Classified X

A compelling movie. Van Peebles provides a lot of interesting historical information.

Melvin Van Peebles is never short on opinions. I'd find it a lot easier to accept them if he weren't responsible for the vastly overrated Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song (forgive me if I omitted any 'a's or 's's from the title) and cinematic atrocities such as the racist, sexist, and plain awful Identity Crisis.

I saw this documentary and thought that it was well presented. It raised issued long past forgotten.

Melvin makes a lot of good points in this movie, and it becomes painfully obvious that in cinema, racism has festered over time. Lately, the casting and representation of blacks in films has improved greatly.

I've meant to watch this documentary for quite some time, primarily because Spike Lee cited it as a major influence on his own narrative film, Bamboozled. Classified X is good, especially in its presentation of 100 years of movie representation of African Americans.

Classified X (1998) *** (out of 4) Melvin Van Peebles hosts and narrates this 50-minute documentary that takes a look at the history of blacks in cinema. I'm going to start off by saying that I really wish someone would come along and make a three, four or even five hour documentary about this subject because there's so much to cover and there's just so little time here that you can't help but feel that so much is missing.

Melvin Van Peebles came to moviegoers' attention when he released "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song", in which he played a hustler who has to go on the lam after killing some cops who were attacking a Black Panther. The movie was widely seen as the first frank look at what African-Americans wanted to say about their experiences, as opposed to what would make whites comfortable.