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Dave Chappelle's Block Party

2005, Movie, R, 103 mins

Dave Chappelle's Block Party: Review

DAVE CHAPPELLE'S BLOCK PARTY
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Two years after going AWOL from his hit Comedy Central show, Dave Chappelle makes a tentative foray back into the limelight with a good old-fashioned concert film that, surprisingly, features very little of Chappelle himself. Back in 2004, the man who was briefly one of the highest-paid men on TV organized and emceed a Brooklyn block party for a small number of lucky guests on what turned out to be a rainy Saturday in September, a time when Chappelle was still on top. Chappelle's idea: Gather together a group of artists from the world of hip-hop who aren't ordinarily played on the radio or MTV — rappers, poets and singers who opt to pursue their personal visions rather than blindly chase dollar signs — and emcee a big bash on a street in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. With the classic concert film WATTSTAX (1973) as their template, Chappelle and director Michel Gondry (ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND and countless groundbreaking music videos) intercut footage of the performers and the ace block-party house band with highlights from rehearsal sessions, a stroll around the neighborhood — including a visit to a PAL daycare center — and an amusing journey back to Chappelle's hometown of Dayton, Ohio. Determined to diversify his audience, Chappelle invites not only the entire Central State University drum line, but two older white women who work at the corner store where Chappelle buys his smokes. Chappelle riffs in his trademark freestyle fashion and offers interesting advice to young comedians — study Thelonious Monk, he says — but the film's highlights are far and away the musical performances: man of the moment Kanye West; the Roots with the legendary Big Daddy Kane; Talib Kweli; the incredible Jill Scott, whose acid-funk jam with the Roots and Erykah Badu is probably the film's best moment; and the Fugees, whose reunion (after seven years apart) closes out the concert. It's all great fun, even if the slice-of-life footage has a lot less to say about contemporary Bed-Stuy than WATTSTAX did about life in Watts in the '70s. But if Chappelle, who quietly returned to the comedy circuit after his high-profile career collapsed, intended this film to serve as a comeback vehicle, it backfires: The wealth of talent he amassed makes his own unscripted shtick sound even weaker than it is. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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