07.06.04
Movie Review: Baadasssss!

Mario Van Peebles’ Baadasssss! will be the feel-good movie of the year for indie filmmakers and their fans. Detailing the production of his father Melvin’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song, from conception through the premiere, the movie contains enough incident for at least three films and a cast of Hollywood types that is at least as good as the one in Ed Wood.

Sweetback is widely hailed as the first Blaxploitation movie (it beat the slicker, studio-backed Shaft into the theaters by two months) and is the story of a black live sex-show worker who kills a racist white cop and goes on the lam.

The story is told largely from the point of view of 13 year old Mario (who played two roles in Sweetback) who watches his father alternately inspire and terrorize his multi-racial cast and crew to realize his vision of making a revolutionary “Ghetto Western”. As told by the younger Van Peebles, it was intended not as a black militant tract, but as a call to oppressed people of all races to "get The Man's foot outta your ass." It was produced by Melvin Van Peebles, one of his white hippie friends, and a black porno producer; and financed by Van Peebles with a bail-out loan from Bill Cosby. (Cosby himself appears over the end credits cheering Van Peebles and Sweetback as pioneers of the medium. In light of Cosby’s recent comments to the NAACP and Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, I will repeat myself: The story of a black live sex-show worker…)

Baadasssss!, like the film that inspired it, looks cheap- it could have been filmed in a series of decrepit motel rooms. But the low budget and cruddy sets (and a tour de force performance by Mario Van Peebles playing his father) lend verisimilitude. By the time Sweetback finally succeeds as the film-within-the-film (it went on to become the top-grossing indie feature of 1971), the audience would have to be made of stone to not feel inspired too.

Baadassssses: Melvin and Mario Van Peebles
© 2004 Sony Pictures Classics