All my life, I done hadta fight!

You know how it starts.  You’re at work, someone’s having a birthday party and they ask a coworker if they want some cake… Then you think, “Annie Mae, eat the damn cake!”… We’ve all been there.  One minute, you’re trying to make it through the day as a corporate schlock, the next, you’re fighting your mind to fend off movie quotes from one of the films in the cannon of Bourgie Black Culture.

Its okay.  We understand.  If you were born between 1975 and 1984, you remember the day your family got its first VCR and huddling around the television on a Saturday night to watch the latest VHS tape and listening to your aunt and uncle argue over whether it worked right on channel 3 or channel 4 while you waited to watch The Last Dragon.  And just for that, we’ve compiled this list of films that every self respecting Bourgie should have committed to their private collection at home.

The List:

10.) The Best Man:  Because its the bourgie woman’s dream.  Marry a professional athlete who just so happens to be best friends with a best-selling author, a community organizer, and a well to do cad and host a lavish wedding with all of your girls oogling over the headlight attached to a platinum band that is your engagement ring.  Throw in the fact that it stars all of the Bourgie movie usual suspects (see: Sanaa Lathan, Taye Diggs, Terrence Howard, Nia Long, and Morris Chestnut) and you’ve got cinematic black gold.  This movie has it all, romance, drama, violence, and black people doing the Electric Slide to Earth, Wind, & Fire while still being one of the best date movies of all time.

9.) Boomerang:  Let’s face it, most of the black men working in advertising today owe their career choice to Marcus Graham (HAA staff included).  This movie is a classic because its got some of the best obscure quotables of all time (”I told you they don’t stink if you take the membranes out!”) and, for its time, it was the pinnacle of Bourgie fashion (the inside of Marcus Graham’s crib looked like the Karl Kani section at Up Against The Wall).  You can’t beat a film that’s got comic legends in it like Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence, Chris Rock, AND John Witherspoon balanced out by some of the hottest chicks in the game at the time, Lela Rochon, Robin Givens, Halle Berry, and MILF Emeritus Eartha Kitt (RIP Catwoman).  And the added bonus, the soundtrack was hot… Don’t front on PM Dawn “I’d Die Without You.”

8.) What’s Love Got To Do With It:  Before we go any further, let’s make this crystal clear, there is nothing funny about domestic violence.  Nothing.  Now that we’ve made that disclaimer, the first three or four times you watch this film, its the story of Tina Turner’s triumphant rise over tragedy and adversity to beat the odds, win her life back, and become a star in her own right… But like, that fifth or sixth time, its the Ike Turner Ignorant Quote-Fest.  Lawdhamercy, there’s some classics here; “She can leave, she can go.  But the name stays home.  The name got my daddy blood on it!,” or “I’m off that narcotic!” or the all-time classic “YOU TRYNA HEP IKE!?!?”… Again, for the record, Domestic Violence= Not Funny, Ike Turner Quotes= Hilarious.

7.) Love Jones:  In the pre-DVD days of yore, when a man invited a woman over to his house to watch a movie on VHS that was the activity for the night.  There wasn’t much time for flipping out one disc for another or skipping from scene to scene.  You popped in a tape, pushed play, and that was what you were watching.  So when it was time to invite that special someone over to the house to watch a movie, nothing said “I plan on getting busy with you later” better than Love Jones.  Every woman knows how that movie starts, all the poetry and whatnot… but every man knows how that movie ends, with you giving a woman a tour of your bedroom ceiling.  There’s probably a Love Jones Jackson or Love Jones Simmons running around today that should be about 11 or 12 years old.

6.) House Party:  Don’t front, that shit’s funny.  Looking back on it, it was Black America’s early ’90s answer to a John Hughes film from the ’80s.  Tacky music, fomulaic jokes, easily defined good-guys and bad-guys, a flimsy love story, and the guy who worked at Winky Dinky Dog in Hollywood Shuffle asking for some Dick Gregory.  Also, it was a “safe” movie at the time and your parents didn’t mind dropping you off at the mall with $4.50 to see it with your friends.  But the thing that makes this movie timeless is Robin Harris, a comedic treasure we lost too soon but who made it possible for others like Cedric The Entertainer and Bernie Mac to get some shine later.

5.) School Daze: For those of you who went to HBCUs, this movie probably factored into at least 35% of your decision.  Anyone who went to an HBCU would argue that School Daze is just as much fiction as it is documentary and the searing rhetoric of the time between the classes of African Americans and the chasm in thought still exists to this day (”I am not from AF-REE-KA, I’m from Detroit!”) not to mention Samuel L. Jackson keeping it as real as it gets in the Kentucky Fried Chicken scene.  Its a snapshot in time, but yet its still timeles and every time you step foot onto a college campus and see any form of Black Greek life, you immediately think of G PHI G.

4.) Boyz N The Hood: Before Cuba Gooding Jr. became an unrepentant coon, Ice Cube cut the jheri curl, and gang signs became a commercial accessory, this was the hardest movie of all time.  It came along at just about the time that the West Coast was cementing its street cred, songs about shooting people were hitting the radio in droves, and all that black consciouness of the late ’80s/early /’90s was getting pushed aside for thuggery.  But there’s just too many unanswered questions about this one… Like, if you know you got some bangers riding around in a Hyundai Excel looking for you, why you gonna stop in the middle of an exposed alley to eat a honey bun and scratch off lottery tickets?  OR, how in the hell did they get them SAT scores back so fast?  OR, how do you get out of a car splattered with blood and just walk the streets of Los Angeles with no one stopping you and asking you what’s up?  OR, how did Chris get on the porch with that wheelchair?  You get the point…

3.) The Wiz:  There’s always gonna be a debate about who’s the better Dorothy, Diana Ross or Stephanie Mills, but there’s no debating how great The Wiz is.  Its not just any musical that a straight black man will proudly display in his DVD collection or that can get thugs dancing to “Ease On Down” at the club (we’ve seen it!), nope.  The soundtrack to this movie is Quincy Jones’s thrid greatest contribution to humanity (1. Thriller, 2. Rashida, 3. The Wiz) and that shit still cranks to this day.  You’re probably waiting to have kids so that one day, you can watch The Wiz with them too.

2.) Coming To America: The most quotable movie of all time… You just said it to yourself, “The royal penis is clean your highness.”… This movie never gets old.  Ever.  What other movie out there can you watch for the 312th time and laugh at like its the first time you’ve seen it?  Its a mainstay in the Bourgie household.  Its the unassailable greatest Black comedy of all time.  We dare you to think of a funnier movie, g’head… that’s right, you can’t because you were too busy thinking about Randy Watson.

1.) The Color Purple:  President Obama should make an executive order declaring that this movie be shown every Sunday afternoon on at least one channel.  There’s not getting around the fact that this is the greatest black film of all time, and before you start tripping ’cause a white man directed it, remember that a white man also founded Popeye’s Chicken and we know how great that is too.  The story is compelling, the acting is amazing, the cinematography is extraordinary, and its one movie that all generation of Bourgies enjoy together.  Its a crime, pity, and gotdamned shame that it got shut out at the Academy Awards.  But Oscar or not, its THE greatest Bourgie Black film of all time.

Honorable Mentions:

-Do The Right Thing, “D, muthafucka, D!”

-Menace II Society, “You actin’ like a real BITCH right about now!”

-Hollywood Shuffle, “Black Acting Schooooool!”

-The Golden Child, “I want the kniiiife… Pleeeeeaaaaase.”

-The Last Dragon, “Kiss my converse!”

-Malcolm X, “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock! Plymouth Rock landed on us!”

And now, the floor is open for debate.

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