“Lee’s vision was not only necessary, it proved remarkably prescient,” wrote British writer Ashley Clark in an edited extract from his book Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled published in the Guardian in 2015. “Bamboozled’s trenchant commentary on the importance, complexity and lasting effects of media representation could hardly feel more urgent. Each time an unarmed black person is killed, then hurriedly repositioned in death as a thug, a brute, or a layabout by mainstream media outlets… we are seeing the perpetuation of old anti-black stereotypes, forged in the crucible of mass American art, reconfigured for our time.”
Critical opinion on Bamboozled began to change. In Indiewire, Jordan Ruimy argued, “Lee’s film is as relevant as ever, dealing with an African American’s frustration with a blindly racist country.” Lee says of the change in opinion, “Many years later it’s rediscovered and so that’s a good feeling. It’s not a thing like ‘Yeah motherfuckers I told you back then’. That’s not the attitude that I had. I’m just happy that people are rediscovering the film. Also, people see this film who weren’t even born when it came out. There is a new generation that wasn’t even around when the film came out.”
Now the film has been added to the Criterion Collection, a home entertainment label that has become synonymous with organising re-releases of only the best of cinema. According to Abbey Lustgarten, who produced the release for Criterion, “It [Bamboozled] has been long overdue for a reappraisal as a central work in Lee’s filmography. This was also a chance to do something the filmmaker had wanted, from a technical perspective. With newer restoration tools and access to original materials, we could address the challenging mix of DV and 16mm footage and make that contrast as distinct as Lee and his cinematographer Ellen Kuras had always imagined.”
The release has seen a wave of articles citing the importance and greatness of Lee’s film. David Fear argued in Rolling Stone, “At the turn of the century, it seemed like a crude attempt at sketch comedy. Twenty years later, the movie feels like a forgotten gem in Spike’s career, one whose spit-polish and reappraisal comes at the exact right moment.” Lee says, “I don’t think it’s a case of I’ve been vindicated because I knew what I did when I did it. It’s just that old cliché, better late than never.”
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