My Brother's Wedding.

"A few years after breaking new cinematic ground with the astonishing black-and-white drama Killer of Sheep, shot on the streets of Los Angeles in 1976, African-American director Charles Burnett scrounged up a somewhat larger budget to make a second feature in color," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. " That movie, My Brother's Wedding, has been an object of controversy, and virtually MIA, ever since.... I only wish I could tell you the film was a masterpiece."

But the New York Times' AO Scott finds the newly edited version "an 81-minute feature of astonishing richness and density" and "a film that is so firmly and organically rooted in a specific time and place that it seems to contain worlds." By the way: "At a moment when the term independent film is taken to refer either to midbudget studio projects anchored by Oscar-soliciting performances or to the aimless navel-gazing of under-stimulated hipsters (Speak up! Stop mumbling!), Mr Burnett's work is an indelible reminder of what real independence looks like."

Updated through 9/19.

"Bound to a narrative instead of Sheep's tone-poem spontaneity, its nonprofessional performances feel more noticeably scruffy, and even its of-the-era color palette looks dated when held up against the black-and-white timelessness of '77," writes Aaron Hillis. "Still, Wedding is a treasure that demands to be unearthed in all its funny-sad tenderness."

"[A]s in Sheep, the film's real force comes from Burnett's ability to unflinchingly portray the details, faces, and voices of a marginalized community, both in realistic humor and sorrow," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine.

Update: "Who would deny that the revival of Charles Burnett's career has been the major film event of the year?" asks Andrew Chan at the House Next Door. Wedding "shows us how deep his humanist perspective goes, yielding more evidence of the subtlety and patience with which this filmmaker explores one of the great subjects of his career: the problem of dignity among a demoralized underclass."

Updates, 9/15: "Where the slogan-ready provocations of Boyz n the Hood and Do the Right Thing don't spend any time beating around the bush ('Fight the Power,' 'Increase the Peace'), Burnett provides a window into the everyday details through which to frame black struggle," writes Paul Schrodt for Slant. "In S Torriano Berry's book The 50 Most Influential Black Films, Charles Burnett says black cinema needs a major female director, but in a Hollywood bent on the false theatrics of gangsta life (from Menace II Society's inhumanity to Get Rich or Die Tryin''s inanity), he may be the closest to one we ever come."

Kathy Fennessy, writing at the Siffblog, is reminded of 70s-era sitcoms: "If anything, My Brother's Wedding is even funnier than a boxed set of Sanford and Son, Good Times or What's Happening.... Burnett's targets may be similar - shiftless sons, judgmental parents - but the combination of real people, authentic locations, and higher-stakes situations only makes the humor seem that much richer."

Update, 9/19: An exchange at Shooting Down Pictures.

Posted by dwhudson at September 14, 2007 9:30 AM