Bamboozled Rated R Cinema 21 616 NW 21st Ave., 223-4515 7 and 9:25 pm Friday-Thursday, Dec. 29-Jan 4; additional shows 1:15 and 4 pm Friday-Monday. $6.

by DAVID WALKER
dwalker@wweek.com

Spike Lee doesn't make films. Spike Lee makes agendas. Spike Lee builds soapboxes from which he can wax not so rhapsodic while lobbing bricks at his audience. Throw into the mix his unresolved conflicts with his father and his black self-loathing, and you've got a filmmaker who's responsible for the best flawed films of all time.

His latest, Bamboozled, is perhaps the most flagrant example of what makes him a director who is simultaneously talented and incapable of making a decent film.

Starting out technically strained, Bamboozled ranks as one of the best films in recent memory before spiraling into one of the biggest pieces of shit in the past five years.

Bamboozled stars Damon Wayans as Pierre Delacroix, a frustrated television writer trapped in an industry dominated by white executives and writers. Delacroix's boss is Mr. Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport), a white man and self-proclaimed "nigger" who wants the writer to turn out a hit series that will save his ratings-challenged network. Hoping it will get him fired from a job he hates, Delacroix creates Mantan, the New Millennium Minstrel Show, starring two black street performers in blackface (Savion Glover and Tommy Davidson) set in a watermelon patch. But his plan backfires when the show is picked up by the network and, despite protests, becomes the most popular TV program in America.

The concept behind Bamboozled isn't half bad--it's almost genius. In fact, it was genius when Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky did it back in 1976 and called it Network--a film Lee rips off with no shame. But while Network remains solid from start to finish, Bamboozled goes beyond shooting itself in the foot, blowing its own brains out. Lee's message about African Americans in the media becomes more and more convoluted as the director points his finger a lot but fails to make a point.

For starters, the film suffers from some serious technical difficulties. Shooting on digital video, Spike seems to have spent too much time exploring the seemingly limitless possibilities that arise when working in video. Somewhere along the line he should have paid more attention to the actual script--which features too many characters for a director of Lee's limited abilities to juggle--and the direction of his actors, whose performances range from flat to strained to phoned-in to over-the-top. Wayans does the best job he can manage, but his performance lacks the finesse he showed in the underrated Great White Hype. Wayans' character is a thinly veiled representation of Spike himself and sad proof that the director needs to resolve his self-hatred. Savion Glover tap dances his ass off as the overnight star of Mantan, but like a porno star, his talent appears to reside below the waist. Only In Living Color's Tommy Davidson and Thomas Jefferson Byrd give performances that rise above Spike's apparent lack of direction.

But Spike's biggest sin--one for which he should be beaten like a runaway slave--is the disdain, hatred and lack of respect he shows for black performers of the past. Yes, by today's standards the work of actors like Stepin Fetchit, Hattie McDaniel and Mantan Moreland is racist and degrading, but Spike fails to take into consideration the context and time of their careers. Instead he lumps them in with white performers in blackface and takes them to task for the racist time in American history that allowed shows like Amos and Andy. What Lee needs to realize is that he would not have a film career today if it were not for these pioneers in black entertainment. He should think about that the next time he's enjoying his court-side Knicks tickets, making a jackass of himself--like a modern-day minstrel--for all the world to see.

If Spike, in his own unique fashion, could have found a little focus, he might have created a movie that matters. But when the only conversation a film inspires is about what the filmmaker did wrong, that film is a failure. Spike Lee has churned out another one of his trademark "joints"--a hodgepodge of conflicting messages with the uncanny ability to hit everything but the target.