Tops on my list of movies to see this week, right behind Lars von Trier's The Five Obstructions, is Mario Van Peebles's Baadasssss!, a "lightly fictionalized" account of the making of his dad's famous movie Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Melvin Van Peebles himself has lived quite the life: as this article notes, he flew in the Air Force, studied astronomy in the Netherlands, painted in Mexico, wrote a novel and worked on a cable car in San Francisco, shook up Hollywood, then moved to New York to write musicals and, yes, work as a commodities trader. (Melvin's book, Bold Money: A New Way to Play the Options Market, is curently available on Amazon.com, used, for forty cents.)

Anyway, Baadasssss! seems like a good movie to see tonight, since there's no better way to commemorate the legacy of Ronald Reagan than to see a movie by, and about, an angry, angry black man.