Tight Buttock Bellbottoms

One major issue with black entertainment media is its failure to escape being cartoonish to the point of ridicule. One exception, on the basis of limited clips the dowager attended to, is The Wire, since HBO is under pressure to deliver, but nearly everything else, Spike Lee's angular paranoid defensiveness included, doesn't anticipate 21st century mature realism. Black exploitation is arguably a rather early form of comic book sequences adapted to film. The idiots who graphed Shaquille into the end of century Steel, with its loping shaggy production values, certainly understood this, and those same idiots did a mite better with Snipes as Blade, but not by much. The franchise, turning Dracula into a virtual demi-god, did not really know what to do with itself. Even Menace II Society, which had reviewers in major media outlets in the thrall of a major moral dilemma, rolled off my back when it was fresh from theater to cable syndication. It was stark, but equally an over exaggeration of urban self depreciation when the arguments come down to a drive by roil with semi-automatics. Eliot Ness would have been right at home. Nevertheless, Jim Brown and Fred Williamson were the cool cat upgrades of my tweenish post Sidney Poitier years. Suffice to say, they do not exist in the inner city, only in a casting director's transference from football to urban crime drama. 

Black Caesar's torque ratio earns its three star rating in its last 40 minutes, but I've certainly never seen a capo of any ethnicity have such a vigorous death scene, constraining a gut shot to defeat a car chase, throttle his assassin, doom his geek brother to death, and kill the mickey who crippled him, only then to get bitch slapped by a wolf pack not dissimilar from the kids who jumped my window bars with taunts, "She's afraid! She's afraid!" My unwitting epitaph bestowed on my graduate twenty two year old head. Torque is no salve for banality, however, and Caesar lacks credence in every aspect, its graft, Williamson's ability to project menace, or command power, even using a disability very much not in evidence, to foster the title character's menace. Jim Brown mastered taciturn minimalism, at least, a necessary prerequisite for black males simmering with rage.