Bamboozled (2000)

Spike Lee delivers an intentionally shocking and racist film that winds up being shockingly racist in unintentional ways. Damon Wayans plays either an erudite and well-spoken television producer, or an erudite and well-spoken muppet, judging by his accent. He works for an exploitive tv network that's not interested in portraying realistic, positive images of african-americans, so he one day decides to create a show so offensive and over-the-top racist that the network executives will be swarmed with public outcry. His plans misfire when his "minstrel show for the new millenium" becomes a mega-hit, inspiring fans all over the country to don blackface call themselves "real" (n-words). Thrown into the mix is Wayan's personal assistant (Jada Pinkett) and her brother Mau Mau, a militant gangsta rapper, whose african pride seems a little misguided, to say the least. The film certainly starts off amusing, and has great intentions, but somewhere along the line, it loses it's point and focus. Jada Pinkett Smith is either a terrible actress or her character is just blandly awful (probably a little bit of both). I can't imagine this blackface minstrel show would ever be a hit series, as it's simply not very funny in any way (and even for a show about blackface, it goes into cheap and lazy territory). There is a fair point one could make about the idiocy of modern television effectively being just an updated version of a minstrel show, but Bamboozled doesn't go anywhere near that territory. By the end of the film (and I don't feel bad in revealing some spoilers), the film delves into wholly unrealistic gunplay and violence. It's incongruous and cheapens whatever valid points it was trying to make. Bamboozled winds up being a whole lot of unoriginal ideas slapped onto an interesting concept. In fact, the ending material sort of justifies the minstrel shows and demonstrates not a rising above that sort of material, but showing black culture as a whole has denegrated itself still further. Go rent the vastly superior C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (2004) for a truly satirical look at America's attitude towards race.