May 13-19, 2004

screen picks

Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Young Turks of the German Cinema (through Sun., May 16, $6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) This touring series of works by Turkish-German filmmakers explicitly places the evolving history of the new, multiethnic Germany in conflict with lingering notions of a homogenous Teutonic state. As the series' original subtitle has it, these are the new "heimatfilms," appropriating the term originally applied to the overtly apolitical films of the post-WWII era, where lederhosened frauleins warbled folk songs in quaint mountain towns untouched by racial hatred. (Less tricky than it might have been, given that characters of non-Teutonic races were conspicuous by their absence.) Rather than imagining a Germany that never existed, these new films -- quite in contrast to the internationalist entertainments of Tom Tykwer or the soft-headed revisionism of Good Bye Lenin! -- confront the Germany that is, even if such topicality sometimes entails a concomitant lack of perspective.

In Fatih Akin's documentary We Forgot to Go Back (reviewed last week), the question isn't whether these German-born Turks are fully German: It's whether they're still Turkish. As in the U.S., contemporary German society seems to offer untold opportunities for immigrants to abandon their native culture and assimilate. Akin's parents quote a saying of the Turkish-German community: "We fly here in the passenger cabin, and we fly back in the cargo hold."

It would be hard to think of a less-inventive name for a documentary about German police officers than German Cops (Sunday, 7 p.m.), but the simple title hides a complex reality. "You grow up with two mentalities," says one officer, who says he speaks German to his parents and they speak Turkish to him. In fact, though his job inevitably involves arresting Turks, some of whom don't speak any German, he avoids speaking in their common language. By speaking Turkish, he says, "I would only burden myself."

In fact, the officer has a good point: In case discrepancies arise, he doesn't want any exchanges to take place that his partner can't understand. But his statement cuts deeper, suggesting the extent to which his profession makes his native tongue a hindrance, rather than an asset. Aysun Bademsoy's documentary doesn't simplify the issues; the officers, who also include several emigrants from the former Yugoslavia, are neither cast as dupes nor, as they report being called, "traitors." Rather, Bademsoy frames their lives as a series of ongoing negotiations -- although she doesn't, oddly enough, mention the critical negotiation between justice and the law.

German Cops is paired with The Lovers of the Osman Hotel, the best of the short films, which stars Akin and writer-director Idil Üner as a German-Turkish couple whose romantic weekend in Istanbul turns into an object lesson in why you can't go home again. Also part of the series: Kutlug Ataman's Lola and Billy the Kid (Thursday, 8 p.m.), set in Berlin's gay and transvestite subculture; Ayse Polat's intriguing-sounding The Tour Abroad (Fri., 8 p.m.), which takes a road trip with an 11-year-old orphan and a transvestite cabaret singer; and Thomas Arslan's Dealer (Saturday, 8 p.m.), whose Bressonian restraint sometimes shades into mere flatness.

The Richard Pryor Show/Chappelle's Show: Season One Uncensored! ($29.99/$26.99 DVD) When NBC gave Richard Pryor his own one-hour variety show in the fall of 1977, it's likely neither Pryor nor the network knew what they were in for. Pryor, at least, went into the deal with his eyes open. Responding to fears that the network might try to tame him, Pryor opened the first show by addressing the audience stark naked, saying he had "given up absolutely nothing." But as the camera zoomed out, it revealed that Pryor's lower half had been replaced by a gender-neutral mannequin, none-too-subtly suggesting that NBC had cut Pryor's balls off.

If the network didn't get the joke, they knew it was on them; proving that brute force trumps irony every time, the network deleted the opening altogether (though it's thankfully preserved on Image's three-disc boxed set). Pryor fired back with the "network-approved" opening to the third show, in which a furious Pryor rants and raves while a mellow announcer "translates" his words as, "Gosh, I'm just so happy to be working at NBC." The pressures were obviously mounting, and the same week that Pryor told his audience at the Hollywood Bowl to "kiss my black ass," he pulled the plug on the show, no doubt narrowly beating the network to the punch.

