Chris Rock's comedic doc about black America's relationship with their hair, and the industry built around it, is getting very good reviews so I thought I would start a thread for it. It could be a best doc contender. It might end up getting better reviews than Michael Moore's latest.
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Posts: 27141 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
There are things in Good Hair, Chris Rock's deeply funny and very serious documentary about the African-American obsession with straightened tresses, that may make your hair stand right up on end. Here are a few of the movie's fascinatingly fun facts:
· The hair ''relaxer'' used by African-Americans for many decades is sodium hydroxide, which will eat away a soda can in two hours and leave you with permanent bald spots if it seeps into your scalp. (Peering into an 18,000-pound vat of the stuff, Rock remarks, ''This would last Prince for about a month!'') The asymmetric hair that Salt-N-Pepa made iconic was the result of a relaxer accident.
· The weaves that are now legion among African-American women can easily cost the most modest working-class folks $1,000 a pop. Those high-maintenance 'dos have become an integral point in the politics of black dating.
· The next time you see an artist like Eve or Nia Long (both interviewed in the film), there's a good chance that the hair they're wearing once belonged to a woman from India who cut it off in a religious ceremony.
Rock, who co-wrote Good Hair and serves as its guiding host, is hilariously aware of the cultural insecurities that have driven many African-Americans to spend a fortune on straightening their hair. Yet by structuring the film around the Bronner Bros. Hair Show, a battle-of-the-salon-stars so over-the-top it's like Iron Chef meets Paris Is Burning, Rock gives Good Hair a rousing message: Where African-Americans in the '60s adopted a ''natural'' look, they now feel free to coif their heads any way they want. That's cultural power. B+
Posts: 27141 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Proving that no subject is too thin to yield a good documentary, "Good Hair" is a raucous and rigorous inquiry into the subject of African-American hair -- the stigmas, the secrets, the shocking price of maintenance -- that gets at universal but rarely discussed truths about black femininity. Chris Rock is in typically sharp but unusually sensitive form in this fresh, funny and altogether fascinating HBO project, which could prove a mildly provocative crowd-pleaser in theatrical release. Black audiences will wig out, but pic should also gel with viewers who have never even heard of a relaxer. Rock set out to make the film in response to a question from one of his two young daughters -- "Daddy, how come I don't have good hair?" -- only to find that she's hardly the first one to pose the question. Working with comedian and first-time director Jeff Stilson (a scribe and co-producer on HBO's "The Chris Rock Show"), Rock interviews multiple subjects in an attempt to get to the root of the matter: the burden of being born with hair that, in its natural state, is considered "nappy" and unattractive by society at large.
Celebrities ranging from actresses Nia Long, Tracie Thoms and Raven Symone to writer Maya Angelou speak with remarkable candor about their hair and their willingness (or unwillingness) to conform to American standards of beauty. For legions of women, the use of a relaxer -- a thick lotion that straightens the natural curls -- is a major rite of passage, but also a potentially harmful one, a chemist explains, as relaxers contain a fair amount of scalp-burning, follicle-damaging sodium hydroxide.
Less dangerous but much more expensive is the weave -- the braiding of extensions into one's hair -- which can cost as much as $1,000. This fact provokes Rock to query his distaff subjects on all kinds of delicate hair-related issues: the degree to which a black woman views her hair as a major investment; her expectations that her significant other will fund her hair care; her sensitivity about having her hair touched, even as a sign of intimacy. Some of the answers are surprising, even revelatory.
It's telling that, with the exception of the Rev. Al Sharpton, who proudly flaunts his perm, Rock's subjects acknowledge that hair vanity is an almost exclusively female attribute. But to the comedian's credit, he doesn't let the guys off the hook, either, and an uproarious series of interviews with black male patrons at a barbershop brings the docu's battle-of-the-sexes subtext to the fore. There's something of a barbershop quality to "Good Hair," in the way Rock creates a lively public forum for people to riff with delightful frankness on subjects that seem more taboo than they should be.
