The opening shot of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled features Damon Wayans, playing a thoroughly co-opted buppie television writer, nasally reciting the dictionary definition of “satire”. The movie ends with a montage of racist depictions of African-Americans in the media (take that, Birth of a Nation!). These two scenes probably tell you everything you need to know about what to take away from the movie. Namely that this film is a satire on depictions of Blacks in the media and their own complicity in the process, and also that Spike Lee thinks we’re all idiots. Fair enough.
Unfortunately, there are two problems here. First, those are actually the best scenes in the movie, not the worst. Second, there are 134 minutes separating them. 134 minutes of Damon Wayons narrating, in which he describes to us what’s going on in the movie we’re trying to watch, in the world’s most grating parody of Ivy League enunciation. 134 minutes of sermonizing and Jada Pinkett Smith-powered melodrama. 134 minutes of situations so contrived and unrealistic that what they’re really satirizing is Spike’s paranoid worldview. But worst of all, 134 minutes of lazy, shot-on-digital-video un-cinema. And when I say that it’s shot on DV, I’m not talking about a movie shot with Thompson Viper cameras in 2007. I’m talking about one shot on consumer-level camcorders in the 1990s. This is a terrible-looking film. I’ve seen student films that look better. I’ve seen fucking Dogme 95 films that look better!
Supposedly, the “low” 10-million dollar budget required shooting on DV. I call bullshit on that. This was shot on camcorders because shooting on film forces you to actually be selective about what you shoot. Only DV allows you to shoot every single half-baked idea that pops into your self-indulgent head. And that is what Bamboozled is actually about.
I did not like this movie.