Writer, director, actor, novelist, musician, and all-around renaissance man Melvin Van Peebles has never been shy about tooting his own horn. Whether he's claiming credit for inventing rap music or merely touting his position as the self-appointed godfather of black cinema, Van Peebles has raised shameless egotism to an art form. It's perhaps inevitable, then, that he should conclude Classified X, his documentary stroll through the history of blacks in film, by touting his own Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song as black cinema's crowning achievement. Classified X actually opens with Van Peebles discussing that film, then addresses approximately 75 years of black film history as a sort of evolutionary process leading inevitably to Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song, a movie that Van Peebles is more than happy to praise once again for its visual brilliance, political integrity, and populist audacity. Functioning as an African-American version of Celluloid Closet, Classified X is informative and watchable, yet frustratingly simplistic. A big part of the problem lies in its brevity: It's impossible to adequately cover its subject matter in 50 minutes, and as a result, Classified X provides little more than a sketchy, minimalist view of Hollywood's treatment of blacks. And while Van Peebles' main thesis—that Hollywood is racist and treats blacks unfairly—should be fairly obvious to anyone with even a passing familiarity with film history, he makes a number of interesting points about the character and nature of that racism. Classified X serves adequately as a bare-bones primer, but the subject deserves a longer, more scholarly film, preferably one made by a filmmaker who isn't quite so self-infatuated.