Good Hair
(2009/Lionsgate DVD)
Picture:
C+ Sound: C+ Extras: B Documentary B
What is
beauty? It is an age-old question that
is also subject to the latest changes in taste.
In the black community, it is more complicated than any one review or
essay or documentary could cover. Jeff
Stilson’s Good Hair (2009) asks the
question about why black women are obsessed with their hair, why the black
community buys 80% of all the hair products in the U.S. and how the idea of the title
changed from natural to alternative/unnatural hair.
The main
issue is about straight hair. Black men
and women do not grow hair like this, but hair with patterns, waves and other
forms as seen during the Civil Rights Movement.
Think Afros and the like. In the
1980s, Jeri Curl arrived and African Americans wanted to jump onto the Reagan
bandwagon, thought Hip Hop became the ultimate backlash to that until money and
wealth subsumed and ruined that side of the genre by its peak in 2000.
By the
late 1980s, straight and straightened hair became the goal and it has been this
way ever since. Chris Rock is the
narrator and host of the program, which starts with him talking about his
daughter making a disturbing statement to him about her hair not being
pretty. This sets off Rock on an odyssey
of discovering how crazy the situation has become.
How about
$1,000 (a thousand; that is not a misprint) for a weave? How about having the hair come from India and not the U.S.? How about dangerous straightener so erosive
that it can eat through tin cans and more; so bad that women who use it cal it
the “creamy crack”. It is also about a
Black Community that has not been able to recover from the Reagan Years and
especially in an age where we now have an African American president, it might
be tome for a new change.
However,
the documentary is as much comedy and absurdity as anything and does not get as
political in examining how wild the world of commodified hair is, all the
insanity we see speaks volumes on its own for itself and does not have to be
explicit about anything as said here. It
is implied enough and reminds us that sometimes, our values can be too easily
affected to do anything to be accepted and happy in the falsest ways. Good Hair is backed by a brain that thinks
and is highly recommended.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image is shot on HD video and edited well, but
still has the usual motion blur and audio flaws you would expect from such a
documentary, but you do get some nice shots here and there anyhow. The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix takes the location
audio and tries to stretch it out, but can only do so much, especially with
audio dropouts in location recordings.
Still, the combination is watchable.
Extras include the theatrical trailer and a really entertaining
feature-length audio commentary by Rock and critic/Co-Producer Nelson George.
- Nicholas Sheffo
