Black Dynamite

The 2009 parody that reproduced blaxploitation's pimps so exactly that it became the genre's best film-school.

Black Dynamite (2009) is a comedy that imitates a 1972 blaxploitation picture frame by frame: the zooms, the boom mic in shot, the oversaturated colour and the plot in which a former CIA agent avenges his brother and uncovers a conspiracy to shrink Black men with malt liquor. Scott Sanders directed from a script by Michael Jai White, Sanders and Byron Minns; it premiered at Sundance in January 2009, was bought there by Sony for about $2 million, and had a small theatrical release through Apparition on 16 October 2009, grossing under $300,000 on a $2.9 million budget before finding its audience on disc and in a 2012 Adult Swim cartoon.

Its pimps are the point. Black Dynamite himself (White) is a pimp among his other trades, and his council of allies is a gallery of the archetypes: Bullhorn (Minns), who speaks only in rhyming couplets in the manner of Rudy Ray Moore; Cream Corn (Tommy Davidson); Chocolate Giddy-Up (Cedric Yarbrough); and the elder Osiris (Obba Babatundé). The film treats the pimp exactly as The Mack and Willie Dynamite did, as a community leader in a fur coat, and lets the absurdity of that convention carry the joke. Roger Ebert wrote that it "gets it mostly right, and when it's wrong, it's wrong on purpose."

For this archive the film is a reference text on how the screen pimp was built: the hat, the cane, the Cadillac, the rhyming boast and the women as furniture. None of the characters is a portrait of a real person.

ERA
2009

ASSOCIATED WITH
Michael Jai White; Scott Sanders; Byron Minns; Sundance 2009; Adult Swim

STANDING
Fictional