Bamboozled (2000)
Directed by Spike Lee
Frustrated when network brass reject his sitcom idea, producer Pierre Delacroix pitches the worst idea he can think of in an attempt to get fired: a 21st century minstrel show. The network not only airs it, but it becomes a smash hit.
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What critics compared Bamboozled to
With its wide-ranging political targets and aggressive sense of humor—to say nothing of the bold use of color—Sorry to Bother You recalls some of Spike Lee’s most agitated efforts, Chi-Raq and Bamboozled in particular.
Flat as all the inane art-world parody may fall, when Cash is coerced into rapping for his new white friends Riley conjures an incendiary, catch-in-your-throat comic set-piece to rival anything in Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled.”
Instead, it’s a gleeful kitchen sink throwback to the satiric, absurdist, wildly inventive indies of the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s like “Repo Man”, “Being John Malkovich”, “Bamboozled”, and “Fight Club” combined with a dash of Mike Judge’s 2006 comic (yet eerily prescient) dystopic fantasia, “Idiocracy”.
Most of the film, which also has links to Spike Jonze’s "Being John Malkovich," plays like a variation on some of Spike Lee’s more scabrous racial fantasias like “Bamboozled.”
And all this without the reactive, dogmatic postures of satires like Spike Lee's Bamboozled , which pillory their chosen targets so ardently that too little energy remains for offering a coherent new alternative.
About the closest anyone has come to this is level of confrontation is Steven Spielberg with Schindler’s List, or even better, Spike Lee with his incendiary Bamboozled.
(When he makes films like 2000's Bamboozled, they can be forgiven.)