African American Cinema on VHS
|
The Return of Superfly
Price: Check for Updated Price
Category: VHS Movies
 Publisher: Vidmark / Trimark Starring: Nathan Purdee, Margaret Avery, Leonard L. Thomas, Christopher Curry, Carlos Carrasco Directed By: Sig Shore Prices subject to change. Please verify pricing during checkout. |
|
|
|
|
|
Malcolm X (2pc)
List Price: $4.98 Now Only: $2.39 You Save: $ 2.59 (52%)
Category: VHS Movies
Publisher: Warner Home Video Starring: Angela Bassett, O.L. Duke, Al Freeman Jr., Sonny Jim Gaines, Albert Hall Prices subject to change. Please verify pricing during checkout. |
|
Filmmaker Spike Lee, star Denzel Washington (the New York, Boston and Chicago Film Critics' choice as 1992's Best Actor) and other talents vividly portray the life and times of the visionary leader. "One of the decade's best and most important films." (Arch Campbell, WRC-TV/Washington D.C.). |
|
|
|
Rosewood
List Price: $9.98 Now Only: $5.72 You Save: $ 4.26 (43%)
Category: VHS Movies
Publisher: Warner Home Video Starring: Jon Voight, Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle, Bruce McGill, Loren Dean Directed By: John Singleton Prices subject to change. Please verify pricing during checkout. |
|
A shameful chapter in American history is powerfully dramatized in Rosewood, but moviegoers in 1997 may not have been ready for the African American equivalent of Schindler's List. And while the massacre that occurred in the nearly all-black town of Rosewood, Florida, in 1922 cannot compare in scale to the Nazi holocaust, it potently illustrates the same issues of racism and inherited intolerance that percolate at every level of human existence. An estimated 40 to 150 blacks were killed in Rosewood by an all-white lynch mob from the neighboring town of Sumner, where a white woman falsely claimed she'd been assaulted by a black man. The resulting mayhem ignited a tinderbox of resentment toward the flourishing citizens of Rosewood, and those few who survived were so traumatized that they remained silent until the truth was revealed by an investigative journalist in 1982. |
|
|
|
Boxing's Best: Sugar Ray Robinson
Price: $79.99
Category: VHS Movies
Publisher: Hbo Home Video Starring: Boxing's Best: Sugar Ray Robinson Prices subject to change. Please verify pricing during checkout. |
|
A shameful chapter in American history is powerfully dramatized in Rosewood, but moviegoers in 1997 may not have been ready for the African American equivalent of Schindler's List. And while the massacre that occurred in the nearly all-black town of Rosewood, Florida, in 1922 cannot compare in scale to the Nazi holocaust, it potently illustrates the same issues of racism and inherited intolerance that percolate at every level of human existence. An estimated 40 to 150 blacks were killed in Rosewood by an all-white lynch mob from the neighboring town of Sumner, where a white woman falsely claimed she'd been assaulted by a black man. The resulting mayhem ignited a tinderbox of resentment toward the flourishing citizens of Rosewood, and those few who survived were so traumatized that they remained silent until the truth was revealed by an investigative journalist in 1982. |
|
|
|
Eve's Bayou
List Price: $14.99 Now Only: $1.95 You Save: $ 13.04 (87%)
Category: VHS Movies
Publisher: Vidmark / Trimark Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Jurnee Smollett, Meagan Good, Lynn Whitfield, Debbi Morgan Directed By: Kasi Lemmons Prices subject to change. Please verify pricing during checkout. |
|
Actress Kasi Lemmons made an auspicious debut as a writer and director with this delicately handled, wrenchingly emotional drama, hailed by critic Roger Ebert as one of the best films of 1997. Eve's Bayou begins with ominous narration: "The summer I killed my father, I was 10 years old." From that point the story moves backward in time and memory to Louisiana in 1962, when a young girl named Eve (Jurnee Smollett) witnesses a shocking act on the part of her womanizing father (Samuel L. Jackson). But what really happened? And can Eve be certain about what she saw when there is more than one interpretation of the facts? Less a mystery than a study of deeply rooted emotions rising to the surface to affect an entire family, the film has the quality of classic Southern literature, with layers of memory unfolding to reveal a carefully guarded truth. --Jeff Shannon. |
|
|
|
Ladies Sing the Blues
Price: $19.98  May be eligible for FREE Shipping offer
Category: VHS Movies
Publisher: View Video Starring: Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, Dinah Washington, Lena Horne, Peggy Lee Prices subject to change. Please verify pricing during checkout. |
|
