Drop Everything and Watch This Now: Black Dynamite (2009)

Directed by:

Scott Sanders

Written by:

Michael Jai White, Scott Sanders, Byron Minns

Cast:

Michael Jai White, Salli Richardson, Byron Minns, Kevin Chapman

Cinematography:

Shawn Maurer

WHO THE HELL IS INTERRUPTING MY KUNG-FU?:

This movie is infinitely quotable.

 

 

I don’t know what cultural appropriation is.

 

Well, I know what it is, I just don’t understand it.

 

According to some, cultural appropriation refers to the use of objects or elements of a non-dominant culture in a way that doesn't respect their original meaning, give credit to their source, or reinforces stereotypes or contributes to oppression.

 

Another source describes it as the adoption of an element or elements of one culture or identity by members of another culture or identity. This can be controversial when members of a dominant culture appropriate from disadvantaged minority cultures.

 

Huh.

 

So this cultural appropriation thing means I can make a movie about Americans talking about apple pie while buying handguns at the gas station store (in case you don’t know, and you have no reason to, I’m a Latino man), but an American cannot make a movie about a couple of Venezuelan kids forming up a band of joropo music?

 

A London-born writer who has never been to El Salvador cannot write a novel about the MS13, but a Salvadorian writer can write fiction about football hooligans in Manchester?

 

What happens with movies like Valkyrie, featuring the consummate movie star Tom Cruise, directed by Brian Singer, from American producers, with lots of American and British actors playing Germans, in English, about a story in Germany, historically belonging to the German people? Is that cultural appropriation, or it gets a pass because it’s Germany?

 

What about the whole filmography of a guy like Lucio Fulci, who was very much Italian, but set his stuff in America, sometimes with Italian actors who had to learn their lines phonetically?

 

James Clavell wrote the wonderful Shogun and his other Asian works without being, you know, Asian. Brian de Palma directed (and Oliver Stone wrote) one of the best movies ever made, Scarface, a film that you could argue reinforces bad stereotypes about the Cuban people, particularly around the time the movie was made.

 

The concept gets even more abstract when we talk about the blaxploitation genre, because these are movies that portray black characters who are sometimes good guys, but a lot of the time they’re morally ambiguous—pimps, gangsters, hitmen. Black Caesar, Cleopatra Jones, Coffy, Black Belt Jones, Truck Turner, Foxy Brown and Boss Nigger (yes, that’s its title) are blaxploitation classics made by white men for a black audience… and that audience loved them. Over time, the heroes of these movies were integrated into African American culture and some of their stars, like Jim Brown, Fred Williamson and the forever gorgeous Pam Grier, went on to build actual movie careers.

 

I mean, Jeanine Cummins can write a novel about the hell of the Latino immigrant experience, and come off as ignorant and even dismissive of the POC plights, particularly when the attention her publisher gives her could actually go to real Latino immigrants, who have written about the experience for decades (and for all the mouth-breathers out there, that's my actual stance on the issue, as a POC myself; I didn't dig American Dirt at all). But what if the work created by the dominant culture person contributes to the oppressed? What do we do, grab all the copies of Cleopatra Jones and we bury them under some New Mexico landfill, or maybe we just let people film and write whatever they want to film and write, and if they suck we stop buying?

 

It’d be a good topic to discuss with Michael Jai White and Scott Sanders, two guys very well acquainted with the blaxploitation stuff, creators of Black Dynamite, one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.

 

If you’re unfamiliar with this type of cinema, Black Dynamite plays like a greatest hits of blaxploitation: The eponymous hero, whose actual name we never learn (even his mother calls him “Black Dynamite”), is a Vietnam veteran and former CIA operative who’s now muscle for some shady characters. When his brother is killed during a drug deal gone bad, he launches a one-man war against “drug dealers in our community,” which ends up being a war against The Man, with real badass kung-fu, black power and undiluted bad-assery.

 

This is a 2009 movie, straight out of 1974, recreating the good—and the hilariously bad. Sometimes you see the boom in camera (and, sometimes, the actors turn to see it, too). Sometimes actors forget their lines. Sometimes, they really hit each other during horrendously choreographed fight scenes, or characters who die pop up alive in the very next scene. All of this really happens in classic blaxploitation flicks, because, as in the case of Dolemite and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, the production was occasionally in the hands of utter amateurs. Black Dynamite isn’t mocking Melvin Van Peebles or Rudy Ray Moore, though; it’s celebrating them, and scene after scene comes with this endearing love for the genre that’s hard not to smile at.

 

B-Black Dynamite??? You're not supposed to do that!

There’s also an insane level of attention to detail, becoming one of those movies that, each time you watch, you catch something new (extra points if you recognize the line, “Where is Bucky and what has he had?”). Michael Jai White here is playing not just Black Dynamite, but the actor playing Black Dynamite, a detail you’re only going to get if you saw the trailer for the movie. Emulating other blaxploitation stars, the fake actor, Ferrante Jones, was an athlete for the Baltimore Colts who had to retire after breaking his neck. And if you watch the movie, you’ll notice Black Dynamite has a hard time turning his head sideways.

 

This is the trailer, by the way. Better than all of the Transformer movies, together:

 

Very early in the movie, there’s this scene where Black Dynamite is having a multi-racial orgy with several girls (relax, grandma, you don’t see much, it ain’t that type of movie), and the scene is filmed from the point of view of the women. We do get glimpses of them having a good time, but we’re mostly with Black Dynamite on top of us, doing the deed to our innocent eyes. This means that the camera man had to actually lay down in bed, and have Black Dynamite on top… because that’s how a blaxploitation star once did it. He figured people would want to see his gorgeous amazing body, so now Black Dynamite is doing it, too.

We have no Dolemite, but we have Bullhorn, rhyming everything he says.

 

You remember the guy who played Spawn in the 90s and the black mafioso who gets the bad end of The Joker’s razor in The Dark Knight? That’s Michael Jai White, you’ve seen him, but maybe you wouldn’t recognize him here, because the guy is transformed. He came up with the concept, the script, and even made a fake trailer to draw producers into investing—and for a movie like this to work, his knowledge of blaxploitation has to be encyclopedic. Of course the photography recreates the type of images that come straight from the 70s, and of course all of the funk and disco is there, but some faces that you’re not expecting come up to warm your dried up, dark heart. Tommy Davidson shows up just for a bit, but you’ll find yourself running theeeiiiiingssss just like him; Miguel Núñez pops out from Friday the 13^th Part V and The Return of the Living Dead, playing the pimp Mo’ Bitches; even Arsenio Hall shows up, and you remember Bubba, Forrest Gump’s best friend in the whole world? He’s here, Mykelti Williams, playing a character so different that’s he’s irrecognizable.

 

What I'm saying here is that this may be the best parody/homage movie ever made; I don’t fancy myself an expert of blaxploitation (some people, like Quentin Tarantino, are lost in love with it), and when I first saw Black Dynamite, I knew actually very little of it. I laughed my ass off all the same, and my enjoyment of the movie has only grown the more I watch of the genre. This is a little jewel of a movie that deserves way more recognition, and you should absolutely watch it today, maybe with some of that new Anaconda Malt Liquor that’s going around. I’ve heard it gives you Ooooooooo!