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African-American Cinema DVDs

King (History Channel)

Sales Rank:6708
List Price: $24.95
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

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Director(s):

Actor(s):

Go beyond the dream to discover the man.

Forty years after Martin Luther King s assassination, HISTORY, with newsman Tom Brokaw, takes viewers through the extraordinary life and times of America's civil rights visionary. KING goes beyond the legend to portray the man, the questions, the myths and, most importantly, the relevance of Dr. King s message in today s world. Includes a rare interview with his son, Martin Luther King III, as well as associates from the civil rights campaigns and contemporary figures such as former President Bill Clinton, Condaleezza Rice, Bono, Forest Whitaker, Chuck D and others.

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Hav Plenty

Sales Rank:26451
List Price: $9.99
Lowest New Price: $3.72
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)

Format:

Closed-captioned
Color
DVD-Video
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Chuck Baron
Diane Barone
Arnold Bayley
Anthony Beneri
Courtney Berlin

From the producers of the smash hit SOUL FOOD comes HAV PLENTY, a hilarious look at love and sex in the '90s that charmed audiences and critics alike. For struggling novelist Lee Plenty, the only thing sorrier than his writing career is his love life. That is, until Lee's old college friend, Havilland, invites him to her home to celebrate New Year's Eve. Before long, Lee finds himself surrounded by three gorgeous women: Havilland, her uninhibited best friend, and her affection-starved sister. It looks like Lee's in for a weekend filled with plenty of laughter, love, and surprises. A hit soundtrack featuring Babyface & Des'ree, Erykah Badu, SWV, and Absolute energizes this fresh and funny romp!

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Black Caesar

Sales Rank:8403
List Price: $14.98
Lowest New Price: $7.57
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)

Format:

Anamorphic
Closed-captioned
Color
DVD-Video
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NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Fred Williamson
Gloria Hendry
Art Lund
D'Urville Martin
Julius Harris

Shot on the streets of New York, writer-director Larry Cohen captures the bustle and color of the city in this violent, low-budget crime film. Ambitious Tommy Gibbs (a swaggering, self-confident Fred Williamson) has risen from shoeshine boy to Harlem crime lord, but he wants a bigger piece of the pot. With a racist, high-ranking cop (Art Lund) in his pocket, he begins his expansion with a bloody takeover bid but finds himself betrayed from within and the target of both the cops and the mob. Cohen invests this fast-paced tale (partially inspired by the 1930 gangster classic Little Caesar with a touch of Scarface) with colorful characters (notably a hustling religious leader played by D'Urville Martin), high energy, and a scruffy style. Black Caesar is one of the most entertaining movies to come from the 1970s explosion of low-budget black cast genre pictures, more commonly known as "blaxploitation" films. --Sean Axmaker

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Dark Blue

Sales Rank:17524
List Price: $14.98
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)

Format:

Closed-captioned
Color
Dolby
Dubbed
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Subtitled
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NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Kurt Russell
Ving Rhames
Scott Speedman
Michael Michele
Brendan Gleeson

The Rodney King riots of April 1992 hang like a keg of dynamite over Dark Blue, a crackling tale of Los Angeles police corruption that gives Kurt Russell one of the best roles of his underrated career. Adapted by Training Day screenwriter David Ayer from a story by L.A. Confidential novelist James Ellroy, the plot finds Russell's rule-bending detective teamed with a promising young partner (Scott Speedman) whose ethics have yet to be tainted. Their boss (Brendan Gleeson) is a lawless maverick, maneuvering the unwitting detectives into covering up a lucrative robbery scam, while L.A.P.D.'s Deputy Chief (Ving Rhames) campaigns to bring them all down. While adhering to familiar cop-thriller formula, director Ron Shelton (Bull Durham) escalates tension with forceful impact, drawing a climactic parallel between the King riots and the fallout from Russell's cynical behavior. It's a powerhouse combination, allowing Russell to find shades of complexity in a character who realizes, almost too late, that he's a devil in the hell of L.A. --Jeff Shannon