Who knew hair could be such an inexhaustibly fertile topic? Rock visits the Atlanta-based Dudley family's hair-products empire, one of the foundations of the $9 billion black-hair-care industry. He jets to India, where Hindu women shave their heads as a form of sacrifice, only to have their shorn locks shipped overseas and turned into extensions for weave-hungry women.
He also spends a lot of time at the Bronner Bros. Intl. Hair Show, an annual hair-care convention in Atlanta. These segments, which bookend the pic, are a bit overextended, but an outrageous contest, pitting four leading stylists of black hair against each other, must be seen to be believed.
Camera (color, HD-to-35mm), Cliff Charles; editors, Paul Marchand, Greg Nash; music, Marcus Miller; music supervisor, P.J. Bloom; sound (Dolby Digital), Michael Haines, Brett Lofthus, Michael Prichard, Adam Jones, Don McCampbell, Desiree Ortiz, Brandt Clark, Glen Kantziper, Subramanian, James Machowski, Dave McJunkin; associate producer, Doug Miller. Reviewed at Sundance Film Festival (competing), Jan. 18, 2009. Running time: 95 MIN.
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Posts: 27141 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
By Melissa Anderson Tuesday, October 6th 2009 at 3:04pm
Don Imus's 2007 remarks about "nappy-headed hos" underscored the immense fear of and fascination with the hair follicles of African-American women. Chris Rock, the host, co-writer, and co-producer of first-time director Jeff Stilson's Good Hair, never mentions Imus's outburst; his interest in the political, social, and sexual entanglements of the tonsorial stems from the more personal—specifically, when one of his two young daughters plaintively asked, "Daddy, how come I don't have good hair?" Rock, affable as ever, queries a few black actresses (Nia Long providing the most candid responses: "Weave sex is a little awkward"); visits beauty salons; oversees an experiment by a scientist who demonstrates the corrosive effects of sodium hydroxide, the main ingredient in hair relaxer; travels to Chennai, India, where women sacrifice hair that ends up in weaves costing thousands of dollars in the U.S.; and stares in disbelief at the Paris Is Burning–like competition at the annual Bronner Bros.–sponsored International Hair Show in Atlanta. Rock is certainly a sympathetic and curious observer, though including Ice-T's remark that "a real pimp can tell what a woman looks like baldheaded" betrays some of the gender politics that remain vigorously unexamined in this breezy, superficial doc.
Posts: 27141 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
What’s so funny about so many black women wanting “white” hair? Plenty, it turns out, in Chris Rock’s surprisingly insightful documentary, “Good Hair.”
The well-known history of black people straightening their natural curls is more tragedy than comedy, rooted in the bygone belief that all things European were better than anything African. But Rock sheds new light on this old story through a poignant mix of interviews, investigation and his trademark satire.
More than a dozen famous and beautiful black women sit for Rock’s camera, ranging from the sage Maya Angelou to video vixen Melyssa Ford to an interior designer with a skin disease that has left her proudly bald. Their testimony illuminates today’s reality: Black women who straighten their hair are not ashamed of their heritage — like women the world over, they just want to work with what they have.
Men don’t escape Rock’s scrutiny, either, as the notoriously permed Rev. Al Sharpton and Ice-T are called to account. Sharpton recalls his mentor James Brown buying him his first ’do before they met with President Ronald Reagan, and Ice-T describes going to high school with his hair in curlers — the bigger the better. Other men sport a variety of eye-catching styles, such as the “shag” — picture a puffy mullet.
There are many scenes in beauty and barber shops across the country, where the various meanings, rules and ramifications of black hairstyles are discussed. But the best revelations come when Rock examines the sodium hydroxide relaxer that turns nappy heads silky, and the origins of the shorn human hair that is “weaved” into shorter tresses to create the illusion of length and fullness.
Rock watches sodium hydroxide eat through chicken flesh and dissolve an aluminum soda can. In India, he visits a Hindu temple where women ceremonially shave their heads and a shady character who describes snipping the hair off sleeping women. In Los Angeles, Rock watches an Indian businessman with a suitcase full of bone-straight locks bargain with a black hairstylist who brags about reselling movie stars’ weaves to average Janes.
