Delayed Reaction: Hollywood Shuffle

Premise: An aspiring black actor in Hollywood struggles to land a job and imagines a world where opportunities for him were better.

Thanks to a quirk in syndication, I've seen almost all of Robert Townsend's 90s WB series The Parent 'Hood. It didn't make a huge impression on me, but I remember liking it well enough. Given that he was the star, co-creator, and most common director, that show was made in his image. So, I was pretty ready for what to expect from Hollywood Shuffle (also directed by, written by, and starring him). A lot of imagined sequences. Plenty of earnestness. Townsend always struck me as the Wayans Brothers' strait-laced cousin.

No surprise, I ended up liking Hollywood Shuffle in the same way that I liked The Parent Hood'. The humor was a bit broader than I care for. Most of the sketches sound funnier as a pitch than as a sketch. Like the school of black acting. Sounds like a funny idea. The actual jokes they used didn't make me laugh. Rambro is a funny name. The sketch was meh. My indifference to the humor in this movie is why I'm hesitant to ever watch UHF again. Townsend and the other Hollywood Shuffle Players are good though. It's not at all surprising to see some Wayans show up in the cast.

The problem message movies like this have is that they are often fighting the last week's battles. Movies don't come together very quickly, so an attempt to respond to the moment ends up being a response to yesterday. There's some of that in Hollywood Shuffle. A lot of the black stereotypes seem to be responding more to the 70s depiction of black culture; the same stuff that Blaxploitation played on a decade earlier. There's also the Catch-22 of this being a movie starring a black actor that is about how black actors don't get any good roles in movies. That's the exception, not the rule when you realize that the year this came out, only 1 of the top 50 movies in the box office by my count had a black actor in a lead role. In this movie it's kind of like if you tell me "I never get to eat ice cream" while you're eating ice cream. Even if it's your first-time eating ice cream in a year, I can't help but be suspicious of your claim.

I really appreciate the questions this movie has about no representation vs. bad representation and how it points out the lack of opportunities in really simple terms. The idea that Townsend is never going to play Superman is succinct and effective. It's also a little funny, because he starred in The Meteor Man 6 years later and then was the patriarch in a super hero family for a Disney Channel movie (Up, Up, and Away!) in 1999. Still, it wasn't until 2018 with Black Panther that a black actor really got a chance to star in a blockbuster superhero movie, so his point stands.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend