In all, I find Undercover Brother hilarious. It’s just a matter of which movements decided to give them platforms and when. I know the person who reads retrospective reviews yet gets mad when I apply a retrospective political lens, it was the early aughts: they might not have “known any better.” But never forget, PWRRRYGMWIAARPL, Black queer people have always, always existed. At worst, a bit of queer-phobia disguised as concern for the declining virility of Black men. I only have so much space to write, but let’s just call that implication, at best, a bad attempt at a “funny” visual gag (“MAN IN A DRESS, TEE-HEE”). They also depict Dennis Rodman’s wearing a bridal gown and wig as an undeniable sign of white-orchestrated sabotage. He also must be a member of a military-industrial-complex that pro-Black thought leaders like Kwame Ture derided wholeheartedly. Even this 2002 film seems to have felt that the only way a Black man could be a viable presidential candidate was if he as both a “staunch advocate of Civil Rights” known to hang with Jesse Jackson. Then again, that lens might disrupt Undercover Brother itself. Tribeca Film Festival 2023: ‘The Listener' Is a Touching Rumination of Modern Anxiety That doesn’t mean hints of an ideology of Blackness don’t emerge every now and again. Don’t get me wrong: the film isn’t a treatise on anything more than staying solid and keeping it funky despite The Man’s attempts to keep you down. Since we’re on to the partly serious aspects of the film, it’s worth discussing the politics of Undercover Brother. The audience can laugh in relief that we came to the brink but avoided catastrophe. However, it ends with the plot foiled and Sistah Girl saving Undercover Brother from White She-Devil (Denise Richards, earning every cent of her paycheck). In that instance, Undercover Brother would more likely resemble something like the original ending of Get Out. If it ends with Undercover Brother losing himself entirely to his white-i-fied Anton Jackson persona, then the film is a tragedy of the bleakest kind.
Undercover brother cadillac movie#
If the movie ends with General Boutwell (Billy Dee Williams) and his fried chicken place (isn’t that sentence fragment alone just the best kind of ridiculous?) creating Haitian-style zombii (not “zombies”) of Black people it’s a comedy. I’ve said it before, and it’s not a great revelation, but the difference between tragedy and comedy is the ending. He knows to portray Jackson not as a 70s blaxploitation character but as someone raised on those characters and aspires to emulate them. Eddie Griffin as Undercover Brother hits all the right notes. Now that’s out of the way, can I just reiterate that this movie is hilarious? And that may be because everyone, and I mean everyone, fully commits to their roles. Although both are ostensibly about a Black icon fighting different iterations of The Man, the personification of white corporatism, Pootie Tang casts him, somewhat troublingly, as a faux-pidgin-speaking entertainer, Undercover Brother presents him and the team behind him as explicitly pro-Black and fighting inequality.Īnd, personally, I find that solid and dy-no-mite. I won’t spend this entire review comparing films because, in a way, both have different target audiences despite having vaguely similar premises. If the jokes are admittedly less innovative, the fact there’s a higher frequency of jokes that actually land makes up for this. If Undercover Brother is more conventional and formulaic in its structure than Pootie Tang, that’s because, well, it actually has a structure.
0 kommentar(er)
