The Film
excerpted from a longer review found here |
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Executive-produced by Queen Latifah, Bringing Down the House isn't so much racial satire (like Blazing Saddles) as it is racial caricature (like the Friday series), positing every African-American character as apparently unemployed or criminal and every white person as old, bigoted, and a CPA. A Mrs. Doubtfire conceit that finds the estranged father going drag as a black person to earn his "cool points" with his just-dating daughter (Kimberly J. Brown) and little dyslexic son (Angus T. Jones), the film strip-mines the purported comedy of Steve Martin and Eugene Levy (and Joan Plowright) waxing Ebonic, while Latifah perpetuates every negative stereotype of the brassy African-American woman in what amounts to pride these days. Like the higher-middlebrow aspirations of Frida, Bringing Down the House identifies feminism and racial pride as standing in contempt of "patriarchal" values like respect for others and respect for self--mistaking braggadocio and exhibitionist egotism for being proud of who you are.
A scene wherein Latifah pours liquid laxative all over an unpleasant old bird's (Plowright) dinner is stunning not for the old bird's crowing of a "Negro spiritual" but for Latifah's silent, burlesque gesticulations and expressions, which pay homage to the sort of grotesque Stepin Fetchit entertainments of yesteryear. But worse, that Martin even has a pink house-servant costume for Latifah to wear for Plowright's surprise visit suggests a dysfunction far more deeply embedded in the film's (and our collective) psyche. Two extended dance sequences allow Martin to display some of the insouciant freedom of his early work (and indeed, what is Bringing Down the House but a chance for Martin to unlock his inner Jerk? (A far superior racial satire, by the by--"You mean my skin's always gonna be this colour?")), yet the rest of the film (including a pair of woman-hating subplots concerning an Anna Nicole gold-digging sister-in-law and a cradle-robbing ex-wife) is a deadly trudge through the valley of hit and mostly miss.
That a few things are funny in a film about a crass woman who insinuates herself into a lonely guy's life through blackmail, bullying, criminal trespass, criminal misrepresentation (it's increasingly less of a surprise that Martin finds himself in this film: between the boardroom presentation of The Out-of-Towners, the dinner discomfort of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, the club hijinks of his wild and crazy guy, the home invasion of HouseSitter, and so on, Bringing Down the House falls out as something of a career highlight reel) isn't ultimately so very surprising. There are a few funny things about most alleged comedies. At the end of the day, it's more fruitful to identify whether we're laughing with the film (as in a scene where a drunken Martin gets love tips from Latifah) or at it (when Latifah speaks "white;" when Martin dresses up in hip hop gear and affects the sort of ghetto-ese of which he's shown himself entirely incapable the rest of the film)--and that when we're laughing at something, we're not involved in a process of satire as much as we're celebrating (and by celebrating, perpetuating) exactly the sort of racial misunderstandings that are the furthest thing from hilarious.-Walter Chaw
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The DVD
Bringing Down the House makes its way to DVD in separately-sold widescreen and fullscreen editions; we of course recommend seeing neither, but will be covering the former for purposes of this review. The 2.35:1 anamorphic transfer is swell, the Dolby Digital 5.1 mix, definitely lacking--the "Bulworth" scene in which Steve Martin dons homey threads only illustrates how much more aggressively Bulworth uses the subwoofer. (That's a real movie, by the way; see it instead of this one.) In the second soundtrack for the film, a feature-length commentary, director Adam Shankman and screenwriter Jason Filardi make such vacuous and/or apocalyptic observations as, "This movie's going to get to introduce a whole new generation of kids to Steve Martin."
Among bonus material, "Breaking Down Bringing Down the House" (17 mins.) begins with producer Ashok Amritaj saying, "The script is the key. That's how you get great talent attached." He's cut off before he can explain how this film proved the exception to the rule. Cast and crew tributes ensue--so and so is amazing to work with and yadda yadda yadda. If I have to sit through one more of these prefab makings-of I think I'll turn avenging angel. "The Godfather of Hop" (3 mins.) would surely raise the ire of Armond White, as it reduces hip hop to a joke, the crux of which is that Eugene "U.G. Dub" Levy invented it and just about every other facet of popular black culture. Seven deleted scenes at least tell us where the housekeeper's uniform came from, but my goodness, was there no end to the picture's '70s-sitcom racism? (Here, after buying Latifah a wardrobe fit for a church lady, Martin remarks, "A taxi might actually stop for you now!") A 4-minute gag reel that shows a slate with the film's original title ("In the Houze") on it, the video for Queen Latifah's "Better than the Rest," and pre-menu trailers for Freaky Friday, Shanghai Knights, Chicago, and the upcoming Platinum Edition DVD release of The Lion King round out the platter.-Bill Chambers
© Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.
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