Barbershop

Welcome everyone to this year’s installment of “Black History Movie Month.” This month, I will be looking at the “Barbershop” franchise. To start off the month, let’s take a look at the first installment that came out in 2002, “Barbershop.”

The movie takes place during one long day in a barbershop on Chicago’s South Side, where seven barbers (six men, one woman; six black, one white) are in charge. When you see those parts, the conversation goes way beyond intercourse, but is not above men discussing a girl’s derriere. Who has it, who needs it, who wants it? Roger Ebert put it best in his review, “But sex as a general topic would be far too limiting for this crowd, and the movie plays like a talk show where everyone is the host.”

The barbershop is owned by Calvin, played by one of the coolest actors, Ice Cube, who had it passed down to him by his father. It helps him out but doesn’t fill his want for something huge – like him wanting to make a recording studio in his basement and sell platinum records. One day, carelessly, he sells the barbershop for $20,000 to Lester the Loan Shark, played by Keith David, who promises the word “barbershop” will be permanently on the front, but privately is going to make it into a gentlemen’s club with the same name.

The barbers and regular customers are furious when they find out. The barbershop gives more than employment or service for them. Ebert put it best when he listed it as, “it is community, forum, friendship, camaraderie, continuity.” Figuring out his mistake, Calvin tries to buy back the barbershop, but finds the price is now $40,000. Now it looks like this will be the last day that the small barbershop is a place for every one of the regulars.

The barbers are probably a whole lot of support by this barbershop, but they give a nice cross section: Along with Calvin, there’s old Eddie (comedian Cedric the Entertainer famous for “The Steve Harvey Show”), who doesn’t look like he has a customer but is position is chief pontificator, Jimmy (Sean Patrick Thomas), a college student who tries to fascinate everyone with his information (are scallops a mollusk?), Terri (rapper Eve), who knows somebody has been drinking her apple juice from the refrigerator in the back room, Ricky (Michael Ealy), who has two strikes against him and will get life for a third, Dinka (Leonard Earl Howze), from Nigeria, who like Terri but is too fat for her standards, and Isaac (Troy Garity), the token white barber, who explains that, inside, he’s blacker than some of the other barbers.

An alternate plot shows JD (comedian and game show host Anthony Anderson, currently on “Black-ish”) and Billy (Lahmard Tate), who try a dramatically hopeless theft of an ATM machine that has been recently put in the Indian grocery story on the corner. Since they “borrowed” Ricky’s van for this job, if they get caught he gets a life sentence. Ebert noted, “The unending conversation in the shop is intercut with JD and Billy wrestling with the ATM machine, which at one point they even attempt to check in with at a motel.”

If nothing important gets done in the tedious barbershop conversations, at least many issues are mentioned, and by the end, in classic sitcom fashion, every problem has been resolved. Ebert mentioned, “The talk is lively but goes into overdrive when Eddie is onstage; Cedric the Entertainer has the confidence, the style and the volume to turn any group into an audience, and he has a rap about Rosa Parks, Rodney King and O.J. Simpson that brought down the house at the screening I attended.”

The film is awkward in structure but elegant in delivery. Ebert criticized, “I could have done without both of the subplots--the loan shark and the ATM thieves--and simply sat there in Calvin's Barbershop for the entire running time, listening to these guys talk. There is a kind of music to their conversations, now a lullaby, now a march, now a requiem, now hip-hop, and they play with one another like members of an orchestra.” The movie’s a pleasure to listen to, it would even work as an audio book.

If you haven’t seen this film, I would definitely say not to miss your chance to see this. It’s a nice little comedy that I think everyone will have an enjoyable time watching, especially since it has heart. Check it out when you get the chance.

Want to know how the sequel is? Wait until next week in the continuation of “Black History Movie Month.”