I haven't seen it, but Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is supposed to be the original of the genre, and was influential enough that Melvin van Peebles' son made a biopic about Melvin's making of the film. The biopic is BAADASSSSS! and is a lot of fun.

Here's a review I did of BAADASSSSS! at the time it came out:

Baadasssss! is a fun film about the making of another movie, in this case Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, which I have never seen. IMDb has it listed as a 2003 film, which is odd, and must reflect it being released at a film festival somewhere. An alternate title is How to Get the Man's Foot Outta Your Ass.

Mario van Peebles directs and plays his father, Melvin van Peebles, which is totally appropriate since Melvin directed and starred in Sweetback. He also uses Mandela, Marley and Maya van Peebles in the film. I believe they are his children, which is again totally appropriate since Melvin used his children Mario and Megan in Sweetback. Khleo Thomas (Zero from Holes) plays the young Mario, and is really good; Penny Bae Bridges plays the young Mario. Ossie Davis plays Melvin's father and is good as always. Joy Bryant is delightful as Melvin's secretary and would-be-actress Priscilla, as is Rainn Wilson as Melvin;s friend and co-producer Bill Harris, to whom the sixties were very good. T. K. Carter has some scenes as Bill Cosby, and does well considering he doesn't really look like Mr. Cosby. Cosby helped out with a $50000 loan when it was desperately needed.

This is a good look at the making of a film while living at the edge of desperation. Melvin van Peebles lost the vision in one eye in the course of making Sweetback, and used his own son in the scene where Sweetback loses his virginity. Half his crew were novices, partly because he insisted on half the crew (not necessarily the same half) being minorities. All in all, it sounds like a lot of fun except for the waking up in the middle of the night in cold sweats. I like the side commentaries where the actors in character comment on the film in retrospect.

The DVD has an interview with Melvin van Peebles, and a making-of documentary, both of which are fascinating. I haven't yet listened to the film with the commentary by Mario and Melvin van Peebles.
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Air Force One
So boringly generic. I hated it when I saw it in theaters years ago. I heard some people profess a love for it randomly over the years and came across it around 2am so I figured what the hell. Well, my original feelings held up pretty well. Oldman in possibly his worst role and Ford acting tough and angry. Sigh. "get off my plane", how about get off my tv instead. 4/10

Osaka Elegy. This is a 1936 Mizoguchi about a switchboard operator who becomes her boss's mistress in order to get him to pay off her father's debts, then gets another man to give her money for her brother's tuition, then wonder why, after getting herself and would-be fiance arrested, wonders why he and her family rejects her. Subtle as a mallet and the print I saw was murky and not-well preserved. One of those movies that seems to last three hours when it's seventy minutes long, but it proves Japan could do pre-Code type movies, too. 3.5 of 10.

Since ze last update...

Dr. Terror's House of Horrors - 5/10
The Three Musketeers (1973) - 5/10
Lolita (1962) - 8/10
The Cameraman - 7/10
Garbo - 7/10
Hoosiers - 7/10
This Means War - 4/10
The Ice Storm - 8/10
Woody Allen: A Documentary - 8/10
Act of Valor - 5/10
The Dead (1987) - 7/10
Young Adult - 7/10
Project X (2012) - 3/10
Spite Marriage - 7/10

Game Change
--A look inside the McCain/Palin campaign of 2008 starring Ed Harris and Julianne Moore as the duo. Moore's performance in this HBO film garnered much of the attention early but it is Woody Harrelson's performance as Steve Schmidt that stands out most to me. Outside of those two the film felt a little flat and really didn't reveal a whole lot that we didn't already know. It was a fairly standard look at the world of politics that was a little disappointing. 5/10

Detachment
From Tony Kaye, director of American History X, this one deserves to be seen by more people than will ever hear of it. Starring Adrien Brody as a troubled substitute teacher and filled with familiar faces like Blythe Danner, Marcia Gay Harden, Bryan Cranston, Tim Blake Nelson, William Peterson, Lucy Liu and James Caan, this film reminds us of the quality that Brody is capable of. There are some rough cuts and edits that may agitate some but they decrease as the film moves forward. However, the film is a rewarding one that is worth seeing. 7/10

The Pink Panther(1963)
The original before the name became sullied over the years starring the amazing Peter Sellers. Interestingly enough though, this one is not as mad-cap as those that would follow and Sellers is a bit more reserved here. He creates the role of Inspector Clousseau with great nuance and restraint. David Niven is fantastic here as Clousseau's nemesis. The last 20 minutes divulge into a little more manic comedy and with great result. It is just goofy for the hell of it and they nail it. A great afternoon diversion. 7.5/10

