there’s that huge African dude ready to beat his ass.
Next thing you know Shaft has been imprisoned, tormented, tested, and forced to go on a mission to Africa to uncover a modern day slavery ring. I would kind of expect Shaft to be a righteous, Afrocentric type of dude, but their plan to guilt him with America’s heritage of slavery doesn’t work. He doesn’t give a shit. (But he’ll learn.) Shaft learns some language, an accent, customs and fighting style and goes undercover so he can get inside the slavery ring and bust that fucker open. (more…)
Shaft’s Big Score
Sunday, January 11th, 2009The first Shaft sequel has a very similar feel to the original, except that it turns more action packed in the last act. Once again it’s more of a straight detective story than the crazy blaxploitation movie Shaft’s reputation might imply. It all begins with a distressed phone call from an old friend. Next thing Shaft knows his buddy is dead and he’s caught protecting a lady in the middle of a fight to find 200 grand gone missing from a numbers racket.
Of course, Shaft is still a bad mother et al and, proving that he really is the black James Bond, he really starts to show his skills as a womanizer in this one. When he gets that call for example it just so happens that he’s in bed with that guy’s sister! At first that seems like a hell of a coincidence, but then when you consider Shaft’s lifestyle you realize that the chances of it happening are actually pretty high. In fact, here’s an even better example of how much Shaft gets around: In the theme song for this one there’s kind of a “shut yo mouth” moment where you hear a woman say, “He’s trouble, he’s been to my house!” Can you believe that? Even within his own theme song you can find at least one backup singer whose heart he’s broken. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a gal on percussion who just didn’t want to say anything.
The music this time isn’t by Isaac Hayes. Well, he did one song, but most of it is composed by returning director Gordon Parks himself. And this sequel has pretty much all the same strengths and weaknesses as the original. It’s a little dryer than you expect, but Roundtree’s performance, the shots of New York and the funky music all combine chemically to create badass.
This one also has a montage to rival that classic “Soulsville” sequence from the first one. This time it’s of a funeral, and set to jazz music. There are some Bruce Lee style zooms on Shaft and the police detective Bolin (Julius “Sho Nuff” Harris) as they spot each other. It’s one of those potent combinations of photography, music and especially editing craftsmanship that reminds you why you love movies. It’s weird how much art there is just in ending and arranging different shots. The editing can really add energy to a movie or it can knock the whole rhythm off if you do it wrong. This movie does it right. (more…)
Shaft
Thursday, January 1st, 2009SHAFT was never one of my favorite blaxploitation pictures. Despite the reputation and legendary theme song I always thought it was kind of boring. But revisiting it in 2008 I feel like I finally get it – I really enjoyed it this time. The lyrics to the theme song are so over the top and have been goofed on so much that maybe you expect something bigger than what the movie actually is: one part detective story, one part straight up BADASS. The music by Isaac Hayes, the shots set up by director Gordon Parks, everything is designed to pay tribute to Richard Roundtree and his character of John Shaft and document what a Bad Motherfucker he is as he navigates the underbelly of 1971 New York. And it’s really not what we think of as a blaxploitation story, it’s a P.I. story. A detective hired by a gangster to rescue his daughter from the mob.
Have you seen AMERICAN GANGSTER? At the beginning of that movie the kingpin of the black mafia, Bumpy Johnson, dies. Denzel’s character Frank Lucas takes over the empire. Well, that’s who hires Shaft in this movie. He’s called Bumpy Jonas instead of Johnson, but he’s based on the same real life underworld figure. And that’s one of the many ways the movie backs up the claims made in the theme song. He makes an appointment with Bumpy, then shows up late, deliberately keeps him waiting. Then he’s rude to him. Then he makes prima dona demands for his hiring. And before Bumpy leaves he threatens him. You might think he’s just trying to act tough, but when Bumpy leaves the room he just laughs. Clearly not scared at all. That Shaft is one bad mutha shut yo etc. (more…)
Dolemite
Friday, November 28th, 2008Josef von Sternberg was an Austrian-American director whose first film, 1925’s THE SALVATION HUNTERS, is considered by some to be the first American independent film. He worked with Charlie Chaplin and Howard Hughes, he discovered and bedded Marlene Dietrich, Robert Mitchum threatened to throw him off a pier, he directed 25 movies including THE LAST COMMAND, THE BLUE ANGEL and THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN, and his influential films and stubborn dedication to directorial vision made him a hero to proponents of the auteur theory. Also he had a son named Nicholas Josef von Sternberg who was the cinematographer for DOLEMITE.
While DOLEMITE is arguably not as accomplished a picture as THE SCARLET EMPRESS, it does follow in von Sternberg’s spirit of independence, and that’s part of what appeals to me so much about the works of my man, the legendary Rudy Ray Moore, who passed away last month.
