Rusty Cundieff

The first films of actor-writer-director Rusty Cundieff have displayed qualities typical of a certain tendency in African-American filmmaking in Hollywood in the decade following the groundbreaking the advent of Spike Lee in the mid-1980s. These films--"Fear of a Black Hat" (1993), "Tales From the Hood" (1995) and "Sprung" (1997)--suggest their maker's relatively cordial relationship to recent American pop culture. Thus far, Cundieff seems to have largely rejected the explicitly political, critical and angry approach of his more serious contemporaries (e.g., Lee, John Singleton, the Hughes Brothers) in favor of the playful audience-friendly tone of Robert Townsend and the Hudlin Brothers. Like Keenen Ivory Wayans, he has shown an aptitude for black-oriented parodies of forms that are more often white-identified (specifically pretentious rock documentaries, cheesy 50s comic-book derived horror anthologies and kooky romantic comedy). While he does not ignore the social problems confronting the black community (i.e., drugs, crime, domestic violence, racism), Cundieff's storytelling instincts are unabashedly accessible and commercial. More impressively, he has managed to retain creative control of his work. Quirky, jokey and derivative, his films seem to aspire to some degree of revisionism but, thus far, he has yet to display the organizing intelligence or overarching vision to reformulate his many influences into a meaningful new hybrid.