Chris Rock’s “Top Five” has better casual Black History talk than any comedy I have ever seen…
Real film reviewers have probably covered Chris Rock’s 2014 comedy Top Five. But I am flippantly certain that no one on this planet has evaluated this star studded film for its throw-away Black history lines. This shot right here, full of the best of them, makes me think of Wyatt Cenac’s Medicine for Melancholy:
Wyatt’s lead and his love interest were in a fictional West-Coast city playing with relatively lightweight Black history quips, which were frustratingly one-sided (nothing coming from Wyatt’s Black woman—which is from my experience very, very realistic). It would never surprise me to discover that the researching habits of Chris Rock saw these scenes and had his female lead, Rosario Dawson, take it to another level in his movie.
What does surprise me is that Chris Rock would get his ‘answer’ to Wyatt out in a film that is clearly designed to be mainstream vehicle (in contrast to, say, the more continentally domestic 2 Days In New York). Rock is making a serious attempt to get some Woody-Allenesque-anti-Semitic-lampooning depth into his on-screen Blackness. (Of course it would sting a little to find that the screenwriter who wrote all the Black history lines, featuring some gory details of the Haitian revolution, was just another educated white dude.)
It should be commonplace by now that details about the many, many fascinating events of Black history should be thrown about in Black films. I should be complaining by now that yet another Black professor of Black history is consulting for Black Hollywood films. It is indeed melancholy that I have to praise a multi-millionaire dude of African descent in the heights of his career taking such care in the 21st century.
Dudes should be doing this right-straight from yard.
Anyway: thanks, Chris Rock.