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Theatrical Release Information
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Baadasssss! is actor-writer-director Mario Van Peebles's best film since 1991's New Jack City; more accurately, it is a mature and often dazzling work beyond previous expectations of Van Peebles' skills as a filmmaker. Certainly he was inspired by the autobiographical subject: The making of his father's 1971, independently produced Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, in which young Mario made his acting debut amidst a frantic, high-pressure operation that paid off when African American audiences embraced the film. Playing his ownhard-nosed dad, Melvin Van Peebles, the younger talent explores--honestly, but not ruthlessly--Melvin's rocky relationship with an ever-disappointed Mario (played by Holes' Khleo Thomas), but he also portrays the elder man as a stubborn idealist against a backdrop of Hollywood cynicism about black entertainment. The film is a whirlwind of action and innovative scenes recreating personal history but without the insistent discursiveness of memory. With Nia Long, Ossie Davis, and Saul Rubinek. --Tom Keogh
From The New Yorker
In 1971, Mario Van Peebles's father, Melvin Van Peebles, made the X-rated blaxploitation movie "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song," starring himself as a bordello stud performer who kills two white cops and manages to escape (the movie concluded with Van Peebles running endlessly across hill and dale). "Baadasssss!" is Mario's layered re-creation of the making of "Sweetback" and the convulsive life around the production, which became a sizable hit. He plays his father, appropriating Melvin Van Peebles's body, his attitudes, his actions, and his treatment of his family (i.e., Mario himself, as a thirteen-year-old boy). The result is a complex homage: Mario turns his father into a sly, guarded, egotistical son of a bitch who nevertheless had to be that way to get the movie made; and he tries, at the same time, to top him as a filmmaker and a human being. The movie captures some of the manic desperation and easy pleasures of the period-the tumbling-into-bed sex as well as the crummy self-delusions by which people having a good time convinced themselves that they were making a revolution. The movie quickly reaches a pitch of manic activity and stays there for its entire length. It's an exhausting, and exhaustingly pleasurable, entertainment. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker
Baadasssss! is actor-writer-director Mario Van Peebles's best film since 1991's New Jack City; more accurately, it is a mature and often dazzling work beyond previous expectations of Van Peebles' skills as a filmmaker. Certainly he was inspired by the autobiographical subject: The making of his father's 1971, independently produced Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, in which young Mario made his acting debut amidst a frantic, high-pressure operation that paid off when African American audiences embraced the film. Playing his ownhard-nosed dad, Melvin Van Peebles, the younger talent explores--honestly, but not ruthlessly--Melvin's rocky relationship with an ever-disappointed Mario (played by Holes' Khleo Thomas), but he also portrays the elder man as a stubborn idealist against a backdrop of Hollywood cynicism about black entertainment. The film is a whirlwind of action and innovative scenes recreating personal history but without the insistent discursiveness of memory. With Nia Long, Ossie Davis, and Saul Rubinek. --Tom Keogh
From The New Yorker
In 1971, Mario Van Peebles's father, Melvin Van Peebles, made the X-rated blaxploitation movie "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song," starring himself as a bordello stud performer who kills two white cops and manages to escape (the movie concluded with Van Peebles running endlessly across hill and dale). "Baadasssss!" is Mario's layered re-creation of the making of "Sweetback" and the convulsive life around the production, which became a sizable hit. He plays his father, appropriating Melvin Van Peebles's body, his attitudes, his actions, and his treatment of his family (i.e., Mario himself, as a thirteen-year-old boy). The result is a complex homage: Mario turns his father into a sly, guarded, egotistical son of a bitch who nevertheless had to be that way to get the movie made; and he tries, at the same time, to top him as a filmmaker and a human being. The movie captures some of the manic desperation and easy pleasures of the period-the tumbling-into-bed sex as well as the crummy self-delusions by which people having a good time convinced themselves that they were making a revolution. The movie quickly reaches a pitch of manic activity and stays there for its entire length. It's an exhausting, and exhaustingly pleasurable, entertainment. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker
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