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Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

Sales Rank:20557
List Price: $14.94
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

Closed-captioned
Color
DVD-Video
Full Screen
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Spencer Tracy
Sidney Poitier
Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Houghton
Cecil Kellaway

Spencer Tracy's last performance was in this well-meaning, handsome film by Stanley Kramer about a pair of white parents (Tracy and Katharine Hepburn) trying to make sense of their daughter's impending marriage to an African American doctor (Sidney Poitier). The film has been knocked over the years for padding conflict and stoking easy liberalism by making Poitier's character in every socioeconomic sense a good catch: But what if Kramer had made this stranger a factory worker? Would the audience still find it as easy to accept a mixed-race relationship? But there's no denying the drawing power of this movie, which gets most of its integrity from the stirring performances of Tracy and Hepburn. When the former (who had been so ill that the production could not get completion insurance) gives a speech toward the end about race, love, and much else, it's impossible not to be affected by the last great moment in a great actor's life and career. --Tom Keogh

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American Pimp

Sales Rank:27168
List Price: $14.98
Lowest New Price: $4.27
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)

Format:

Anamorphic
Closed-captioned
Color
DVD-Video
Widescreen
NTSC

Director(s):

Albert Hughes
Allen Hughes

Actor(s):

John S. Dickson
Antonio Fargas
Heidi Fleiss
L. Hammond
Hugh M. Hefner

There's a fascinating film to be made about the pimp culture and the myth of the outlaw sexual entrepreneur. American Pimp, a slick and entertaining but rather timid documentary by filmmaking brother act Allen and Albert Hughes (Menace 2 Society, Dead Presidents) isn't quite it, but it's a captivating document nonetheless. Flashy, garrulous real-life characters with names like Charm, Rosebudd, Too $hort, C-Note, and the "internationally known" Bishop Don Magic Juan take over their interviews with silver-tongued charm, spinning self-aggrandizing, often contradictory stories of life in the trade. The Hughes never challenge those contradictions and give only token representation to the women in the life (who have either bought into the myth or are too cowed to say differently). Apart from a few unguarded statements by less cagey subjects, the film avoids the seedy flip side to the so-called benevolent relationship between pimp and "ho." More to the Hughes' point is the fluid relationship between media image (as celebrated in such blaxploitation classics such as The Mack and Willie Dynamite) and street image. Simultaneously embracing and decrying their outlaw status, these pimps transform themselves into peacocklike fashion statements inspired by the very images they find so denigrating. They are undeniably dynamic characters playing out a bizarre fantasy of wealth, power, and swaggering sexuality, but if the film shows the cracks in their masks, it never manages to reveal the men under the money or expose the fallacy behind the fantasy. --Sean Axmaker

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Booty Call

Sales Rank:17688
List Price: $9.95
Lowest New Price: $3.99
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)

Format:

Anamorphic
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Color
DVD-Video
Full Screen
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Director(s):

Actor(s):

Jamie Foxx
Tommy Davidson
Vivica A. Fox
Tamala Jones
Amy Monique Waddell

Okay, so Booty Call is trashy and often sophomoric. It is still funny. Tommy Davidson and Tamala Jones have been dating for almost two months and are pushed into that big romantic night by best friends Jamie Foxx and Vivica A. Fox (as the hysterically named "Lysterine"). The friends, of course, engage in a verbal war based on instant loathing and mutual attraction. The humor is low-brow and sometimes stereotypical, but this is worth watching just for the scene in which the two guys, concerned about "safe sex," cover themselves in plastic wrap. It pushes the envelope, which is fun, but the clearly homophobic tendencies cause it to lose ground. Still, there is chemistry between the players and plenty of laugh-out-loud scenes. --Rochelle O'Gorman

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Deep Cover

Sales Rank:15130
List Price: $14.98
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)

Format:

Anamorphic
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Director(s):

Actor(s):

