Preto e Branco

Watching Robert Downey Jr. try to seduce Mike Tyson is worth the ticket price alone, but only just. The appropriation of black hip-hop culture by privileged white teenagers should prove interesting ground for storytelling, but James Toback's film is undermined by the lack of even one likeable character. It's very hard to care about the motivations or destinies of people you hate. Two pleasant surprises amongst the vignettes: Ben Stiller can be convincing outside of trash comedy; and Claudia Schiffer can actually act.

Black & White: a documentary director and her husband follows several upper middle class high school kids to try and comprehend why they have chosen to emulate black inner city hip-hop rappers.

What is intended to be an avante-garde-in-your-face mockumentary addressing serious sociological issues is a weak series of loosely interconnecting stories with poorly developed and uninteresting characters. The credits tout many big names - Robert Downey Jr., Ben Stiller, Brooke Shields among them - but the performances are lackluster at best: while Downey's stereotypical fey gay character borders on offensive, he can't compare with Mike Tyson's ludicrous attempts at philosophizing.

At least there are no shades of grey here - it is all bad.

Well, at least that's what this movie becomes in the end. Actually, I couldn't finish the movie. I got 90 minutes into it, and gave up hope that the movie would return to its beginning. The movie starts out good, with a nice angry premise. It seemed so full of venom and froth that the movie would turn out to become a great statement about white culture, black culture, inner city culture, middle class culture, etc.

The movie begins with a black man and two white girls having sex. Then jumps to show that one is middle class. Then, in one of its greatest moments, it has a white guy explore the difference between N-a and

N-r. That was a priceless moment. It adds to the fun with Brooks Shields, and Downey (unnecessarily, but fun). And it keeps going with brutality.

However (There's that nasty word), the movie loses itself fairly quickly. It gets caught up with a basketball player being bribe to lose a game, then blackmailed for accepting it. It goes on, and the movie begins to have a plot instead of a theme, which has nothing to do with the theme. Its like, the movie lost its way, and had nothing left to say. I think I knew where it was going to go with it, but it didn't go there. Maybe it was still on its way, I dunno.

But, in the end, the movie would have made a better episode of "Strangers With Candy" than anything else. It lost its way, and I wonder how it ever got greenlighted, nevertheless had all the big stars in it. Well, we all make bad choices (check "Ready to wear (Pret-a-porter)"), but this one should never have been made.

3/10 (for the beginning)

Hip-hop is not just a style of music, for it comes associated with an attitude, an attitude that notoriously does not wholly reject the ghetto from which it springs. Whether the music, and culture, should thus be seen as the free expression of the dispossessed, or as one of the chains tying them down, is this a moot point (though it's worth noting that every revolution in popular music over the last half-century has been seen by respectable society as the end of the world). 'Black and White' is a celebrity-studded collection of small stories about characters living the hip-hop life, its focus on the interplay of the white community with this essentially black form of music. It's not badly executed, although it's hard to get very interested in any of the characters. One peculiarity, though, is how little hip-hop there actually is on the soundtrack, a strange vacuum at the heart of the film; also, we see little in the way of everyday life in the world from which the music emerged. The result is watchable, but there are no real insights, sociological or musical, to be had.

I wish the the summary line I wrote was a joke, but unfortunately, it isn't. This film catered to every tired-out racial cliche known, and the dialogue was stilted and wooden. Every character was completely unbelievable. Nauseating. That anyone reviewed this film positively is a sign at just how far we have to go on matters of race...most people would rather lie to look PC than tell the truth and actually embrace people based on their own merit instead of having outmoded racial stereotypes.

By the way, it's "bass", not "base", Mr. Canadian Reviewer.