While Pryor had his trouble with the censors, it's important to note that the four episodes of The Richard Pryor Show challenged more than FCC standards. The first episode, which begins with a lightweight Star Wars parody, closes with the 20-minute "Satin Doll," in which Pryor plays a GI returning home to Harlem after WWII. The sketch, which features a surprisingly tender performance from Pryor, is notable for its extravagant staging of Harlem nightlife at its peak, as well as for the fact that, by design, it contains not a single laugh. Pryor wanted to explore the limits of comedy, and go beyond them; The Richard Pryor Special?, whose high ratings prompted the idea for an ongoing show, slides from Pryor's mildly funny characterization of a habitual drunk into a tearful Maya Angelou monologue pronounced over his passed-out body.

The Richard Pryor Show veers from one extreme to the other. There's too much lightweight comedy, much of it premised on racial fish-out-of-water gags: Pryor facing gunslingers in the Old West; Pryor speaking gibberish Japanese in a samurai costume. At the other end of the spectrum are the show's less-frequent ventures into dramatic territory, not least an intense monologue delivered by an unidentified actress that addresses the suppression of lesbian desire with shocking frankness. (It's presented as a pirate-TV interruption to "New Talent," in which Pryor appears as a Little Richard-esque piano player in an absurd wig and comical outfit.)

Still, the show has its shining moments, the shiniest of which is "The Come From Man." The sketch opens with several minutes of African dance, a powerful assertion of Pryor's roots that he immediately undermines as the scene shifts to an African village where Americans have come to learn their ancestry. (Similarities to Pryor's own African voyage are obviously intentional.) A charlatan in tribal garb, Pryor's "come from man" sells black and white tourists alike stories of their heritage that are as obviously phony as the African shields with tags reading "Made in Taiwan." Acknowledging the desire for a homeland while satirizing those who think it can be acquired for a price, it's a brilliant piece of cultural comedy, one of the few moments where The Richard Pryor Show cuts as deep as Pryor himself. With names like Robin Williams, Sandra Bernhard, Marsha Warfield and Paul Mooney, it's easy to drool over the show's cast, but the writers couldn't figure out how to use Pryor, let alone a group of unproven comics fresh out of the clubs. If the distance between inspired moments shows how far Pryor was out of his element (a circumstance unfortunately replicated in his movie career), it also heightens your sense of how hard they were to create. The missed shots just make the bull's-eyes more remarkable.

Race relations in America may not have shifted much in the last 27 years, but the landscape of television sure has, to the point where Dave Chappelle can become a smash hit doing things that would have gotten Pryor kicked off the air. But it's worth pointing out that, for all the controversy Chappelle has stirred up, he offends in the way we expect a comic to offend, by taking stereotypes to absurd extremes. As did Pryor, Chappelle opened his first episode with a shot across the bow, the now-famous sketch in which Chappelle plays a blind white supremacist who has no idea that he is black himself. Ostentatiously provocative -- a committed character improviser, Chappelle is unsparing with his character's racist rhetoric -- the sketch is, at bottom, a fairly pedestrian comment on the "blindness" of racism. The shock is undeniable, and lasts through repeat viewings, but it leaves you shaken, not stirred.

If Chappelle's show has an underlying theme, it's that blacks and white are as far apart as they've ever been: Witness "Trading Spouses," a reality TV show in which black and white couples swap husbands, or "The Mad Real World," which flips the MTV script by placing one white guy in a house with six black people. (After they've knifed his father and passed his girlfriend around, they decide that they don't feel "safe" with white boy around, and boot his ass out.) The global triumph of hip-hop culture may have helped create a common language, but as Snoop Dogg reminded Saturday Night Live's audience last week, it's still not OK for white folks to say "nizzle."

In the post-Puffy world, money may seem like an antidote to racism, but in the first season's most despairing sketch, Chappelle says it ain't so. In "Reparations," African-Americans finally get their checks from the U.S. government, but instead of transforming social differences, the money merely inflames them: KFC and Fubu merge to become the world's largest corporation, Escalade sales skyrocket, and a street-corner dice-player becomes the world's richest man. It's not the season's funniest moment (that would be the devastating deflation of golden-shower aficionado R. Kelly), but it does seem to get closest to what the show is about (at least at its best; it's also "about" an endless stream of booty jokes that grow quickly tiresome over the length of 12 episodes). When Broadway has to turn to "A Raisin in the Sun" (with P. Diddy in the lead, no less) to find a way to talk about race, it's a sure sign that the dialogue has stalled, made superficially obsolete by a culture in which everyone's entitled to shop at the same stores. Chappelle's Show is a warning flare, a reminder that we're not done yet, and if we don't pay attention, we'll go back to how we were.