Bulworth

GREEN'S CANCEL THE WEEKEND RESEARCH PROJECT REVIEW:

What happens when a white, highly suicidal, uptown United States Senator falls in love with a woman from the 'hood? If you're Senator Jay Bulworth, it means you don't need the ridiculously large insurance policy you just agreed to buy for your daughter, nor do you want the mob man who you've just hired to contract out to kill you to follow through with it.

Thinking your life is about to end, you begin to tell the truth wherever you go. The blunt and honest truth, no matter who it hurts or what people think of you. Worse, you do it singing, rhyming and rapping. Now if you could only find the person who wants to kill you....

Whenever I think of Warren Beatty, which is not often, I do not think of a comedic actor. In fact, he wouldn't even make my top ten list of funniest actors, if I had such a list. So I was quite surprised that this movie, and Beatty himself, was quite funny, though sometimes a bit offensive.

Oliver Platt absolutely steals this movie as the conservative, absolutely hates surprises, life organizer for Senator Bulworth. I thought Don Cheadle also did a fine job with his part in this film. I was disappointed in Halle Berry's part, not because of her performance per-se, but because it seemed to me like her part was too small, her character way too underdeveloped, even though she got 2^nd billing in the credits.

A good movie but not great. You'll get a few laughs out of it.

**¾ out of *****


(Two and three quarters??? We never agreed on quarters!!! Anyway:)


SCRIBE'S HIT DAT NAPPY DUG-OUT REVIEW:

This is one of my favorite movies so I will try to be objective when I tell you it was quite possibly the greatest statement on faux white liberalism and black cultural failure ever put to film. OK, it's probably the only one, but still...

Senator Jay Bulworth was once a Sixties poster boy, shaking hands with the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr. and hanging out with Huey Newton. But that was then. Nowadays he panders to wealthy special interest groups while pretending to be a centrist who cares about minority rights. He hates himself. He should hate himself. He is a sellout and a whore.

As the film opens, we meet Bulworth at the moment of his epiphany. He sobs uncontrollably in his office through the night, surrounded by pictures of his former achievements and a looping videotape of his spin doctoring present day bullshit. It comes as no surprise that this guy wants to die. What does, however, is the total sense of liberation he experiences when he pays a guy to pay a guy to kill him so his daughter can collect the life insurance policy...his wife's a self-indulgent, unfaithful bitch.

What follows is a surreal trek into Bulworth's sleep-deprived unconscious mind as he informs African-American voters the Democratic party doesn't give a rat's ass about them and tells wealthy Jews their Hollywood products are shit. In-between, he meets a hot biracial chick (Halle Berry) and her hood-rat girlfriends, decides he wants to live after all, and raps his way through a debate and TV interview where he spits naught but truth complete with foul language.

If there's anything offensive in Beatty's story, it is the unflinching and factual social commentary. Obviously disgusted with his fellow left-wingers and their tendency to sell their souls to the highest bidder, Beatty has created an enduring and electrifying statement on the affairs of state. The underlying message, that white liberals need to overcome their hypocrisy and blacks need to stop waiting to be saved by someone else, is even more relevant in light of the recent election than it was in the Nineties when the film was first released. (I saw it in a theater, by the way, and the mixed audience loved it)

**** out of ***** (One star subtracted for the lack of nudity on the part of Berry)