Entertainment

Hamstrung

Writer/director Spike Lee, who’s more honest and honestly entertaining than serial depressive Pulitzer winner Cormac McCarthy, got right to the point in 2001 by using the term, “super-duper magical negro.”

He was at Washington State University, and then at Yale, talking about movies.

The “magical negro” (not invented, but embellished by Spike) is, in short, the ridiculous practice of using a black character as a foil in order to enlighten the white character on the shallowness of a life lived without enlightenment.

Think of Super Duper as a latter-day Socrates.

Generally “Super Duper” will be older, all-wise and will only be able to speak in brilliant insights — despite being stuck in a menial job while a clueless white person always has some highfalutin position.

Enter the ultimate cardboard “super duper magical negro” with HBO’s film of McCarthy’s over-the-top two-man play, “The Sunset Limited.”

This is the story of one black enlightened super being, and one suicidal white college professor, who talk endlessly about Jesus, life and death — oh, and did I mention “Jesus”?

The two men, one actually named “White” (played by Tommy Lee Jones who also produced), and the other “Black” (Samuel L. Jackson), spend the entire time in one room of Black’s poor-person Harlem apartment.

White, we’re led to believe, has just been magically “rescued” from the tracks of a Harlem subway called “The Sunset Limited.” Now, perhaps McCarthy, who lives in New Mexico, has never bothered to visit NYC, but since when — ever — do New York subways have names that aren’t letters or numbers?

What’s just plain wrong, though, is White telling Black, that he has to “go up to Bellevue.” Up? They’re on 155th Street, and Bellevue is at 27th Street!

Anyway, White finds himself in the apartment of Black (who’s a maintenance guy at a building somewhere). Black, an ex-con/murderer/philosopher, seems to know everything about God — while White can’t even figure out why God would come to “a cesspool” like Black’s bleak Harlem apartment.

Like I said, dumb, shallow white guy.

Granted, the acting in this two-man play is brilliant, but the film itself is strictly for master thespians on the loose — and people who are desperate to get into restaurants that won’t take their reservations.