Just the Ticket #225: Bulworth Brings Back the Soundtrack
a.k.a. The Ticketmaster.
Originally conceived by Warren Beatty (who directed, co-produced, co-wrote, and stars as the title character) as a romantic thriller about a man who puts a hit out on himself but then falls in love (spoilers for the actual plot, I guess), Bulworth reached its final form when Beatty felt inspired by his history with politics and chose rap and hip-hop as the film's defining culture because of the "great comic contrast" that would be possible. And so, we got a typical white savior/magical negro narrative in the vein of fish-out-of-water comedies like Analyze This, Mickey Blue Eyes, and Bringing Down the House, that I have strong memories of thinking it didn't go weird enough or take its premise as far as it could have.
Happy Birthday to my America, Ticketholders!
I guess you'd call me a liberal, or "left-wing," if you had to put me in a binary box, but the one conservative hope I have is that we as a country can get back to a time resembling what we had before this past decade of insanity, hate, and fear, because twelve score and ten years ago, our founding fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. And then women, eventually, once all the witchcraft paranoia got hung out to die and one of them made our flag.
It took a lot longer than four score and seven years to even approach that equality, and a mere handful of years, plus at least as many acts of upheaval to affect a frankly superficial level of social change before the next manufactured boogeyman of the month instigated a mass fear response of, by, and for the wrong people to get it all rolling again like one of my favorite blended metaphors: Sysiphus getting Kafka'd into a scarab and getting eternally crushed by the giant ball of shit he's pushing up a hill to make the sun rise. Yeah; I bet you didn't know the Egyptian sun god was a dung beetle, did you? Well, now you do. Which means the sun in Egyptian myth, much like politics and attempted social reform, is full of shit.
And speaking of being full of shit, somewhere between Rodney King and Black Lives Matter, there was Bulworth....
But maybe that's for the best?
Beatty (who had to professionally add a 't' to his last name because his name sounded too violent, maybe) plays fictional incumbent California senator Jay Billington Bulworth (a name so pretentious and on-the-nose that if you couldn't see him, you'd imagine a rich, white guy who's full of shit and worth every brown pound that comes out of his mouth), who has a nervous breakdown and hires a hitman to kill him so his family can have the insurance money. But after really going nuts while delivering a stock speech at a black church, Bulworth becomes attracted to Nina (a pre-Catwoman Halle Berry, who was the one holdin' the gun in the glove) and embarks on a journey of self-discovery and cultural appropriation that makes him a viral sensation and brings him into contact with gangsta "father" L.D. (the ageless Don Cheadle), endears him to Nina's extended family (including a pre-Grey's Anatomy crashout Isaiah Washington, who looks worse here than he did on the show), and thanks to the aforementioned magical negro (legendary writer Amiri Baraka as a recurring homeless character literally credited as Rastaman) telling him he needs to sing to be of substance, rapping. Badly. Like, spoken word with infantile meter, inconsistent rhythm, and delivery so asthmatic that half of it probably had to be fixed with ADR. It was funny when I was fourteen, but aside from the massive step up in quality during the "Obscenity‽" scene (mind you, the bar is so low you'd have to search for it in Communist China), it's ear-to-ear cringe by even Vanilla Ice standards.
Meanwhile to Bulworth going full wigga through the plot of Man Of the Year, dodging perceived threats on his life (because he changed his mind but the broker had an inconvenient heart attack and the Pronoun Game is an augmented reality MMO in this movie), and cheating on his (ex-?)wife (Christine Baranski, The Good Wife) with a woman half his age, his chief of staff (Oliver Platt, playing the one kind of role he would play in almost every movie ever) develops a cocaine habit, and the success of Bulworth's unconventional campaign style ultimately incites a disgruntled insurance agent (Paul Sorvino, Nixon) to kill him.