The film’s narrative is driven by the Bronner Bros. Hair Show, where top stylists create Las Vegas-style productions to compete for a $20,000 prize. The outlandish contest, which features little actual hairstyling, is a perfect metaphor for the inherent absurdity of a billion dollar industry built on metal-eating chemicals, stolen ponytails and thousand dollar-plus weaves.
This is exactly why Rock is the perfect “Good Hair” host. His ad-libbed quips and silly-serious questions put interview subjects and viewers at ease with this sometimes painful reality, keeping them laughing instead of crying. And when Rock ventures into a hair store trying to sell some kinky “black hair” to the Asian owner, his comedy cuts to the root of the issue in a way Ken Burns never could.
“Everyone want straight hair,” the owner says. “It look more natural.”
Posts: 27141 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
"Good Hair" is a documentary about black women and their hair. Chris Rock, the host and narrator, is a likable man, quick, truly curious, with the gift of encouraging people to speak openly about a subject they usually keep private. He conveys a lot of information, but also some unfortunate opinions and misleading facts. That doesn't mean the movie isn't warm, funny and entertaining.
The film got its start for Rock when his little daughter asked him, "Daddy, why don't I have good hair?" He wonders how she got that idea. He discovers that some children even younger than his daughter are already having their hair straightened -- and that for children that is a bad idea. He talks to a great many black women about their hair, beginning with the matriarch Maya Angelou and including such celebrities as Nia Long, Eve, Tracie Thoms, Salli Richardson, Salt-n-Pepa and Raven-Symone.
He discovers that for some black women, attaining "good hair" means either straightening or using extensions. Straightening involves the application of products containing sodium hydroxide, which a dermatologist and a chemist describe as potentially dangerous to the scalp and even to inhale in quantity (your lungs might get straightened). Leave it on too long, and your scalp or face can be burned -- something that has happened to some of the woman featured in the film.
I imagine a good many black women would tell Chris Rock that having "good hair" simply means having hair that is healthy, strong and abundant. Why must it also be straight? Yes, many black women enjoy their straight hair, whether natural or by way of extensions. They look great. But often they go back and forth among hairstyles; that is the way of women, unlike us male clods who settle on a hair style in grade school and stick with it like Rod Blagojevich.
Extensions involve braiding long swatches of hair to existing hair. Think Beyonce. Where does this hair come from? India, mostly, where some women cut off their hair before marriage or for religious purposes and can sell it for amounts that mean a lot in a poor nation.
What about the hazards of straightening? Rock shows a hair-raising demonstration of an aluminum Coke can literally being eaten up in a bath of sodium hydroxide. It may help to recall that another name for sodium hydroxide is "lye." God forbid a woman should put that on her head! What Rock doesn't mention is that few women do. If he had peeked in Wikipedia, he would have learned: "Because of the high incidence and intensity of chemical burns, chemical relaxer manufacturers have now switched to other alkaline chemicals." Modern relaxers can also burn if left on too long, but they won't eat up your Coke cans.
The popularity of Afros in the late 1960s and '70s asserted that natural hair was beautiful just the way it grew (and was styled, cut and shaped, of course; Angela Davis didn't look that good without effort). Classic Davis-style Afros have grown rare, but another "natural" style, braiding, is seen all the time nowadays. Many black women and some men use braids and dreads as a fashion statement.
The use of the word "natural hair" is, in any event, misleading. Take a stroll down the hair products aisle of a drugstore or look at the stock price of Supercuts. Few people of any race wear completely natural hair. If they did, we would be a nation of Unibombers.
Black hair is a $9 billion industry. Rock plunges in. He visits Dudley Products in Atlanta, a black-owned hair-products empire, and is fascinated by the Bronner Bros. International Hair Show, an annual convention in Atlanta. Here a vast convention hall is jammed with the booths of hair-care companies, and there's an annual competition to name the hairdresser of the year. The contest is fascinating, not least because it seems to have little to do with actually taking care of someone's hair. Would you want your hair done by a stylist hanging upside down from a trapeze? Or joining you inside a giant aquarium? Showmanship is everything; one of the four finalists is a young white man who is treasured by his clients.
