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Superfly movie12/17/2022 ![]() More an equal in Priest’s coke-slinging operation is Eddie (Jason Mitchell), who seemingly oversees most of the business while Priest is tending his hair and squinting at people. (That scene may be literally steamy, but its cheesy soft-core vibe made the New York preview audience giggle.) ![]() In the 1972 film, Priest had two women (one black and one white) who didn’t know anything about each other here, he lives in a happy threesome with girlfriend-employees, treating the black one (Lex Scott Davis’ Georgia) nearly like a sentient human and keeping the Latina (Andrea Londo’s Cynthia) as an accessory, unseen until it’s time for a threesome in the shower. In the next scene, we enter a vast strip club where Priest’s two girlfriends do his bidding without question. If you think this is the beginning of a subtext weaving real-world issues into genre conventions, hold your applause until you see the nature of those jobs. In raspy voiceover, Priest explains that he’s been hustling since 11, building his little empire by knowing what others don’t and giving people jobs. In a hard-to-swallow introductory scene, we watch him confront three men with guns and disarm them simply by airing their dirty laundry. Jackson, sporting an upswept shock of straightened hair, plays Priest, a coke dealer whose success depends on knowing his rivals’ secrets. So now that it’s possible (albeit difficult) to get a serious film about black characters made, the occasional prospect of remaking one of these movies is greeted not with an indignant “how could you!” but a bemused “why would you?” Some of the era’s most brilliant artists lent their gifts to these cheap films: Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield arranged entire scores for Trouble Man and Super Fly, respectively, while the theme songs by Bobby Womack and Isaac Hayes were easily the most enduring elements of the respective Across 110th Street and Shaft. Though significant at the time for putting black protagonists onscreen, and occasionally in the director’s chair, the movies were often made by cynics who thought their audience couldn’t tell good scripts and acting from bad, and would buy anything containing a few surefire plot ingredients (guns, cash, naked ladies) and music by big stars. Choose according to your interests.For many of us who discovered blaxploitation decades after its brief heyday, the appeal was not cinematic but musical. I’ve given you 3 Peetimes: 2 have simple conversation that’s easy to sum up, and one has 5 minutes of steamy shower sex and no plot. Here are the originals of the 70s Superfly films: NOTE: That blood vat torture scene is NOT a Peetime, since it’s at the very end in an R rated movie that had been uniformly violent throughout – do you think it requires a “Questionable Content Alert”, even so? That’s a new thing we are adding to the next RunPee update, out very soon. Now you get to choose. Please give this movie your poll ratings on the app. So I will give it a B-, add my violence-trigger caveats, and leave it at that. Sort of like the horse head in the Godfather, maybe?”Īs we try to grade movies by the target audience, I could see people approved of the rebooted Superfly. On that, Sojobi adds,”Every gangster movie has to have at least one gnarly scene like that. Between my insomnia and weak stomach for violence, I want to say I hated this mean-spirited movie from start to finish. I can’t unsee this, and it’s been literally keeping me awake for three nights now. ![]() I think he’s been rendered alive into various components. But it was also about a LOT of cocaine, many bricks of it, with characters snorting it, and some soft porn-ish shower sex (that’s a Peetime, if you don’t like sex scenes, BTW), and one extremely creepy machine that one character goes into, screaming, until the nightmarish ‘suction sounds’ come on, and viscous red fluids comes snaking out, through some tubes and into a vat. The characters were more compelling than I expected of a Superfly reboot, and the actors portrayed them well.” Sojobi goes on to say, “I’m not saying it was Oscar-winning character or plot development, but overall, I think it was as good a time as one would have watching most any other gangster film.”Īs for me: I thought it would be campy, snappy/silly fun, and stylish. It was a fun, action-packed gangster movie set in Atlanta, so there was the fun of an organized crime movie with an insight to Atlanta culture added on top of it. Volunteer RunPee photographer Ola Sojobi says: “Yeah, I liked Superfly. Here are some thoughts from a friend who knows more about those 70s blaxploitation films than I.
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