Column: A new book on Blaxploitation movies celebrates it all, from Pam Grier to ‘Black Belt Jones’
As a preteen growing up in Jersey City, New Jersey, Odie Henderson saw a tremendous number of wildly inappropriate movies. Take age 4, an especially big, bad year for Henderson and inarguably too young to be eye-mauled by “The Exorcist.”
But there was also that time the future Boston Globe film critic and author of the new book “Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation Cinema” saw a double bill of “Coffy” and “Foxy Brown,” starring Pam Grier. Grier figures prominently in Henderson’s book, published earlier this month.
It’s an extremely good read, and Henderson is coming to Chicago’s Music Box Theatre for a book signing and a 35mm screening of the 1972 “Super Fly,” another seminal title in the garish, brutal, vitally expressive screen era of Blaxploitation.
That word doesn’t fly with everyone these days. Nor did it in the
