Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971)'s comments

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Public Enemy

Even if you didn't like the film, read up on it's history. This isn't something like Brakhage making stuff safely. Instead, you have a director doing his own stunts, getting an STD from a scene, working with motorcycle gangs, and being forced to arm himself and the crew because it wasn't a union film.

11 years ago

Shingwauk

Does no one have a problem with the scene with the prostitute having sex with a child!

5 years 9 months ago

weirdboy

LOL at the map of the entire United States up on the wall of the police station to coordinate a search of Los Angeles. It wouldn't have been so obvious if he hadn't included a scene where the guy points right at it and says "he's got to be right here" (pointing to California).

8 years 3 months ago

Siskoid

Blaxploitation meets art house in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, a historically and culturally significant film, but no easy watch, opening as it does with a disturbing pedophilic sequence where young Sweetback has simulated sex with a grown woman (you've been warned). Director and star Melvin Van Peebles was evidently inspired by the French New Wave in his approach to editing, but there are so many interesting effects that if I were a film maker, I'd want to perpetually "quote" this movie. It's certainly rough, guerilla film making, with a lot of non-actors, and the plot is thin and secondary to creating transgressive, hallucinatory vignettes. Van Peebles is working in the same mode as John Waters, but with righteous anger rather than a comic approach. The key is in the title. This is jazz cinema, a violent, sex-fueled ton poem set to a great groove and not to be understood in the usual narrative terms. It would be true to say that I admire more than like it.

2 years ago

the3rdman

A true original. Stylish as hell, with a palpable sense of anger and righteousness and a killer soundtrack. I haven't even begun to look into the history of the film, but I will--thanks Public Enemy.

10 years 7 months ago

boulderman

This film created Blaxpolitation films, extreme zooms, jump cuts. There are willys from the start. Racism and beatings throughout and a feeling of watching a protoShaft. Great soundtrack that really mirrors what you're watching, especially with the edits. Very good, not great 7/10

3 years 3 months ago