Cleopatra Jones
Cleopatra Jones is a fictitious fantasy movie about America’s war on
drugs. It starts off with Cleopatra
showing up in Turkey and bossing the Turkish air force around and getting them
to bomb an opium poppy field, which she eyeballs to be worth about $30 million
dollars on the street. We all know that
lately Turkey has been doing backflips to try and
gain membership in the European Union, but this film makes it seem like these
guys are just eager to please anyone to the point that if a self-assured woman with
an afro tells them to blow up a farm they oblige. I don’t have a problem with Turkey destroying
heroine plantations, but I think they should maybe have a bit more initiative
and self-respect and just do this stuff on there own.
Cleo comes back
the USA where some hitmen are waiting for her at the
airport. But she emerges on the baggage
carousel in a precarious and laboured but nonetheless striking pose and
dispatches the hitmen with a pistol in a big
shootout. I guess incidents like this
and the one at the beginning of Big Trouble in Little China are what
have led to today’s stringent airport security precautions. That 9/11 thing might have something to do
with it too.
This film is
clearly a fantasy seeing as it’s made in the 1970s, if it had been an accurate
portrayal of America’s war on drugs at the time, there
wouldn’t be any drugs around today. I
saw this more realistic movie called Traffic starring Michael Douglas a
few years ago and in that film they talk endlessly about how the USA’s anti-drug
department can’t compete with drug lords.
The big victory in Traffic was Benecio
Del Toro getting some fuckin’ lamps on a baseball
diamond. And I guess Don Cheadle interrupted a drug lord’s pool party and put the
guy off his Kool-Aid for a moment, but that’s pretty slim potatoes compared
what Cleopatra Jones accomplishes in the fist five minutes of her movie. And that’s what makes me say Cleopatra
Jones is more of a far-fetched fantasy movie.
And whatever
organization it is that’s funding Cleopatra clearly has money to spare since
they can afford to equip her with a really nice Corvette that has a little
hydraulic panel that opens up so her afro can stick out the top and a lavish
home. She gets around in some pretty
stylish outfits and clearly has a lot of training in martial arts, dirt bike
riding, international relations, and sasstalking.
Cleo’s nemesis
is Big Mumma (played by Shelly Winters and not by
Martin Lawrence) who is a fat middle-aged white lesbian drug lord. She lives like a big baby throwing tantrums
about how much money Cleo is costing her and getting served treats by young
sexy women in slutty outfits who she slaps on the ass. Big Mumma’s
strategy is to fuck up a charity that Cleo runs so that Cleo will show up to
sort the shit out and then Big Mumma’s hitmen can kill her.
It makes sense, except her idea is to pay some dirty cops to storm in
and plant drugs on somebody in the charity and use it as an excuse to shut the
place down. Only the charity
organization is a drug rehabilitation centre, so to me, the idea of a drug
addict who is seeking rehab getting caught with some drugs on him doesn’t quite
seem like a scandal. I think they
should’ve planted some lame whitefolk music like
Barry Manilow in her record collection and attacked her
street cred that way.
But somehow the
whole drug-addict-possessing-drugs thing works and that’s legitimate reason to
shut the down an institution devoted to fighting the demand for drugs, no
wonder Michael Douglas was so fucking frustrated in that Traffic
movie. I guess I shouldn’t have doubted
Big Mumma.
I’ll tell you guys a little story from my exciting professional
life. I had all this filing that I
needed help with and so my boss allowed me to hire an assistant to help with
this stuff. We got two applicants, one
was a regular type young woman and the other was a young woman with a really
slutty look and huge knockers. The
chesty one kinda came across snotty and cold and so I
decided to go with the regular-looking chick since I can see pretty ladies
other ways and I actually needed somebody who was going to work, and the
average-looking chick was much more friendly.
A lady in another part of the office took the pornstar-looking
chick because she needed an assistant, too. My co-workers all got really
furious with me for depriving them of having this pornstar-looking
chick prancing around our end of the office for their amusement. It turned out both chicks were totally
useless and the pornstar chick was fired just before
I fired my regular-looking chick. So the
moral of the story is that useless eyecandy would’ve
been better than just plain useless. Big
Mumma hires her servants based on looks, and it
seemed to have worked out fine, and this who drug frame-job thing worked, so my
professional instincts are clearly not as good as Big Mumma’s
and I’ll never doubt her again.
Anyway, back to
the film. This film is in the blaxploitation genre as it is a 1970s crime film that
features a black hero wearing very flamboyant outfits and saying sassy things while
strutting around to funk music. This
film also deals with typical blaxploitation themes
such as corrupt white cops (involving perfuse use of the word ‘honky’) and The
Man keeping blacks in the ghetto as well as themes such as the gitting of you, sucka, the
crossing of 110th street, and various superfly
shafts.
But this film
is definitely a different breed. It’s a
lot higher budget than most of this stuff.
There are scenes that take place indoors where you can actually see
everything because they seem to have lighting ‘n stuff (maybe Benecio Del Toro arranged that). And the fight choreography is okay too. There’s none of that Dolemite
stuff where an out of shape hero clearly kicks air near a dude’s stomach the
dude falls down holding his face. The
plot is also a lot bigger in scope. It’s
more like a James Bond feature considering Big Mumma’s
evil layer, the gadget-tricked-out Corvette, and the whole part at the end
where Big Mumma decides to kill Cleopatra by putting
her in a slowkill easily escapable situation out of
sight.
The weird thing
is the lack of music. Sure, the score’s
all funky sounds, but there’s no singing or theme song. And a name like Cleopatra Jones just begs to
have itself written into a song. Superfly looked like it was filmed without permits
using security cameras, but they ponied up the dough
to get Curtis Mayfield to perform one of the best original sountracks
ever. So what gives? I mean, I said this feels like a James Bond
movie, but even Bond had theme songs.
The higher
production value has a lot of perks. The
film has one really good car chase and some of the dialogue is great. There’s a character called Doodlebug who
steals the show by giving a monologue about how a woman is like your hair, you
treat it good and it treats you good, it gets out of line and you cut it. Which is a strong theme in the movie since
Cleo is good to people who treat her good and grows at a rate of about 1
centimetre per month (okay I made that last part up). But this movie also has one of my pet peeves,
which is when other characters stand around talking about how good-looking the
main character is. I think when the
camera stands around and gawks at a lady walking in slowmotion,
we the audience can tell she’s supposed to be hot. And Tamara Dobson is very pretty, so they
definitely didn’t need to tell you.
I realize in
real life people do stand around and talk about how big some applicant for an
assistant position’s knockers are, but I think it’s one of those things that
just doesn’t work in movies. It kinda fails one
of two ways. If the actor cast in the
role is good-looking, like in this movie, we the audience will figure that out
on our own. But sometimes they don’t
cast somebody who’s very good looking and it feels really weird when other
characters talk about how hot she is and she isn’t.
So for more of
a James Bond type blaxploitation feature, I feel this
is a success. I have not seen the
sequel, but will try to rent it eventually.
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