"Baadasssss!" Film Analysis

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Marketing and Advertising So much to say, yet so little at all. This film is a surprise, as it should be. The title, in and of itself, causes attention and has a hint of being for a specific group of people. “Baadasssss!” (originally "How to Get the Man's Foot Outta Your Ass") stems from the son of Melvin Van Peebles, Mario on the complications of making a controversial film that needed to be made. All meta-ness aside (which could be an entire essay on this year’s syllabus), “Baadasssss!” is a well made film. It has style, direction, and badassery. The opening is reminiscent of the film that is the subject of the greater whole: “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song”. The sun-kissed L.A. almost-overexposed cinematography gave the film a 70s look that definitely fit, and the dream sequences and hallucinations allowed for good insights into the main character. Melvin was definitely portrayed as at least an ambitious man by the mostly low angles of him. This allowed for the times of his weakness to be especially impactful. This ‘dream-within-a-dream’ storyline allows for autobiographical honesty and political and social poignancy dealing with racism and unresolved prejudice. A white boy born in the nineties can only go so far to analyze the social commentary of a different time and a different race, but from the history books and fiction, I’ll take a crack at it. Obviously, there was police brutality involving African Americans in the time that this movie was portrayed, and that was the major turn-off of “Song” to the major studios. Kaufman wouldn’t support Melvin’s picture and why should he? The white man, and the white man only was the hero and all other races and even women were inferior as portrayed by the movies. Van Peebles was hired for a 3 picture deal at Columbia pictures at the expense of his own dignity. He didn’t want to do that.

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