Aside from Bulworth the movie being a statement piece that both aged poorly (the culturally insensitive tropes that once passed as brilliant insights into black circumstance, for the most part) and says some frighteningly contemporary things about politics and the System (particularly how everything is connected by money, and how differences are modularized and weaponized to perpetuate fear and widen the wealth inequality gap at the expense of the marginalized, and how research devolves advertising and campaigning into homogeneous, repetitive slop that only a Cybertruck could love), the scene where Bulworth buys L.D.'s child soldiers ice cream and saves them from escalating an instance of Blue-on-Black violence (one of the cops played by K-9000's Chris Mulkey) was a highlight for me despite being heavy-handed and extremely white savior-coded, the score made good use of the film's soundtrack (Public Enemy's "Kill 'Em Live" as the assassin/chase scenes theme, and Witchdoctor's "Holiday/12 Scanner" as the L.D. crew's theme, in particular; the rest was used as either part of a credits medley with Ennio Morricone's instrumental score, or as diegetic nightclub music), and there are tons of minor appearances by actors besides Washington and Mulkey. There's Sean Astin (Lord Of the Rings) and Laurie Metcalfe (Scream 2) as Bulworth's campaign film crew, Michael "Big Mike" Clarke Duncan (The Green Mile) as a bouncer in his fourth credited role, and Wendell Pierce (Elsbeth and Superman) as...some guy named Fred.
Both times I watched this, I found it entertaining enough that it's not a slog to get through. But it is uncomfortable in how it treats its defining gimmick as a culture-deaf joke and the black characters in it as disposable fixes for one white man's (self-induced) trauma that he can sleep off before he's destroyed by the System he helped perpetuate and then spoke against. Throw in the "thank God she's of legal age" infidelity relationship that's so uncomfortable the movie won't commit to Bulworth's actual age (Berry and Beatty have a thirty-year age gap in real life), the "all problems will be solved if we fuck until everyone's the same race" statement (particularly in this movie's health insurance context, this is stupid and terrifying because we wouldn't be genetically capable of surviving inbreeding on that scale when we already have micro-level evidence of how bad it is with certain Southern communities, not to mention the emergence of weird allergies throughout the past few generations, so healthcare premiums would skyrocket with all of the mutations we'd end up having from genetic homogeneity, and we'd probably just find new reasons to fear and hate each other anyway because humanity sucks), and the ultimate message being that you maybe shouldn't have a song of substance to effect change because as long as evil exists, there will always be some radicalized maniac or senile rich asshole with a grudge to kill you in the name of the status quo. Movies don't need a magical negro trope, they need magical thinking. And so does reality.
D+
My magical thought before I even re-watched Bulworth for this review was to give the movie's soundtrack a full first listen (partly inspired by Todd In the Shadows and his One-Hit Wonderland on "Ghetto Supastar" that I watched recently), and make this a doubled post like I did for The Retaliators several Christmases ago.
Bring Back the Soundtrack #7:
- Dr. Dre and LL Cool J - "Zoom": I don't really hear Dre on this except for some of the production, the knockoff "Rump Shaker" hook is a safe, late-90s hip-hop trope, and LL Cool J is fine, I guess.
- Pras, Ol' Dirty Bastard and Mýa - "Ghetto Supastar (That Is What You Are)": I vaguely remember this song being the reason I even wanted to see Bulworth in the first place (and now you know how that went for me...twice) and it was a hit single back in the day. It's more sample-era hip-hop, this time with a voice clip from James Brown's "Get On Up" and Mýa re-vocaling "Islands In the Stream" by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers of all things. Meanwhile, Pras makes odd pop-culture and historical similes disguised as social commentary and ODB raps the plot of the movie like his life depends on it. It's just as good, terrible, and odd as that sounds, but the instrumental lead-ins are intense enough to get you hyped for what follows, regardless of your opinion on its quality.
- Canibus and Youssou N'Dour - "How Come": N'Dour's atonal vocals and the production sensibilities have Wyclef Jean's influence all over this track (plus the expected ad libs and shoutouts by the Fugee himself), and Canibus spits raw bars almost continuously about the ills of urban living...for the first half before Wyclef turns it into a rambling production showcase and uses the title as an excuse to mope about rich people problems and thank the same producers and executives he called out for making his job suck. What even was this?
