Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha

Details

Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha
Directed by Melvin Van Peebles
Opens August 21, Cinema Village

Related Content

• Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
  December 22, 2010
• Melvin Peebles Gets a BAADASSSSS Review from the Voice
  December 7, 2010
• From The Archives: Colson Whitehead On The Digable Planets, 1993
  October 28, 2011
• Q&A: Orthrelm And Krallice's Mick Barr On Free Improv & Jazz, Working With "Klassikill" Music Sage Nondor Nevai, And Not Being In Hella
  December 5, 2011
• VOICES FROM THE EDGE
  May 11, 2010

More About

• Melvin Van Peebles

In Melvin Van Peebles's homely home-video-art love-story curio, incorporating fragments of his 1982 stage musical Waltz of the Stork, the seventysomething star-writer-director plays the lead role from age 15 to 45, opposite actors who are, in every case, younger. This makes the scenes of teenaged sexual discovery particularly eyebrow-raising. Like practically everything in the movie, the device only really "works" on a theoretical level, though it's transfixing for a time, in a slightly sad way. Van Peebles's unnamed protagonist narrates back on his life from middle age, talking over reenactments of his running away from Chicago ("Itchyfoot" meaning wanderlust), escape from gangsters, Harlem domesticity, pirate fighting with the Merchant Marines, gigoloing, and courtiering in royal Africa. The film has a footling kind of style, emptying the whole after-effects toolbox of weird wipes, superimpositions, and solarizations. There's little concession to period detail in blithely anachronistic street scenes, and the art direction is not much more than one would expect from a backyard eighth-grade production. There's a temptation to "give" this to Van Peebles, but any scene in which actors get to interact is deathly awkward, and 100 minutes should never feel this long.