Laurence Fishburne
Jeff Goldblum
Victoria Dillard
Charles Martin Smith
Sydney Lassick

Bill Duke (A Rage in Harlem) directed this edgy action yarn that stretches the barriers of the genre. It explores the fine line between good and evil, while testing the resolve of a moral man seduced by an easier, more pleasurable lifestyle. Although the plot eventually becomes too overblown and earnest, Deep Cover proves far more intelligent than the average action pic. Laurence Fishburne is the straight-arrow undercover cop who gets so far into his assumed identity that he has trouble recognizing the good guys from the bad. The characters, all flawed, are fleshed out and believable as they face their decisions with questions and doubt, unlike most in this genre. Jeff Goldblum provides smarmy comic relief as an eccentric mid-level drug dealer/attorney who is probably a psychopath and most definitely paving his path to hell. --Rochelle O'Gorman

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Men of Honor (Full-Screen Edition)

Sales Rank:31317
List Price: $14.98
Lowest New Price: $2.89
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)

Format:

Closed-captioned
Color
DVD-Video
Full Screen
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NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Robert De Niro
Cuba Gooding Jr.
Charlize Theron
Aunjanue Ellis
Hal Holbrook

Men of Honor presents a great role model for younger viewers, yet it's rated R due to abundant use of the F word. With appropriate discretion, parents should allow their preteen and teenaged children to see this rousing if altogether conventional biopic inspired by the life of Carl Brashear. Played with gravity and gumption by Cuba Gooding Jr., Brashear was the first African American to become a master diver in the U.S. Navy, despite the lingering effects of segregation, opposition from Navy brass, and the amputation of his left leg following a tragic on-duty accident. Robert De Niro adds marquee value and salty bluster as Billy Sunday, the drunken, redneck (and fictionalized) Master Chief who watches, with gradual admiration, as Brashear attains his ultimate goal through sheer force of will.

This is all quite uplifting on its surface, but in attempting to hit the requisite highlights of an inspiring biography, director George Tillman Jr. (Soul Food) reduces Brashear's achievement to a succession of clichés, forcing Gooding and De Niro to battle sentiment with their noteworthy performances. As Sunday's neglected wife, Charlize Theron is completely extraneous; Hal Holbrook's diving-school commander is a ranting caricature; and newcomer Aunjanue Ellis barely registers as Brashear's wife (in part because their obligatory romance is handled with an utter lack of finesse). There's no question that Brashear's efforts are heroic and worthy of recognition, so Men of Honor serves its basic purpose. Still, one can't help but wonder if Brashear's story would be even more impressive with a more authentic treatment. --Jeff Shannon

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New Jack City

Sales Rank:12093
List Price: $14.98
Lowest New Price: $5.60
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)

Format:

Anamorphic
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Color
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Full Screen
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NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

John Aprea
Nick Ashford
Bill Cobbs
Anthony DeSando
Flavor Flav

Some pundits called it a flawed, exploitative action film that glamorized drug dealing and the luxury of a lucrative criminal lifestyle, spawning a trend of films that attracted youth gangs and provoked violence in theaters. Others hailed it as a breakthrough movie that depicted drug dealers as ruthless, corrupt, and evil, leading dead-end lives that no rational youth would want to emulate. However you interpret it, New Jack City is still one of the first and best films of the 1990s to crack open the underworld of cocaine and peer inside with its eyes wide open. It's also the film that established Wesley Snipes as an actor to watch, with enough charisma to bring an insidious quality of seduction to his role as coke-lord Nino Brown, and enough intelligence to portray a character deluded by his own sense of indestructible power. Director Mario Van Peebles stretched his otherwise-limited talent to bring vivid authenticity and urgency to this crime story, and subplots involving a pair of tenacious cops (Ice-T, Judd Nelson) and a recovering coke addict (Chris Rock) provide additional dramatic tension. Although some critics may hesitate to admit it, New Jack City deserves mention in any serious discussion about African American filmmakers and influential films. --Jeff Shannon

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