What Rock does is help create a film, directed by Jeff Stilson, with much good feeling and instinctive sympathy for our desire to look as good as we can. He asks direct questions, but doesn't cross-examine; he reacts with well-timed one-liners, and he has a hilarious, spontaneous conversation with some black men in a barbershop that gets into areas that are rarely spoken about. The movie has a good feeling, but why do I know more about this subject than Chris Rock does? Smile.
Posts: 27141 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
A *** out of **** review from Michael Phillips in the CHICAGO TRIBUNE...
“Good Hair” consists of two documentaries braided together, one enjoyable, the other enjoyable and provocative.
Chris Rock and a film crew covered the 2007 edition of the Bronner Bros. Hair Show in Atlanta, in which the Hair Battle Royale came down to hairdressers — performance and conceptual artists, really — from Alabama, Texas and Georgia. What these people do in the name of style! Cutting and styling, not to mention relaxing and straightening, is the least of it; the Hair Battle Royale is theater, pure and simple. This half of “Good Hair” works well enough, but Rock reaches for more. In a voice-over Rock says that when his 5-year-old daughter started bad-mouthing her own hair, he knew he had a project (though he’d thought about filming the Atlanta bash for years).
More than half of the $9 billion dollar hair industry, the film asserts, gets its revenue from hair extensions and weaves, which can run anywhere from $400 to thousands a pop. “Good Hair” takes Rock to India, charting the “tonsuring” ritual by which Indian women cut off their hair in a religious ceremony. The results of this are shipped to the U.S. and elsewhere.
Rock is a canny interviewer, in addition to being one of the funnier and more engaging fellows in show business. When he chats up a group of men at a barbershop regarding African-American women’s hair — the economics, the invisible No Trespassing sign — the conversation starts out like a joke but becomes compellingly serious and honest. Rock takes his “Good Hair” job as a documentarian seriously enough to be interesting, but not so seriously that the film groans with earnestness.
In the final lap it’s back to Atlanta for what feels like an episode of “American Black Hair Idol.” Directed by Jeff Stilson, “Good Hair” would’ve been better off downplaying the Bronner competition and focusing more on the questions of why African-American women willingly fry, scald and spend the way they do. (Easy for me to say: I don’t even own a comb.)
Rock is skeptical but hardly damning (why should he alienate half his audience?), but when you hear actress Nia Long and others talk about how they never put their head under when they’re swimming, you think: Then why go swimming? When you hear natural-headed actress Tracie Thoms talk about the media-fed ideal and white-dominated mass-culture notions of beauty, you think: Yes. Natural is the way. Rock thinks so, too, though he doesn’t wag a finger so much as pose a question — amiably but with purpose.
Posts: 27141 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Hair -- short, long, curly, straight -- if it happens to be on a woman's head, those tresses come with issues; roots buried deep in the complicated corner of the brain where self-esteem lives.
If it is "black" hair -- as in ethnic -- there are many more layers of issues and implications that Chris Rock tries to untangle in answering a question posed by his 5-year-old daughter a few years ago: Daddy, why don't I have good hair?
The result is the documentary "Good Hair," an amusing, poignant and surprisingly candid look at the topic with a disarming Rock coaxing answers and opinions from an eclectic cross section of African Americans, including Maya Angelou, Al Sharpton, actresses, models, stylists and everyday patrons of barber shops and beauty parlors around the country.
Not surprisingly, it is a story with money at its center -- the multibillion-dollar business of black hair from the processes used to straighten it, to the money spent to weave straight hair over it, to the cultural stigma attached to it.
Though Rock has a distinct point of view -- natural is better -- instead of outrage, he relies on irony and his own bemusement to walk us through a world he clearly finds troubling. Indeed, what carries this film is Rock, as both star and part of the writing team he has surrounded himself with old friends from "The Chris Rock Show": writer-director Jeff Stilson and writers Chuck Sklar and Lance Crouther.
