Spike Lees Bamboozled
Spike Lee's Bamboozled

This weekend, the NW Film Center kicks off their "Constructing Identity: Black Cinema Then and Now" series—which, as we note in Things To Do Film, offers a "retrospective on the varied voices of Black cinema, including key works by Julie Dash, Spencer Williams, and Spike Lee, all doing their part to show Black identity in ways not typically exhibited on American movie screens."

The first film in the series is Spike Lee's Bamboozled, which screens Saturday and Sunday. Bamboozled was met with mixed reactions when it landed in 2000—critics were divided, and audiences didn't show up—but as the Mercury's Bobby Roberts wrote last year,

Maybe Spike Lee's most adventurous and experimental film, Bamboozled stars Damon Wayans as an executive producer who tries to get himself fired by developing an actual minstrel show for television, which of course becomes hugely successful, because the American media is racist as hell. When it was released in 2000, it was criticized for being pretty ham-fisted and more than a little unrealistic. 16 years have transformed it from mean-spirited dystopic fantasy to very goddamned prescient satire. You're gonna laugh. It's gonna hurt when you do.

Thanks to the NW Film Center (thanks, NW Film Center!), I've got a pair of tickets to give away to tomorrow afternoon's screening—the movie's showing Sat April 1 at 4:30 pm at the NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium (1219 SW Park). Want to win those tickets? Then email me no later than 1 pm today (Friday, March 31), and make sure your subject line is "A Spike Lee joint." I'll pick a winner at 1 and email 'em back. That's it! Have at! too bad, they're already gone. :(