Soul Man

Steve Miner's outrageous 1986 satire on race relations in the 1980s--or as leading character Mark Watson (C. Thomas Howell) puts it, "the Cosby decade"--still retains a fair amount of controversial bite some 15 years later. When Mark, the spoiled son of upper-class WASPs, is surprised by his parents' decision to give him his "manhood" by cutting the financial umbilical cord, his road to Harvard Law School takes a serious detour. Popping tanning pills and curling his hair, Mark poses as black and, after winning a fraudulent bid for a minority scholarship, enters Professor Banks' (James Earl Jones) class, assuming that a brother is going to cut him some academic slack. Not so; and Mark soon discovers that being black is not exactly a bed of affirmative-action roses, as he is ticketed, jailed and beaten in quick succession on account of his new color. Needless to say, Mark gets more of an education than he bargained for, helped along by love interest Rae Dawn Chong, and scene-stealing best bud Arye Gross. Praised and denounced by various critics upon its initial release (and reviled by Spike Lee), Soul Man lands on DVD with a very good transfer and decent Dolby Digital stereo sound, as well as a humorous scene-specific audio commentary with Miner and Howell. Recommended. (R. Pitman)