The result is a documentary that weaves as much comedy as fact into the narrative, making the experience a satisfying entertainment even for the lucky few who have no hair cares at all.
The story of "Good Hair," Rock explains, begins in Atlanta, the hometown for so many things that define black culture. In this case it's the Bronner Bros. International Hair Show, an annual convention on black hair that attracts more than 100,000 hairdressers and culminates with a styling face-off that is a comedian's dream. It ends with the four top competitors staging styling extravaganzas complete with marching bands, dancers and remarkable feats of skill -- do you have any idea how hard it is to cut someone's hair when you're hanging upside down or underwater?
Black hair is a huge, global business, little of it in the hands of black business owners. Rock tracks down one of the few, the Greensboro, N.C.-based Dudley Products, which specializes in the chemical mixes used to "relax" hair. Relax turns out to be a good descriptor, because while hair may not be capable of anxiety issues, as Rock shows us, the heads underneath the hair certainly are.
The documentary uses comparison rather than condemnation to make its key points. Though the Dudley family is never grilled on the safety of their products, Rock interviews a scientist analyzing the ingredients found in typical straightening products. The demonstration shows they can eat through a soda can in a few hours. That's followed by conversations with girls as young as 5 having their hair straightened. No, they don't like the process, but they love the result. We can connect the dots.
From straightening he moves to weaves, which takes him to India, where the big money is. Here the hair is gathered from temples where the religious rite of tonsuring -- shaving off one's hair and donating it to the gods -- takes place at the rate of roughly 10 million heads a year. He follows along as the hair is collected, cleaned, combed, stitched and readied for sale in the U.S. where weaves cost from $400 to $4,000 and need replacing every few months. For too many, the price of keeping good hair on their head is more than putting a roof over it.
Though Rock mines many laughs along the way, there is a sadness in watching young African American women discuss wanting the "good hair" that says smart, professional, sophisticated, upscale, educated.
The black hair that has launched a thousand discussions in recent months, Michelle Obama's long straight locks, is noticeably absent from the discussion. In a sense, it underscores the very issue Rock is grappling to explain to his daughter, for the main question circling the first lady's hair is not whether she should go natural but how in the world she manages to get that look.
Posts: 27141 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
A *** out of **** review from Lou Lumenick in THE NEW YORK POST...
Did you know some black men are not al lowed to touch their women's hair for fear of disturbing hair extensions that cost upward -- sometimes way upward -- of $1,000? That many black women (and some men) straighten their hair with a chemical so strong that it can literally dissolve a Coke can?
I didn't, so I found "Good Hair" fascinating. I've never been much of a Chris Rock fan, but I was riveted by the on-screen interviews he conducts with celebrities like Nia Long and Al Sharpton, as well as regular folk, to explore African-American women's very complicated
Fun fact: 80 percent of hair-care products are bought by the black community even though it comprises 12 percent of he population.
Rock and his producer, Jeff Stilson, find the embodiment of this economic goldmine at a massive hair show in Atlanta, where four contestants are followed in a preposterously lavish competition.
About the only question not answered by "Good Hair" is whether Michelle Obama wears a hair extension (most come from religious ceremonies in India) or straightens her hair.
Posts: 27141 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
I really liked this movie. I'd argue that Chris Rock was born to narrate documentaries; his riffs on the subject matter were often hilarious. The interviews with the black Hollywood actresses, particularly Nia Long, were a hoot. "Weave sex" will be a new catchphrase thanks to Nia Long. I do wish that Rock had gotten deeper into the subject matter. He merely glanced the surface when talking to some of these actresses. Also, I felt he spent too much time on the Atlanta hair show. I think he should've spent more time discussing hair with these black actresses. In addition, some of the information was inaccurate. For instance, the average black woman does NOT spend $1000+ on a hair weave. $50-$200 is more like it. But overall, this documentary is very funny, insightful and even poignant. Go see it. You'll be glad you did.