- Method Man, KRS-One, Prodigy and Kam - "Bulworth (They Talk About It While We Live It)": Amazing title track. I'm not versed enough in rap and hip-hop to be able to identify anyone's voice except Method Man, but the lyrical manipulation and occasionally anti-metric rhyme scheme on everyone's part here is impressive for its time, and the production (in part by DJ Muggs) is rich and eclectic, and I half-expected a Juvenile song to break in at any moment. Straight fire.
- Witchdoctor - "Holiday/12 Scanner": I remember hearing this in passing a lot when I was in high school, and although it was probably my first exposure to trap music (well before I even knew what that was), it's so vocally uninteresting that "the doctor" (an insult to the real doctor of hip-hop) quickly runs out of ad nauseum gangsta rap clichés and hook novelty, and spends the last minute-thirty of the track on shoutouts. Another fuckin' shitty "Holiday" (Holiday).
- RZA - "The Chase": An absolutely blazing story track where it feels like RZA is rapping in pursuit of his own delivery until he metaphorically drops the mic and lets the beat speak for itself. I wanted more bars, of course, but this felt like a statement, blending vivid narrative quality and insane lyrical density into something magical.
- Eve - "Eve of Destruction": Eve is arguably the best female rapper of my lifetime, but this just felt like Def Rebel entrance music for if she decided to try WWE in the modern day as a mid-carder.
- Mack 10 and Ice Cube - "Maniac in the Brainiac": To be meta for a moment, as I'm writing this part of the post song-by-song from a YouTube playlist, I haven't re-watched Bulworth yet, so I'm just honestly trying to get through the album at this point. As a white guy from the safe parts of the West Coast, this song is just more telling of a life experience I don't connect with, but I like the production, the rapid-fire lyricism, and the infectious hook. Cube is definitely a better rapper than he is an actor.
- Nutta Butta and Anonymous - "Freak Out": If you couldn't tell, this is more sample-era, using Chic's "Le Freak" for a funky, ladies' man jam that serves its purpose as a mood-shifting album filler and doesn't bring much else to the table.
- The Black Eyed Peas and Ingrid Dupree - "Joints & Jams": I have a lot of nostalgia for this one because it's the first Black Eyed Peas song I have a memory of from when I came across the music video on a third-string MTV-like channel (alongside videos for Jay-Z and Jermaine Dupri's "Money Ain't A Thang" and "Space Lord" by Monster Magnet). It's got that Tribe Called Quest energy, and holds up better than some of the Peas' later mainstream stuff (and especially whatever they started doing from their End album onward). It's a joint, it's a jam; turn that shit up and play it again.
- Cappadonna - "Run": Uninteresting gangsta rap that boils down to four minutes of "if you do something bad and/or you are of a marginalized group, do the title with an appropriate level of intensity for the situation."
- B-Real & Sick Jacken - "Lunatics in the Grass": Oh, no! The pigs have come to confiscate our weed again! Just wait twenty years and you'll be fine, guys.... Seriously, though, it feels like a lost Cypress Hill track in the best way, and the rapping is, for lack of a better word, crazy.
- Public Enemy - "Kill Em Live": Finally, some lyrically interesting protest rap on this political satire movie soundtrack! The meter is awkward sometimes, but that's part of the song's charm, and...it's Public Enemy; what's not to like?
- D-Fyne - "Bitches Are Hustlers Too": Though it speaks to a terrible kind of female empowerment (before TLC and Destiny's Child introduced the "I want my man to be a rich criminal so I can gold-dig off his blood money" school of thought and made it worse) by glorifying gangsta activity as something a woman should aspire to for street cred when their male counterparts do it out of circumstantial necessity (hence the title), and it feels like D-Fyne drops the soft N more frequently here than the previous thirteen male-driven songs combined, the hook is catchy, so I...enjoyed?...it, I guess. At least, I didn't feel like I was waiting for it to be over, which is more than I can say for most of this album.
Another thing I was itching to do before I re-watched Bulworth was to get back into the Goj-Year-ra project, so Stay Tuned for my thoughts on Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla, coming next Friday. Also, Wednesday brings a GFT Retrospective double-feature. Until then, please continue to support me and what I do by Becoming A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.
40
Ticketmaster,
Out.
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