'Shaft' & 'Shaft'

Ironically, Shaft was based on a novel by a white journalist.

That's right. African American's biggest and best-known pop culture nugget is only in existence because some white, geeky journalist decided to write a book about a black detective. Named Shaft.

First Elvis Presley steals rock, then white culture steals Shaft.

Kidding aside, Melvin Van Peebles once noted that the original story was going to be a white detective. Instead, they decided to take the Shaft novel and turn it into a film after the success of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Thus, Blaxploitation had its poster boy in Richard Roundtree.

Shaft isn't a bad film at all. Although I didn't get into Sweet Sweetback and I'm not particularly a fan of other Blaxploitation, this is a nice, short film. The acting isn't horrible and it does a great job in fully developing this man named John Shaft into a character that we still know little about other than he's a guy that always does the right thing and spends little time putting up with bullshit.

No mater our skin color, those are traits we can all relate to.

And, to top things of, we finally have a film where the soundtrack is better than the actual movie. Isaac Hayes' score and soundtrack is the pillar of mid-1970s funk and soul. It'd be good on its own. Put a film behind it and it's even better.