Barbershop (movie)
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Barbershop is a motion picture directed by Tim Story, produced by George Tillman, Jr.'s State Street Pictures, and released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on September 13, 2002. Starring Ice Cube, Cedric the Entertainer, and Anthony Anderson, the film revolves about social life in a south Chicago barbershop that has become a neighborhood institution. Notable for being one of the most successful films ever to have been directed by an African-American, Barbershop also proved to be a star-making vehicle for acting newcomers Eve and Michael Ealy, and provided Ice Cube with a character different from the tough thugs he was so often called upon to portray in films.
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Cast and Characters
Barbers
- Calvin Palmer, Jr. (Ice Cube): a young expectant father, who feels like the barbershop his father left him to manage is causing undue complications in his life.
- Eddie (Cedric the Entertainer): a 60-plus year old barber who strangely never cuts any heads. He worked under Calvin's father, and constantly compares and contrasts both Palmers and the periods they lived in.
- Jimmy James (Sean Patrick Thomas): a recent college graduate who sees his job at the barbershop as nothing more than a temporary stop on his way to a "real" job.
- Terri Jones (Eve): a tempermental young woman with a cheating boyfriend, who accuses Jimmy of drinking her apple juice. She is the only female barber in the shop.
- Issac Rosenburg (Troy Garity): the only Caucasian barber (or person) in the shop, Issac is the recipient of bigoted language and behavior from some of the other characters, especially his nemesis, Jimmy.
- Ricky Nash (Michael Ealy): A two-time loser who is trying to go straight by working in the barbershop.
- Dinka (Leonard Earl Howze): An immigrant from Nigeria, Dinka is the butt of many jokes based on his African nationality. He has an unrequited crush on Terri.
ATM thieves
- J.D. (Anthony Anderson): A would-be thief who attempts to steal an automatic teller machine and spends the duration of the film trying to find a way to pry it open.
- Billy (Lahmard Tate): J.D.'s accomplice in the ATM theft.
J.D. and Billy's antics are reminiscent of those of Laurel and Hardy, and two sequences in which they have to carry the heavy ATM up a long flight of stairs recalls Laurel and Hardy's Academy Award-winning short film, The Music Box (1932).
Other charactes
- Jennifer Palmer (Jazmin Lewis): Calvin's seven-months-pregnant wife, who first met Calvin in the barbershop. She reminds him a number of times about the cultural and historical significance of the shop and why he should not sell.
- Lester Wallace (Keith David): A crafty loan shark who buys Calvin's shop for $20,000 and plans to turn it into a strip club. After selling the shop, Calvin spends the rest of the film trying to figure out a way to raise the money to buy it back, as Lester raises the prise to $40,000 after he has control of the shop.
- Ray-Ray (DeRay Davis): a hustler who constantly barges into the shop trying to sell stolen goods; everything from CDs to dogs to Pampers.
Production
Produced on a budget of only $12 million, Barbershop, with a story by Mark Brown and a screenplay by Brown, Marshall Todd, and Don D. Scott, was filmed in Chicago during the winter of 2002. The filmmakers used a storefront that was once a laundromat to build the set for Calvin's barbershop, and the set was duplicated on a soundstage to make filming certain scenes easier. Similar to what he achieved with his 1997 film Soul Food, producer George Tillman, Jr wanted to portray African-Americans in a more positive and three-dimensional light than many other Hollywood films had in the past.
Subjects discussed in the barbershop
Like many African-American (and Latino) barbershops, serious and lively conversation is more important than haircuts in Calvin's barbershop, and the characters in the film candidly discuss many topics in the film; some trivial, some serious.
- The significance of Rosa Parks' contribution to the Civil Rights Movement. In a sequence the filmmakers hold up as the film's centerpiece, Eddie loudly (but correctly) points out that Parks was not the only, or even the first, Black person to protest the segregated bus seating system prevalent in many metropolitian areas. Checkers Fred tells Eddie that he "better not ever let Jesse Jackson here you talking like this," to which Eddie responds "fuck Jesse Jackson!" When Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton heard about this scene, they started a boycott campaign against the film, and called upon MGM and State Street Pictures to edit the offending sequence out of the film before it reached home video and television. The film was released on home video in January 2003, with the Parks discussion intact.
- Arizona citizens' initial refusal to recognize Martin Luther King Day as an official holiday in 1993, and Martin Luther King, Jr's infidelity. Jackson and Sharpton also wanted the King reference deleted from the film, but, like the Rosa Parks sequence, it was not.
- Whether or not Black people need (or deserve) reparations
- White people who act "Black" (Issac) and Black people who act "White" (Jimmy)
- whether or not being educated makes a Black person "better" than everyone else
- The generation gap
- Evander Holyfield, Christianity, and Jesus' religion
- a woman's ideal figure, using Jennifer Lopez and Mother Love as contrasting examples
- whether or not a scallop is a shellfish
In 2004, MGM released the sequel Barbershop 2: Back in Business. All of the original cast returned, but Tim Story did not; this film was directed by Keith Rodney Sullivan.