MasterChugs Theater: 'Dave Chappelle's Block Party'
Somewhere between the Dave Chappelle of comedy stardom and the Dave Chappelle of abrupt sabbaticals for contemplative stretches in Africa is the guy who experienced "the best single day of my career" when he threw a party for a few thousand friends and fans. Inviting some of the most gifted and socially conscious hip-hop and R&B artists, he assembled his dream concert on a corner in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Director Michel Gondry chronicles the September 18, 2004, event and its lead-up in the loose-limbed, funny and impassioned documentary known eloquently as Dave Chappelle's Block Party.
Dave Chappelle's Block Party is perhaps the first concert movie since Stop Making Sense to give you a blissful buzz. The buzz comes from the music, which has a loose, burning joy that's rare to behold in a live rap performance, and also from Chappelle's wicked prankster's glee, which spreads through the movie like a happy virus. Block Party features Chappelle as its impresario, on-scene jester, and guiding spirit, and the director, Michel Gondry, echoing techniques he used in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, keeps cutting between the run-up to the concert and the event itself, staging the film as a series of flickering time leaps that work on you almost kinesthetically. After a while, you stop thinking about ''past'' and ''present.'' You're eager simply to be in the now, as content to watch a rapping Brooklyn waiter, who turns out to be a brilliant boaster, as you are to see an incendiary stage performance by Dead Prez, with their blistering indictments of white power.
The enthralling spirit of the documentary, its mood of exuberant democracy, extends to every rap and soul performance in the film. A lot of the artists, like Kanye West or Common, summon an intensity of rhythm and attitude that didn't exist in hip-hop before the form went gangsta in the early 90s, yet all of them, in different ways, reject the get rich and screw the world nihilism that ultimately brought gangsta rap to such a dead end. You can feel the longing for a more redemptive era when Erykah Badu, tearing off her Afro wig in the wind, does a gorgeous paean to "back in the day when things were cool," and that spirit extends to Mos Def (who has the greatest dimples in rap), singing about his desire "to be free," or The Roots, with Kool G Rap and Big Daddy Kane, playing the ferocious "Boom." It's part of the rousing offhandedness of Block Party that the finale, in which Lauryn Hill, with her china-doll face and luscious tremolo, reunites with the Fugees to do "Killing Me Softly With His Song," is sublime, but no more so than a follow-up scene in which Wyclef Jean, off stage, leads a group of those CSU marching band members in his great reggae anthem "President", letting them--and the audience--know that, in music as in the world, anything is still possible.
The film is filled with small, magical moments of truth and human warmth, real humor and the kind of positive attitude to which so many people give nothing but lip service. It’s easy to sometimes think that the only aspects of life worth examining in art are the heavy, serious and sad ones, and it’s all too easy to sometimes think that the only way to make a movie happy and life-affirming is to pack it with schmaltz. Dave Chappelle’s Block Party is the cinematic equivalent of that first beautiful day of spring after a brutal winter, when you can take off your coat and go to the park, bob your head with the radios playing to the open, sweet-scented air and watch the pretty girls walk by.
Dave Chappelle's Block Party is perhaps the first concert movie since Stop Making Sense to give you a blissful buzz. The buzz comes from the music, which has a loose, burning joy that's rare to behold in a live rap performance, and also from Chappelle's wicked prankster's glee, which spreads through the movie like a happy virus. Block Party features Chappelle as its impresario, on-scene jester, and guiding spirit, and the director, Michel Gondry, echoing techniques he used in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, keeps cutting between the run-up to the concert and the event itself, staging the film as a series of flickering time leaps that work on you almost kinesthetically. After a while, you stop thinking about ''past'' and ''present.'' You're eager simply to be in the now, as content to watch a rapping Brooklyn waiter, who turns out to be a brilliant boaster, as you are to see an incendiary stage performance by Dead Prez, with their blistering indictments of white power.
The enthralling spirit of the documentary, its mood of exuberant democracy, extends to every rap and soul performance in the film. A lot of the artists, like Kanye West or Common, summon an intensity of rhythm and attitude that didn't exist in hip-hop before the form went gangsta in the early 90s, yet all of them, in different ways, reject the get rich and screw the world nihilism that ultimately brought gangsta rap to such a dead end. You can feel the longing for a more redemptive era when Erykah Badu, tearing off her Afro wig in the wind, does a gorgeous paean to "back in the day when things were cool," and that spirit extends to Mos Def (who has the greatest dimples in rap), singing about his desire "to be free," or The Roots, with Kool G Rap and Big Daddy Kane, playing the ferocious "Boom." It's part of the rousing offhandedness of Block Party that the finale, in which Lauryn Hill, with her china-doll face and luscious tremolo, reunites with the Fugees to do "Killing Me Softly With His Song," is sublime, but no more so than a follow-up scene in which Wyclef Jean, off stage, leads a group of those CSU marching band members in his great reggae anthem "President", letting them--and the audience--know that, in music as in the world, anything is still possible.
The film is filled with small, magical moments of truth and human warmth, real humor and the kind of positive attitude to which so many people give nothing but lip service. It’s easy to sometimes think that the only aspects of life worth examining in art are the heavy, serious and sad ones, and it’s all too easy to sometimes think that the only way to make a movie happy and life-affirming is to pack it with schmaltz. Dave Chappelle’s Block Party is the cinematic equivalent of that first beautiful day of spring after a brutal winter, when you can take off your coat and go to the park, bob your head with the radios playing to the open, sweet-scented air and watch the pretty girls walk by.
Labels: MasterChugs Theater
posted by Chris 'Chugs' Taylor at
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