Dave Chappelle's Block Party

Prologue: Last Thursday I met up with Jeremy at BAM Rose Cinemas for the 9:30 p.m. showing of Dave Chappelle’s Block Party. BAM is one of the best places in the 5 boroughs to see movies. The screens are large, the seating comfortable, and the popcorn special is, well, special. For $10 you get a huge tub of popcorn and two 24-ounce drinks. The popcorn’s usually drenched with butter but colons be damned, the stuff is addictive and delicious. One of the saddest days of my life will be when my doctor tells me to lay off the stuff.

A question: “If you could have a dinner party with five people living or dead, who would they be?” I can’t remember the first time I heard it but it’s a fun question (Midwestern alert! Midwestern alert!): get the five people/historical figures you’ve always wanted to meet, bring them together and let mayhem ensue. It’s a question probably confined to dinner parties among strangers or internet dating sites but it’s an idea whose reality I’ve always thought about: would Einstein really have all that much to say to Hitler? Would Malcolm X refuse to pass Socrates the salt?

The premise of Dave Chappelle’s Block Party is an interesting variation on this question: What if I held a block party in Bed-Sty, invited my favorite singers and musicians to play it, invited a bunch of people I like from my hometown, chartered buses for all those people to attend, and had director Michael Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as well as countless uber-imaginative music videos) follow it all with a camera? The result is a hilarious and energetic film, which gives us an idea of what the hypothetical question would look like.

After a quiet and curious opening sequence in which Chappelle tries to help two men fix their car’s engine (the two men don’t seem to have any idea who he is; one man even waves him off), the film follows the comedian as he hands out invitations to people in his Ohio hometown, friends and strangers alike. These scenes are endearing not only for the jokes but for the effect the invites have on the invited. There is an interview with two young, black men who after they are given tickets, decide to go golfing and are met on the course with some extremely racist remarks. Instead of striking back at the perpetrator, they decide to remain calm and let it go lest they miss their opportunity to attend the Party. And in one “Holy-Crap, No Way This Is Happening” moment, Mr. Chappelle offers to charter two buses for an entire university marching band to perform at the block party. The moment the band’s conductor announces the band will be allowed to go was worth the price of admission. Standing amid the jumping and screaming band members, the film’s star looks a little surprised and overwhelmed by the havoc he’s created.

The second part of the film details the concert itself whose performers include Kanye West, Jill Scott, Dead Prez, Erykah Badu, Big Daddy Kane, The Roots, Bilal, Common, The Fugess (whose reunion is treated with a reverence reserved for a Beatles reunion) and Mos Def, or as I like to call him, God. Since I as white as wonderbread with mayo, I have run these names by people in the know: it’s a mighty powerful line-up.

The party itself was not at all what I expected. For reasons unknown to me at this time, I have been trying to find a comparison between this and other concert films and have come up empty. It shares a quirky sensibility with Stop Making Sense (My favorite concert film of all time) but lacks that film’s rhythm, momentum and theatricality; It also has a similar sense of curiosity with it’s subjects as U2’s Rattle and Hum but does veers far away from its stylization (it was made by a music video director) and (thankfully) its pretension (I like U2, and ‘With or Without You’ is a fine song, but after spending two hours listening to them explain and expand upon their artistic vision, I felt like the main character in A Clockwork Orange). The closest I could come was Wattstax, a documentary concert film about a concert at the Los Angeles Coliseum held on the seventh anniversary of the Watts riots. That film also flip-floped (sorry Senator Kerry) between concert footage and interviews with actors, comedians, musicians and citizens which dealt with racial and social relations of and within the African-American communities. (with especially deft observations from none other than my beloved Richard Pryor and a foul-mouthed, mutton chopped Teddy Wilson, known for playing Isaac the Bartender on The Love Boat).

