Product Description

Mario Van Peebles directs and stars in this fascinating docudrama focusing on his father Melvin Van Peebles' attempts to film 1971's "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song." Forced to work outside of the Hollywood system that feared his views on African-American culture, the director experienced tremendous sacrifices and hardships while trying to bring his vision to fruition. With Joy Bryant, T.K. Carter, Ossie Davis, Nia Long. AKA: "Gettin' the Man's Foot Outta Your Baadasssss!," "How to Get the Man's Foot Outta Your Ass." 108 min. Widescreen (Enhanced); Soundtrack: English Dolby Digital 5.1; Subtitles: French, Portuguese, Spanish; audio commentary by Van Peebles; featurettes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #66767 in DVD
• Brand: Sony
• Published on: 2004-09-01
• Released on: 2004-09-14
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: Spanish, French, Portuguese
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 108 minutes

Amazon.com
Baadasssss! is actor-writer-director Mario Van Peebles's best film since 1991's New Jack City; more accurately, it is a mature and often dazzling work beyond previous expectations of Van Peebles' skills as a filmmaker. Certainly he was inspired by the autobiographical subject: The making of his father's 1971, independently produced Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, in which young Mario made his acting debut amidst a frantic, high-pressure operation that paid off when African American audiences embraced the film. Playing his ownhard-nosed dad, Melvin Van Peebles, the younger talent explores--honestly, but not ruthlessly--Melvin's rocky relationship with an ever-disappointed Mario (played by Holes' Khleo Thomas), but he also portrays the elder man as a stubborn idealist against a backdrop of Hollywood cynicism about black entertainment. The film is a whirlwind of action and innovative scenes recreating personal history but without the insistent discursiveness of memory. With Nia Long, Ossie Davis, and Saul Rubinek. --Tom Keogh

From The New Yorker
In 1971, Mario Van Peebles's father, Melvin Van Peebles, made the X-rated blaxploitation movie "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song," starring himself as a bordello stud performer who kills two white cops and manages to escape (the movie concluded with Van Peebles running endlessly across hill and dale). "Baadasssss!" is Mario's layered re-creation of the making of "Sweetback" and the convulsive life around the production, which became a sizable hit. He plays his father, appropriating Melvin Van Peebles's body, his attitudes, his actions, and his treatment of his family (i.e., Mario himself, as a thirteen-year-old boy). The result is a complex homage: Mario turns his father into a sly, guarded, egotistical son of a bitch who nevertheless had to be that way to get the movie made; and he tries, at the same time, to top him as a filmmaker and a human being. The movie captures some of the manic desperation and easy pleasures of the period-the tumbling-into-bed sex as well as the crummy self-delusions by which people having a good time convinced themselves that they were making a revolution. The movie quickly reaches a pitch of manic activity and stays there for its entire length. It's an exhausting, and exhaustingly pleasurable, entertainment. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker