Waste of time

Simply A Masterpiece

People are voting emotionally.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Any film that features in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die has got to be worth trying in my opinion, I have been both surprised and occasionally questioning the titles, and this is one I'm somewhere in between. Basically Sweet Sweetback (Melvin Van Peebles), named after his love for sex and large penis, grew up in a Los Angeles brothel after being orphaned, where he worked as a towel boy and lost his virginity to a prostitute, and now as an adult he is a sex show performer, i.e. male prostitute. A black man has been murdered, and the LAPD speak to Sweetback's boss Beetle (Simon Chuckster), and they get his permission to arrest Sweetback, blame him for the crime and then quickly release him to make peace in the black community. When they do arrest him they also bring in young Black Panther named Mu-Mu (Hubert Scales), who insults the police, and eventually the officers remove his cuffs to beat him up very badly, and Sweetback, still cuffed, beats them until unconscious. Next we see Sweetback travelling from South Central Los Angeles towards the United States–Mexico border, where he is arrested again for the earlier assault, only to escape again during a riot. After getting his cuffs removed with the offer of sex, he carries on his journey, getting captured by the biker gang Hells Angels, and the female leader lets him and Mu-Mu go as long as she gets sex, being impressed by his large penis. The police almost catch them, and while Mu-Mu goes with the gang, and he and another Biker (John Amos) are killed, Sweetback continues to run, and a sympathetic white man agrees to swap clothes so he can blend in with society. The police find out Sweetback's real name is Leroy from his foster mother, and the film ends with Sweetback forced to walk across the desert, escaping the hunting dogs, going into the Tijuana River and making it to Mexico, swearing to return. Also starring John Dullaghan as Commissioner and Rhetta Hughes as Old Girl Friend. Van Peebles acts, produces, composes and directs well enough, despite the fact the film is rather weird, with all the sexual behaviour, violence and prostitution element but it is I suppose important in the history of filmmaking, as it does not (completely) stereotype black people, and it is a different non-mainstream film, a strange but kind of fascinating blaxploitation. Good!

I was traveling cross country via Greyhound in 1971 when I had some time to kill in Denver and saw this movie. I think I had a fever at the time, but I sat there mesmerized.I grew up in a white bread suburban neighborhood and had precious little knowledge of the black experience. This movie cracks whitey over the head--literally and figuratively. For me, it was an eye opener and the wild editing and psychedelic nightmare rhythm of it was fun.For such a low budget film, I found it innovative, although now people may see it as indulgent and sloppy.It still maintains an integrity and a legitimate anger.The sexuality is raw. The violence, rough stuff for the time.I saw it again recently and enjoyed it with certain allowances of style. It is uneven and exasperating, but it also has a soul and courage.Calling it the first blaxploitation film works for me. Classic stuff.

A young black orphan is picked up by a group of women who feed him and give him a job as a towel boy in their brothel. One of the women seduces him and the two have sex. Due to his apparently large member, the woman, in a fit of ecstasy, nicknames him 'Sweetback'. When Sweetback is grown, he is employed as a male prostitute who performs for rich folk. When he witnesses police brutality on a black man, he beats up two police officers and goes on the run. The film follows his plight in a picaresque fashion, and he makes his way across a corrupt and discriminative America.Generally regarded as the first blaxploitation film (although whether it is in fact exploitation is questionable), Sweet Sweetback influenced a whole generation of film-makers, and gave a new voice to a social minority with a lot more to say than the majority. Director Melvin van Peebles (father to Mario), who also plays the eponymous hero, funded the project himself (with a little help from Bill Cosby), and the film went onto gross $4.1 million. The film became required viewing for members of the Black Panthers, and Sweetback himself can be seen giving the Panther first sign.As socially and historically important as this film is, it's still not very good. Apart from van Peebles' use of some innovative jump-cuts and camera-work, I found the film hard work. The terrible editing often renders scenes unwatchable, and I had trouble even following what was happening during some of the fight scenes. Often characters just babble seemingly meaningless rubbish at the camera. I must also mention the very uncomfortable first sex scene which borders on child porn, which depicts a boy (played by Mario) of around 12 having sex with a woman, the both of them being completely naked. Very weird.Van Peebles himself appears in a few sex scenes, that are apparently unsimulated. He actually contracted gonorrhoea during the shoot, and claimed workers compensation. This is a film all about black domination - Sweetback's large penis and sexual prowess standing for black superiority. As well as sexually, the black community are seen as superior mentally (the community pull together to outwit the police and protect Sweetback) and physically (Sweetback overpowers two policemen in a bar brawl). You can feel the anger and the desire to fight back in every scene.Still, as interesting as the film is in a social context, this is extremely amateurish stuff. The last half an hour sees Sweetback running endlessly while the camera jumps around showing various landmarks to the sound of an extremely repetitive soundtrack. It goes on and on and on. But I suppose that any film that is indirectly responsible for Disco Godfather can't be all bad.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is Melvin Van Peebles harsh, incisive, intentional baffling and revolutionary take on the black experience in America. It isn't that, exactly, but it gets down the how "the Man" keeps the black community down at every turn they can. To be sure, this was the first of what was called 'black-exploitation' films, but it isn't exactly that either. Sure, it shows the film's hero (and believe you-me, Van Peebles IS a bad-ass hero, at least in some circles) having sex with a LOT of women, mostly black and some white thrown in at random moments, and it has a completely one-sided view on the Caucasian presence in America (either rabidly racist and crooked cops, or women with a 'craving' for the Sweetback, and the occasional bikers). But it also intends to be a movie by black people, of black people, and FOR black people, to make what is intended as a statement on not just the image of African Americans in the country at the time, but what wasn't shown in movies at all.In this latter sense, Van Peebles is making an attempt, much like Godard did with his early films (particularly Breathless and My Life to Live), to break through and re-configure conventions into something that is kind of f***ed up, but is alive and interesting in ways that more expensive or resourceful movies would have. Peebles makes his movies sort of out of junk-yard avant-garde parts, like some kind of garish vision taken in via superimpositions, montages, and a soundtrack as a combination of great Earth, Wind and Fire songs and a collage of voice-overs during Sweetback's run. Now, if looking at it from a purely objective viewpoint, of how it is technically, it's a little all over the place and, of course, totally dated. Peebles is also so intense with his camera- and rightfully so- that he lets his script sort of go into a better lack of focus; a lot of the time I only had a slight understanding of what was going on, and sometimes just not at all.This being said, it's a tremendous credit to Peebles as an independent filmmaker that the film even got finished; he had many production difficulties, as later chronicled in the film Bad Asssss. It's a very rough movie, with scenes going very much into the realm of pornography (even though, unlike most pornos of the period, it doesn't go for the jugular with its angles and shots- if anything Peebles is a little inert as a lover). All the same, it has a lot that pops out as striking, not just in its rambling assortment of visuals, which combine location shots of urban sprawl, deserts, and industrial areas, with the very real, un-glamorized faces of those in the 'ghetto', but in the subject matter as well. It is sensationalized for cinematic effect, but the point still remains today, and is quite ideal as Peebles's most notoriously crazy and weirdly exciting effort.