Birthdays and anniversaries are usually rather self-congratulatory affairs, opportunities for a reassuring dose of back-patting platitudes and anecdotage. But that is not likely to be the case for Melvin Van Peebles’ 80th birthday that will be celebrated tonight at the Film Forum in New York. Though the Afro-American polymath has reached that venerable age, his body of work is not ready yet for retrospective mummification. Now that Obama’s “hopeful” prosthetic surgery is peeling off, Van Peebles’s grandiloquently titled masterwork Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song feels as urgent as it did first released in 1971.
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