A couple nights ago I watched My Little Eye, a fantastically creepy horror film from director Marc Evans (Trauma). The plot revolves around a group of five people who participate in a web-based, Big Brother-style reality show. The prize is a million dollars to each contestant, but only if they stay within the confines of a secluded house for six months. The house has been set up with thousands of cameras, which record everyone's actions. Of course, this being a horror film, not everything is at it seems. The film makes terrific use of all the camera placements, creating an incredible sense of uneasy tension as the events onscreen start to escalate. Perhaps more than any other film I've seen, it gets an incredible amount of mileage out of that uncomfortable feeling of being watched by something unseen. There are some inevitable logic problems, and in the final twenty minutes the intangible threat becomes tangible, which isn't quite as well handled as the creeping paranoia that comes before it, but overall this is a film that all fans of the horror genre should check out. If prompted, I would place it high on my list of the top horror films of the last decade. 8/10.

The last 20 minutes of Pink Panther made me crave one thing and one thing only......to check out my new Blu-Ray of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Needless to say, I knew what I was in for here and have seen it countless times. This doesn't make it any less enjoyable as I still smile at the coconuts, the Black Knight, Ni, and all the other great bits. I'm an admitted Python junkie, even having seen Spamalot on Broadway and each visit with the troupe makes my day. 8/10

I'm 2/3 of the way through the entire series. I'm going to make a thread on it when I finish

you're a fan? woudn't have guessed that. are you going to watch Curse & Son of the Pink Panther as well?

I dressed up as Inspector Clousseau for Halloween one year when I was a kid. Had to explain who I was at every house.

I am going to start the same so I'll look out for it as I catch up.

The Adventures of Tintin (2011)
Computer animated adaptation of the classic Tintin adventure comics (more precisely of “The Secret of the Unicorn”, “Red Rackham’s Treasure” and elements of others).
In the light of the concentrated talent involved in making ‘The Adventures of Tintin’ (director/co-producer Steven Spielberg, co-producer Peter Jackson, writers Stephen Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish, editor Michael Kahn, music by John Williams), it should have been a better movie. Before going into details, I should first admit that the original comic books by Belgian artist Hergé are childhood favourites of mine and that I still enjoy reading Tintin stories.
Perhaps influenced by this love of Tintin comics or a general dislike of computer animation, I don’t think that the style of the movie fits the material at all. Hergé’s original comics are drawn in a style called Ligne Claire, i.e. clear, uniform lines with no hatching or shading and often featuring simplified cartoon characters against a realistic background. As a result, Tintin comics have a very simple look and “2D feel”. In movies, this would best be represented by hand-drawn animation, as has been done with the Tintin TV series. The animation used in ‘The Adventures of Tintin’ - 3D, naturalistic CGI, motion capture - is the opposite of this style. As a consequence, the movie doesn’t visually capture the atmosphere of the Tintin comics despite of the technically highly accomplished CGI. Also, the departure from the style of the comics and the near realistic looking CGI raise the question of why the movie hasn’t been made as live action movie (such as two French Tintin movies of the 1960ies). In my opinion, this would have been more involving than seeing mo-cap avatars, which look like animated plastic action figures to me. However, it is to the credit of the filmmakers that I got used to the CGI and didn’t mind it too much after a while.
The bigger problem with ‘The Adventures of Tintin’ is the storytelling. Spielberg, usually praised as one of the best storytellers in contemporary cinema, piles on rollercoaster chase sequence after rollercoaster chase sequence, interrupted only by brief moments of exposition or slapstick humour. This gets boring after a while and also misrepresents the comic books, which balance action and story about evenly.
These two issues - inappropriate CGI and repetitive chase sequences with little story (but an overabundance of plot) - make ‘The Adventures of Tintin’ resemble a computer game, which isn’t a good thing because watching someone else play computer games isn’t exactly great entertainment. That being said, the lighthearted tone of ‘The Adventures of Tintin’ is about right. There are nice references to various Tintin stories. Captain Haddock (voiced by Andy “Gollum” Serkis) is consistently very funny and injects life into the movie. The title sequence and music are fantastic. All in all, this isn’t a bad movie and it’s better than average, but it could (and should) have been good or even great. 6/10