But the political commentary in Dave Chappelle’s Block Party is more subtle because it’s an effect of the event, rather than a reaction to a far more serious one (i.e. the Watts riot). That Gondry includes this leads me to believe he’s more interested in the event and what it means to those involved. In one scene, Wyclef Jean of The Fugees sits at a piano, speaking to the members of the marching band and asking them questions about what music means to them and what they’d like to do with their lives. The marching band was rapt and appreciative. It was easy to see how much it meant to them to be speaking this way to someone they admired and would otherwise have little chance to speak with.

Gondry also seems keen to show the work involved in putting the party together. In one sequence, he gives us footage of Erykah Badu sporting a GINORMOUS afro performing a song called Back in the Day; he then cuts to her rehearsing the same song in the studio; then cuts back to her performance when a gust of wind blows the afro off (it was a wig), and then cuts to poet/performer Jill Scott watching Ms. Badu’s performance in a makeshift green room telling us how much she likes, but how different she is from, Erykah Badu then cuts back to Badu singing and leaping into the audience. The cuts kept me on my toes and the overall effect was mesmerizing. I’d only heard of Erykah Badu before after watching this sequence, I am fully prepared to have her babies. (Aaah: the magic of movies.)

The constant cutting from the party to the interviews wreaks a bit of havoc with the rhythm of the concert but since this block party is more than just a block party, I went with it and made a note to myself to buy the sound track. And since Dave Chappelle is involved, it is very funny. Chappelle is a tall, skinny guy who drags his feet as he walks. He holds himself like an athlete and seems to approach comedy that way: he lopes around the edges of the action waiting for an opportunity then springs to life when the moment arrives. The jokes are not always funny but he’s seasoned enough to make weak jokes work through sheer force of personality, inflection and timing. There are several examples of this throughout the movie but one of my favorites occurs when it begins to rain on the party. Since this is his concert, he rallies the troops and entertains the crowd. The film cuts to Chappelle underneath an umbrella, beating on a set of bongos:

(beats on the bongos) 5,000 black people chillin' in the rain.
(beats on the bongos a little more and a little longer) 19 white people peppered in the crowd.
(Beats on the bongos again then stops completely. Pause.) Time to find a Mexican
(Beats the bongos like crazy as the crowd laughs and screams)

His presence is relatively quiet. He’s more content to sit back and let things happen. He’s involved but distant; taking stock of everything going on around him. I didn’t know before seeing the film but roughly eight months after shooting it, Dave Chappelle walked off the set of Chappelle’s Show and booked a flight to South Africa, essentially giving up $50 million dollars in the process. I remember hearing this and wondering:

1) Who cares? It’s nobody’s business. It may be Comedy Central’s business but since I don’t have cable or work for them I felt I could easily relinquish my right to know and proceed to the sports page to see how the Detroit Pistons were doing, (They won. Whoo-Hoo!)
2) Wait-What would make someone walk away from $50 million dollars?

In interviews he’s done since returning from South Africa, Chappelle speaks candidly about why he did it. He talks about the pressure and the fish bowl existence and about all the people he suddenly has to answer to. Here’s what he told Simon Robinson in Time Magazine: "everyone around me says, 'You're a genius!'; 'You're great!'; 'That's your voice!' But I'm not sure that they're right." And then he says: "I want to make sure I'm dancing and not shuffling." He also wonders, like any sane person would, if he made the right decision, But it takes a crazy courage to walk away from that much success to make sure you’re ‘not shuffling.’ He says at the beginning of the film: “This is the concert I always wanted to see.” There is no shuffling in this film. I wonder if the experience of making it got him to thinking?

Epilogue: The moment the film ended, I turned to Jeremy and said ‘That was awesome!” to which he replied “That was one of the best things I’ve even seen”. We threw away our half eaten bucket of popcorn, went to the bathroom (a necessity, given the 24 oz. drinks) and left the theatre. Ten feet from the theatre I felt so good about what we had just seen that I screamed ‘Oh my G-d that was good’ and we both whooped and hollered into the sky. In the morning I woke up thinking about it. I emailed Jeremy and he said he was thinking about it. I’m listening to the soundtrack as I type this and I’ve been thinking about it all week. How often does this happen? Go see this movie.