SHORT TAKES
COOLEY HIGH (AIP) :: Billed as a black American Graffiti, which it's not, Cooley High is the best black movie since Claudine, but it's convincing for different reasons. Where James Earl Jones and Diahann Carroll made you believe they were sickeningly sweet, the characters in this flick ride high (with laughs and a great Motown oldies soundtrack) on the contradictions between being sweet and nasty, without once convincing you they are either.
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SHORT TAKES
COOLEY HIGH (AIP) :: Billed as a black American Graffiti, which it's not, Cooley High is the best black movie since Claudine, but it's convincing for different reasons. Where James Earl Jones and Diahann Carroll made you believe they were sickeningly sweet, the characters in this flick ride high (with laughs and a great Motown oldies soundtrack) on the contradictions between being sweet and nasty, without once convincing you they are either. The all-suffering black mama intends to chastise her oldest boy but as he goes to get the belt she falls asleep waiting for him because she's pooped from working three jobs. And the hero learns through the senseless death of his best friend that he wants to keep his life together, but at the final funeral scene he walks off to college with a bottle of cheap whiskey in his hand.
Georgia Christgau
MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (Cinema 5) :: The legend of King Arthur gets a well deserved swipe in what may be the comedy film of the decade, or at least the week. British comedy army Monty Python (Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jon$s and Michael Palin) concoct a smorgasboard of sight gags, puns, black humor and satire that reduces Camelot to a madhouse populated by senile wizards, man eating rabbits, cowardly knights,^effeminate giants/ socialist serfs, modern day paddy wagons and holy hand grenades (blessed by Rome, natch). The comedy pace is faster than the Marx Brothers ever dreamed of and the humor is cerebral enough to make Woody Allen wince. If you enjoy laughing, drooling or sticking your thumb up your nose and making strange noises, you owe it to yourself to see this film as opposed to listening to it which would be a fairly silly move on your part.
Ed Naha