Midnight Lace (1960)
Kit (Doris Day) is the independently rich, newly-wed wife of London businessman Anthony Preston (Rex Harrison). When she walks through the park on a particularly foggy day, she is harassed by a menacing voice which threatens to kill her. Soon after, Kit is receiving malicious phone calls and barely escapes an accident with the help of a peculiarly helpful construction engineer (John Gavin). While she grows increasingly worried to the point of becoming hysterical, her claims that she is being stalked by a mysterious man who intends to murder her are met with disbelief by her husband, friends and the sceptical police.
‘Midnight Lace’ is a suspense thriller in the style of then contemporary Hitchcock movies, although, unfortunately, journeyman director David Miller doesn’t have the master’s touch. There are elements of a whodunit, although the introduction of various possible suspects will not disguise the obvious culprit from anybody who has seen a movie like this before. There are a few nicely filmed suspense sequences, which resemble similar scenes from European horror/ thriller movies of the 1960ies, and Doris Day’s performance as a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown is quite good. However, ‘Midnight Lace’ leaves little impression overall - it took me to get to the final act until I remembered that I had actually seen ‘Midnight Lace’ before. It is a serviceable thriller, although you could do a lot better by watching classic Hitchcock - 6/10

Does Doris Day sing Que Sera Sera? I think she's sung that song in every movie I've seen her in.

My Dog Tulip: a 2009 animated feature, based on an autobiographical novel by J.R. Ackerley, about the relationship between an old man and his dog. There are a couple big positives: Christopher Plummer gives a very strong vocal performance as the old man/narrator, and the filmmakers employ a crude yet expressive hand-drawn animation style that suits the simplicity of the story perfectly. It's an easy film to admire, but my personal feelings regarding the subject matter kept me from finding any kind of deeper appreciation. See, I'm not a dog lover, and I have no intention of ever becoming a dog owner. Currently, the neighbors on both sides of where I live own dogs, and their constant yapping at the most ungodly hours of the day has become akin to daggers stabbing at my eardrums. Unfortunately, the dog in this film does a lot of barking, and the old man is the type of character who will let the dog continue on barking without any consideration of how irritating it is to other people. He has the mindset that, if he loves the dog, well, everyone else should love the dog as well. Despite the oftentimes quite poetic quality of Plummer's narration, the old man and his dog are annoying, and spending a feature length film with them is somewhat exhausting. It doesn't help that the second half of the film is devoted entirely to the old man trying to improve the dog's sex life, with the film going into some surprisingly graphic details (this isn't a film for kids). In the end, I can imagine that dog lovers would get much more out of this film than I did. As someone who doesn't have any interest in dogs, my overall appreciation of the film was muted. 5/10.

21 Jump Street

More thoughts on its respective thread.

8/10

'The Descendants' (Payne, 2011) *** 1/2 out of **** (9/10)
This is the film I've been waiting for Alexander Payne to make. I just found it too hard to care about almost any of the characters in Election or Sideway, but here we have a screenplay that is honest, gentle and touching while perfectly suiting Payne's sensibilities. It can be simultaneously funny and sad without being jarring, its screenplay's arc is complete and nearly free of artificiality, and the acting is some of the best from this last year. A wonderful film more then deserving of numerous viewings.

'Hugo' (Scorsese, 2011) *** out of **** (7/10)
It's a fun and sweet picture, with some great uses of Scorsese's signature stylistic flourishes, but there is nothing particularly special about the film. It holds up stronger for filmgoers but its charms are universal, although I'm not particularly a fan of Scorsese's more CGI oriented style since The Departed as opposed to the magic he works with straight film. Still worth watching though.

'Take Shelter' (Nichols, 2011) *** 1/2 out of **** (9/10)
A film that has stuck with me longer then most I saw from 2011, Take Shelter is one of the most perfectly constructed screenplays from last year with two amazing performances from Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain. What exactly does its ending say about the events that proceeded it? The film remains fascinating and continues to stir in your mind weeks after viewing it, its intents and purposes open to interpretation but brilliantly realized.

'The Ides of March' (Clooney, 2011) *** out of **** (7/10)
Very well acted, written and made film but nothing revolutionary or particularly new. Michael Clayton did the corruption in our system bit better five years ago while coming across fresher. Still worth watching, but Clooney's best film of the year is The Descendants and Ryan Gosling's is still Drive.

What the ending says about the events before it is what annoyed me. The film was a perfectly-essayed meditation on mental illness--call it the anti-Field of Dreams--until the ending ruined everything

What if the film isn't an essay about mental illness but faith?

Then it's awkwardly constructed

Jumpin' Jack Flash. Time has not been kind to this film, which I thought was fairly amusing when it came out 25 years ago. A British spy is trapped behind the Iron Curtain and needs to contact somebody at the British embassy to get him out. For some reason, he breaks into Whoopi Goldberg's work computer to do this. (The office network has some sort of link with Russian television because they keep getting exercise videos. Today the film is most notable for being the first film directed by Penny Marshall. (Her second was Big, so she learned rapidly.) Today this is fitfully funny at best. ** of ****