WINNER OF: -The American Video Conference/Billboard Magazine -The International Film & TV Festival of NY -The American Film & Video Festival The "Ladies" who created an art form and sang their way into legend… a bygone era is recaptured in this filmed salute to the women who started it all… whose turn of phrase made musical history. Priceless footage of the great American divas (complete songs, not just tantalizing excerpts) Billie Holiday backed by the most extraordinary band ever formed-Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Benny Webster, Roy Eldridge, and Gerry Mulligan. The great Bessie Smith in her only film appearance…Dinah Washington from the stage of The Apollo Theatre…Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne, and others, singing their classics. For many of them, this was their only performance on camera…Certainly some of the greatest performances! Performances thought to be lost to time! V.I.E.W. |
|
|
|
Lady Day - The Many Faces of Billie Holiday
List Price: $19.95 Now Only: $2.88 You Save: $ 17.07 (86%)
Category: VHS Movies
Publisher: Kultur Video Starring: Billie Holiday Prices subject to change. Please verify pricing during checkout. |
|
Given the often inextricable relationship between art and suffering, it's no coincidence that Billie Holiday, popularly acclaimed as jazz's greatest (if not technically best) female singer, was also one of its most tragic figures. While both triumph and tragedy are covered in this hourlong documentary, we are mercifully spared excessive details about the more sordid aspects of Holiday's life (her drug and alcohol addictions, her disastrous relationships with abusive men) in favor of careful consideration of her music. Testimonials are offered by those who played with her (pianist Mal Waldron and trumpeters Buck Clayton and Harry "Sweets" Edison), were influenced or inspired by her (singers Carmen McRae and Annie Ross), or worked with her (producer Milt Gabler). Together, they paint a portrait of a woman who was both tough and vulnerable, sad and defiant, an unschooled musician who became a supreme innovator. |
|
|
|
Jazz on a Summer's Day
Price: $35.00
Category: VHS Movies
Publisher: New Yorker Video Starring: Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, Chuck Berry, Chico Hamilton, Gerry Mulligan Directed By: Bert Stern, Aram Avakian Prices subject to change. Please verify pricing during checkout. |
|
Part concert documentary, part pop-cultural time capsule, Bert Stern's Jazz on a Summer's Day chronicles the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival with an approach as deceptively relaxed, even impulsive, as the music itself. Still photographer Stern sidesteps more formal documentary conventions such as narrative voiceovers to wander purposefully from festival stage to boarding-house jam sessions, taking in the parallel color and motion of the America's Cup preparations when he isn't capturing rich color footage of the performances and the celebratory mood of the concertgoers. In the process, he documents American jazz at a notably golden moment in its development--diverse, adventurous, and still broadly popular, this was jazz not yet under the shadow of rock and youth culture, played by an integrated artistic community a few short years away from social and political turmoil that would boil divisively to the surface during the '60s. To say Stern was rolling film in a jazz Camelot is overstatement, but only slightly so. |
|
|
|
Pootie Tang
List Price: $9.98 Now Only: $2.99 You Save: $ 6.99 (70%)
Category: VHS Movies
Publisher: Paramount Starring: Tristan Armoogan, Chris Rock, Lance Crouther, J.B. Smoove, Jennifer Coolidge Directed By: Louis C.K. Prices subject to change. Please verify pricing during checkout. |
|
Pootie Tang pushes blaxploitation to the point of surrealism. The title character--who first appeared on The Chris Rock Show--speaks a kind of slang on steroids, an incomprehensible stream of nonsense syllables that nonetheless makes him irresistible to women and a threat to evildoers everywhere. Pootie is part movie star, part superhero, righting wrongs with the slap of his daddy's belt. But when an evil corporation uses a super-ho named Ireenie (Jennifer Coolidge from Best in Show and Legally Blonde) to steal this magic belt, Pootie must find himself again. |
|
|
|
Watermelon Woman
List Price: $29.95 Now Only: $28.45 You Save: $ 1.50 (5%) May be eligible for FREE Shipping offer
Category: VHS Movies
Publisher: First Run Features Starring: V.S. Brodie, Lisa Marie Bronson, Cheryl Clarke, Emmy Collins, Irene Dunye Prices subject to change. Please verify pricing during checkout. |
|
Cheryl Dunye has transcended the usual pitfalls that pockmark most lesbian-themed movies: specifically, the usual angst and suffering that occur when the gay gal falls for a heterosexual friend. The Watermelon Woman is more a cultural document, addressing speculative sociological gay history themes with an interesting and engaging cover story about a video store clerk named Cheryl (played by Dunye) who, in her research for a movie, comes across an old-time black actress simply called "the watermelon woman" and becomes obsessed with her persona. In the process, Cheryl finds herself embroiled in a relationship that parallels that of her icon. What makes The Watermelon Woman special is its layered story line and its willingness to present its characters as comically flawed. |
|
|
