Carbon Copy

Tell me if you've heard this one: a rich white Jew learns he has a black son (sired 18 years ago during a short-lived college fling) and convinces his high-society wife and spoiled daughter to allow the bastard to stay at their San Marino mansion by telling them it's for an urban exchange program. The punchline? Hollywood could get away with anything in the 80s. Minus 20 points for Denzel Washington not being on fire.

Ill-formed but surprisingly venomous satire of racism, hypocrisy, and white fragility whose most inspired acid moments are refreshing in a diet of today's weak tea (have to wonder about the degree to which Schultz's position as perhaps the first Black filmmaker after Poitier with real studio clout informed the film's vision of vile white LA disrupted). Big twist then-intended to implicate audience racism now seems likelier to afflict woke live-tweeters. The running rape gags are...unfortunate.

Passes the time.