The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, September 9-15
Cooley High (1975)
Directed by Michael Schultz
Rappin’, laughin’, chasin’ girls—sure, that comprised F. Gary Gray’s Friday (that Ice Cube/Chris Tucker classic), but Cooley High got there first. When it did, the then-popular 60s nostalgia gained an authenticity absent in Richie and Fonzie. Released near the end of American International Pictures’s successful run of blaxploitation films, the mischievous adventures of Preach and Cochise (Glynn Turman and Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs) are as rife with revenge, betrayal, womanizing, and scrapes with the fuzz as those triumphs, but Schultz and screenwriter Eric Monte (inspired by his youth in Chicago housing projects) harmonize the strife with unpredictable humor and a whole lotta Motown. Max Kyburz (September 13, 2pm at the Museum of the Moving Image’s “Black Film Pioneer: Conversations with Michael Schultz” series; a talk with the filmmaker follows)