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[The Shadow]

Did anyone else catch the first part yesterday? The second part airs tonight. It's a true life documentary about a black heavyweight champ around the turn of the century. The first part ended with all the news about the race riots and violence after Jack Johnson won the heavyweight championship against a white man. Pretty interesting stuff IMO.

It airs on PBS.

http://www.pbs.org/unforgivableblackness/

 

[UtadaBarkley]

Damn I missed this... The previews looked good. It's coming out on DVD, or it's already out, I'll have to give it a rent.

 

[karasu]

I caught it on PBShD, it was grand. He had poor taste in women though.

 

[The Shadow]

Damn I missed this... The previews looked good. It's coming out on DVD, or it's already out, I'll have to give it a rent.

Looks like it's already available at the PBS store.

 

[Prospero]

The DVD came out last week--I bought it, but haven't had time to watch it yet.

 

[bishoptl]

I read the preview of this in the Washington Post. Looking forward to watching it on DVD.

 

[Matlock]

Somehow, this was a documentary that kept my attention for more than ten minutes at a time.

That's saying quite a bit.

 

[Nerevar]

it's Ken Burns - what do you expect. This guy is the best documentarian (is that even a word?) of our time, possibly ever.

 

[Tommie Hu$tle]

Jack Johnson like Shirley Chisholm is one of my favorite historical Black figures. He is the prototypical black athelete that white people love to hate. You see shades of him in Moss, Owens, Tyson, Iverson, Bryan but they are all cheap knockoffs. Jack Johnson was the real deal "I don't give a fuck, pay me and give me your white bitches." athlete. To me he is real because he stuck it to the man when the wages of sin were death. Now-a-days the wages of sin are 3 mil off your endorcement.

 

[Shinobi]

I recorded both parts with my new DVD recorder. Only saw the last ten minutes of part one, but it was fascinating.

 

[heavy liquid]

They were talking about this on NPR the other day. I'm looking forward to catching it on DVD.

 

[Rorschach]

I missed it because of work, but I'll probably be picking up the DVDs.

Also,

Spoiler

Glad to see this isn't about TBS.

 

[Prospero]

So since I was snowed in today, I spent four hours with this.

It was great to see a film that's mainly made up of talking heads, still shots, and voiceovers kick the ass of all the big-budget, whitewashed Hollywood American biopics that came out last year. It was absolutely riveting, and gave a complex and balanced portrait of the guy (instead of glossing over his flaws in favor of portraying his badassery). There's little treatment to the source material that goes beyond cleaning it up--there are sound effects added to the originally silent footage of Johnson's fights, but they're so subtle that you don't even notice them much.

I think it's worth a blind buy (that's what I did, at any rate), but if PBS runs this again you have to watch it.

 

[Ninja Scooter]

i saw this when it aired on PBS last week. Excellent doc. Probably pick it up on DVD sometime. Its amazing all the shit Jack Johnson had to endure. Not getting a title shot until he was 30 (years after he deserved one) because all the white fighters were afraid of him. And the kinds of stuff he did would make Randy Moss and Terell Owens seem tame by comparison, yet he was doing it at the turn of the century. Not to make this sound wrong, but i am surpised he wasn't ever killed or lynched, but i guess it really shows what kind of cowards those guys were back then.

 

[Prospero]

And the kinds of stuff he did would make Randy Moss and Terell Owens seem tame by comparison, yet he was doing it at the turn of the century. Not to make this sound wrong, but i am surpised he wasn't ever killed or lynched, but i guess it really shows what kind of cowards those guys were back then.

Yeah, when he

Spoiler

went into an all-white bordello and brought three prostitutes back to his hotel room at once

, I thought, "Today's press would roast a professional athlete for that, no matter what race he was."

 

[ShadowRed]

Yeah I saw it last week when it aired and it was fucking great.

i saw this when it aired on PBS last week. Excellent doc. Probably pick it up on DVD sometime. Its amazing all the shit Jack Johnson had to endure. Not getting a title shot until he was 30 (years after he deserved one) because all the white fighters were afraid of him. And the kinds of stuff he did would make Randy Moss and Terell Owens seem tame by comparison, yet he was doing it at the turn of the century. Not to make this sound wrong, but i am surpised he wasn't ever killed or lynched, but i guess it really shows what kind of cowards those guys were back then.

It was a different time back then. You didn't have the instant media of today plus you had a midset that the people didn't really need to know what happened in a public figures life to the Nth degree, unlike today.