Shaft

Monday, June 16, 2008

Sorry for how brief these posts all are, but I'm on vacation, I'm lazy and I'm watching a lot of movies, so I'm not trying very hard when I write these.

I thought it was about high time I did a triple feature of klassik blaxploitation films. I like crime movies and shit like that, so this is a pretty major chunk missing from my catalog. I picked three klassiks from the genre that I thought were must-sees: Shaft, Super Fly and finally Across 110th Street, which okay fine isn't really that famous, but I thought it looked good and it has a bitching theme song.

And you know what? I wasn't that crazy about Shaft. I can see why it's an iconic movie, what with that awesome theme song and strong, black hero, but it's a pretty mediocre detective story, and not well written. And I wasn't too impressed with the character of Shaft. I like my detectives to be flawed, complicated people. Shaft is kind of shallow and one-note, he's just a "cool" superman type, more of a Mike Hammer than a Phillip Marlowe. But he's not even really that cool. I mean, Richard Roundtree, the actor who plays Shaft, seems cool. But Shaft the character doesn't seem to do much cool stuff. The movie keeps telling you he's cool, you know, they write that check up but they never cash it. Shaft doesn't really have any memorable dialogue, and his action scenes are few and far between. Maybe he gets cooler in the sequels, I dunno, but I suspect maybe people just fell for the awesome theme music and didn't play close attention to the movie itself.

Anyway, Blaxploitation Triple Feature is off to a bad start.