3 Black Chicks Review Flicks: Movie Reviews With Flava! - Book Review

Black Issues Book Review, Nov-Dec, 2002 by Sharon D. Johnson

by Kamal "The Diva" Larsuel-Ulbricht, Rose "Bams" Cooper, Cassandra "Cass" Henry Amistad, November 2002 $17.95, ISBN 0-060-50871-X

As its title proclaims, 3 Black Chicks Review Flicks is a movie guide written from the point of view of three black women. Kamal "The Diva" Larsuel-Ulbricht, Rose "Barns" Cooper and Cassandra "Cass" Henry--who live in Lansing, Michigan, New Orleans and Seattle respectively--transformed their successful Internet site into a catalog of almost 250 film reviews. As the subtitle indicates, these are movie reviews with tiara, further emphasizing that sistah girls are doing the critiquing.

If readers can accept the occasional charm of the lingo, they'll find a comprehensive and funny book whose purpose, according to its authors, is "to get the reader to enjoy going to the movies again, and to get Hollywood to understand that viewers won't settle for subpar movies."

Films are grouped into 16 separate chapters, including "Black Gold" (African American Academy Award nominees), "Late-Night Booty-Call Flicks" "Independently Thinking" and "When Bad Things Happen to White Folks" (no explanation necessary). The Chicks examine such factors as The Brotha Rule: how soon the black male character dies; STS, or Spot the Spot: finding the lone person of color in a film; and most important, The Black Factor: the commentary on relevance to black culture, history or sociology. Each film is rated using a traffic light scale from "Green," meaning "What are you waiting for?" to "Red" meaning "I don't think so!"

There is some unevenness in how films are grouped. For example, the chapter "In Celebration of Our Culture: Blaxploitation (or what we call `The Classics') and Beyond," is muddied with a mix of 1970s blaxploitation films (which deserve a chapter of their own) and more contemporary films, such as Baby Boy, The Best Man and Bamboozled. That Eve's Bayou is also reviewed in this chapter and not in "Independently Thinking" seems odd. Bayou was the highest grossing independent film of 1997, a fact omitted from the text, including the chapter entitled "Intermission: A Movie Trivia Quiz." And while the authors give much love to all of Pam Grier's films, they curiously do not review Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino's 1997 homage to the blaxploitation flick, starring Grier and Samuel L. Jackson.

Another criticism is the Chicks' failure to research some of their entries. In her review of The Matrix, "Bams" expresses her anticipation of the sequel where actress Gloria Foster, who died in September 2001, might reprise her role as the Oracle. Since the authors refer to Halle Berry's and Denzel Washington's 2002 Oscar wins, the mistake obviously was not an "as we went to press" oversight.

Overall, 3 Black Chicks Review Flicks is a thoroughly enjoyable guide that will appeal to moviegoers across the racial divide.

--Sharon D. Johnson is a journalist, screenwriter and chair of the Writers Guild of America, West Committee of Black Writers.