Block Party

I really want to see Dave Chappelle's Block Party, directed by the amazing Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), mainly because of the review that I'm excerpting here. So here's a BIG chunk from Stephanie Zacharek's review on Salon.com (because a lot of you don't have Salon subscriptions and because Zacharek is my favorite film critic).

While the rest of us are busy carving up the country -- red state, blue state; urban, suburban; sophisticated, rustic; them, us -- in "Dave Chappelle's Block Party," there's room for only one America, but it's one big enough to include everybody. "Block Party" -- directed by Michel Gondry, and shot on film, not video, by Gondry's frequent collaborator, cinematographer Ellen Kuras -- is partly a performance documentary, a record of an afternoon-into-evening concert that took place on Sept. 18, 2004, at the L-shaped intersection of two quiet Bed-Stuy streets: The artists featured on the program include Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Kanye West, the Roots and Dead Prez, as well as, remarkably, the reunited Fugees. But "Block Party" is also a record of Chappelle just horsing around, both in New York and Ohio. And Chappelle's horsing around is often funnier, and more brilliant, than the routines other comedians spend months honing.

Chappelle will turn out to be, I think, one of the defining comedians of our era, partly because his jokes and routines -- as he has shown on his hit Comedy Central series "Chappelle's Show" and elsewhere -- are so sociologically sharp that they almost defy laughter. I'm still feeling rattled by a sketch I saw on the first-season DVD of "Chappelle's Show," in which Chappelle plays a black white supremacist. (Blind from birth, he has simply convinced himself that he's white, availing himself of all the power and standing that his imaginary skin color grants him.) I'm not wholly convinced I didn't dream this sketch. Chappelle's ideas are both outlandish and beautifully conceived, and although his riffs never seem forced or canned, you get the feeling they spring from thoughts that have been marinating for a long time. His gags have the rare distinction of feeling both spontaneous and considered.

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"Block Party" is a rangy, open-hearted picture; its spirit is one of joyous inclusiveness, and I suspect it will open the eyes (and ears) of many people who claim not to like hip-hop, if only because it shows that the term is such a broad umbrella for a vast range of styles. Considering hip-hop is the biggest force in pop music today, I'm always surprised by the number of people I meet (most of them, admittedly, over 40 and white) who think it's all gangsta rap, and who, for that reason, have decided that they unilaterally don't like it -- which is a little like deciding you don't like abstract painting without ever having seen a Rauschenberg or a Pollock. Nearly all the performances in "Block Party" are vital and highly charged, even though they're also extremely varied. The simmering political frustration that courses through Dead Prez's numbers is a world apart from, say, the Fugees' accomplished but perhaps too studied version of "Killing Me Softly." Even so, it's remarkable to see all these performers brought together in one place, and it's easy enough to trace the threads between astonishing performers like Jill Scott (the spiritual daughter of Abbey Lincoln) and Erykah Badu (whose magnificent exploding-star afro is like a visual ode to Sly Stone).

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The camera gets a charge just from the look of Chappelle: In the early minutes of the movie, we see him prancing about with a bullhorn, announcing the details of his upcoming concert to us and to the world, a gangly cheerleader at an improvised pep rally. Chappelle has no butt: He's all joints and limbs, a lanky puppet on invisible strings. Later, he'll use that same bullhorn while driving down one of the tonier streets of what I'm almost sure is Brooklyn's Fort Greene, his rallying cry of "Attention, Huxtables!" echoing down a canyon of exquisitely renovated brownstones.

Chappelle's humor is unabashedly racial, though not racist; he seems to get that erasing differences isn't the answer, and it isn't even desirable. He spends some time talking to an aged white hippie couple who own an outlandish (and amazing) churchlike building right near the spot where the concert will take place. They tell a fairly wild story about how their house got its name, "Broken Angel," which is painted in swooping letters on its facade.

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His America has room for the lady in Ohio who works in the store where he buys his cigarettes (she confesses that, out of respect for his privacy, she had always pretended she didn't know who he was, even as she was screaming to herself, "It's Dave Chappelle!"), as well as for the old hippies who may not like his taste in music but who are nonetheless happy to support his little "happening."

At a time when our country feels divided to the point of cracking, "Dave Chappelle's Block Party" feels like a salve. It's a defiant act of optimistic patriotism. This is what Dave Chappelle's America looks like, and now that we get the idea, there's no reason we can't live in it too.