I don’t know about other places but in these past 10 or 15 years young white people in Seattle have picked up the adjective “ghetto” to mean low rent or shoddy. It kind of bugs me because I don’t know how the “ghetto Safeway” that doesn’t have the best selection of organic foods is comparable to the actual experience of living in poverty and segregation. But I think “ghetto” is a pretty good adjective for the life works of Rudy Ray Moore, because he seemed to maintain the same ethic from beginning to end, the ethic of a club singer who learned a poem from a homeless man, reworked it into a standup act, started pressing his own comedy records and selling them out of the trunk of his car, made a cottage industry of underground XXX comedy records like “Eat Out More Often” and used those profits to make a series of scrappy low budget movies shot in his house, at a night club where he performed and in the parking lot of Ralph’s. (more…)
Long Live Dolemite! Vern on Rudy Ray Moore
Tuesday, March 20th, 2007Friday night I saw Rudy Ray Moore perform at The Funhouse in Seattle. If you’re not familiar with Rudy, he’s a legendary comedian, maker of x-rated comedy records, who paved the way for his contemporaries like Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx to do their thing by carving words like pussy and motherfucker about ten thousand times into vinyl. But it was his string of self-financed, low budget blaxploitation comedies like Dolemite, The Human Tornado and (my favorite) Petey Wheatstraw, the Devil’s Son-in-Law that put him on the map for most of us. Those movies are built around his persona, the arrogant, unbelievably shit-talking chauvinistic badass with a knack for hilarious insults and rhymes. Like his movies, his act is mostly built around the traditions of the dozens and toasting. He tells stories in rhyme and picks out people in the crowd to talk shit about (which most people take as a great honor).
I never saw Rudy Ray in his hey day, but I did see him here a few years back. That was a polished, old fashioned show with a band of local musicians who he probaly hadn’t met, but he handed them sheet music and they knew what to do. He did all his classics (Dolemite For President, Signifyin’ Monkey, Shine, Petey Wheatstraw, etc.) to the music and even sang a few songs. At first the pure filthiness and sexism of the whole thing was almost overwhelming, it kind of felt like he had gone around slapping people at random, everyone was in shock. I remember there was a young woman playing in the band who didn’t look too happy at all this talk about pussies and dicks. And there’s a joke he does about “a deaf and dumb bitch” that is about the worst thing anybody ever said. But then slowly it seemed like that woman in the band started to get to a point where it was so ridiculous she started to laugh and by then most of the audience couldn’t stop laughing.
This show was pretty different. The Funhouse is a weird place for Dolemite to show up. It’s right across the street from tourist central at the Space Needle, but they say it’s “Seattle’s oldest surviving punk club.” It looks like a shithole from the outside, with a big, ugly evil-clown head on the front. But inside it looks like a ’50s diner, complete with stools and checkered tiles. The stage is maybe a foot tall, probaly less, with a small area to crowd around and do whatever you do as a card carrying member of a punk club. (more…)
Black Caesar
Monday, February 12th, 2007In my opinion BLACK CAESAR is one of my favorite blaxploitation movies. It’s got a good story and direction (by Larry Cohen), a badass soundtrack (by James Brown) and a super badass lead (Fred Williamson). Fred plays a cruel motherfucker, sort of a Scarface type anti-hero, but makes him mostly sympathetic.
You already know the movie is good at the beginning because it has such a good and unusual opening. Fred’s character Tommy Gibbs is a kid (played by some young guy, don’t worry it’s not Fred wearing a beanie or nothin) working as a shoe shine boy.
There’s a nervous white man in a suit, looking over his shoulder, but Tommy convinces him to get a quick shine. Suddenly a scary mafia dude comes out with a gun and the whitey tries to run. But Tommy holds onto his shoe. After the dude is dead, Tommy meets up with the mafia dude in an alley. He gets his payment and also gets to hold the murder weapon and check it out. This kid may have some problems, is the idea.
Later, when the kid has just gotten out of the joint (where he grew into Fred Williamson) he decides to enact a master plan to take over a neighborhood from the Italians. It’s a bold plan and even though Larry Cohen is probaly some sort of white dude, he puts alot of race and class wish fulfillment shit in there to make it fun. For example, Tommy is so rich he buys a penthouse apartment from a white couple, forcing them to move out immediately and leave all their belongings. Then he tosses the wife’s fur coats out the window. The next morning we figure out why he bought the place – his mom is the maid. He tries to get her to just retire and live in the apartment herself, but it’s more complicated than that. She can’t see herself living in the rich white people building. She’s just sees herself as the maid. (more…)
