a review of 骚狐狸

Feb 5/28: Foxy Brown (TubiTV) For my Black History Month theme, I thought it might be fun to revisit Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown" as a showcase for blaxploitation icon Pam Grier. But as I was about to throw it into the player, I realized that I'd never watched "Foxy Brown" before, and I thought why not? It turned out to be up for viewing on the free TubiTV streaming network, which is actually a pretty solid service. Initially, I thought the movie was kind of a funky blast, with Grier and her co-stars inhabiting the same sort of breezily preposterous Afrocentric action universe as other blaxploitation classics I'd seen. But when the actual revenge plot finally kicks in, it starts to get a bit skeevy in a way that I don't think I was quite prepared for. Grier cuts a tough figure and is a great sport through everything, but the undercover prostitution and captive-rape subplots didn't sit entirely comfortably with me. Obviously, a lot of this stuff played differently in 1974, but in 2017 it feels like a lot of cruelty and punishment for a "strong" heroine, even though she gets her full bloody vengeance in the end. I'm definitely following up with "Jackie Brown" later this week, but I couldn't help but be a little disappointed with its pop culture forbear.