Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

Critics often compare Rusty Cundieff's mockumentary to Rob Reiner's This is Spinal Tap , and while  comparisons are often warranted, they do the film an injustice. Fear of a Black Hat , although it borrows and adapts some of the jokes, stands on its own as an insightful commentary of hip-hop culture. The film's  callbacks and inside jokes  will make anyone familiar with hip-hip history laugh out loud. Many of the spoofs are accurate, but more importantly, they are funny.  Unlike other parodies such as CB4 (also 1993), the film spoofs more aspects of hip hop culture without relying on the gangster rap era. The parodies of different era's hip-hop stars are precise sendups of specific people and tropes. Direct references to these figures, particularly Salt-N-Pepa as Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme and M.C. Hammer as M.C. Slammer, call attention to the self-seriousness of the movement and its critical response. The group member's contentious rivalries with each o...

Tony Silver's Style Wars (1983) focuses a tighter lens on graffiti, breakdancing, and subway art than Wild Style. The interviews add realism lacking in that earlier film and provide a more comprehensive focus than its scripted story. However, that film feels more organic because of its less glossy cinematography and the community involvement in its production.  Style Wars includes interviews with graffiti artists and break dancers who champion their art's creative expression and those like Mayor Ed Koch, the NYC Police Department, and disgruntled parents who view graffiti as the destruction of public property. These figures come across as hilariously out of touch, while the artists and their graffiti show the enthusiastic promise of a burgeoning art form.  The soundtrack consists of a representative assortment of classic hip-hop tracks, including Grandmaster Flash's "The Message" and The Treacherous Three's "Feel the Heartbeat," next to songs that j...

The films in Criterion Channel's Fiftieth Anniversary of Hip Hop collection include insightful documents of the early 1980s New York scene. Charlie Ahearn's Wild Style traces the convergence of disparate, yet equally creative cultural strands, including rapping, breakdancing, and tagging.

Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times is his last Little Tramp picture and a commentary on the financial situation during the Great Depression. The Little Tramp has difficulty adjusting to the industrialized world as he works in a factory and attempts to help an orphan girl, Ellen Peterson (Paulette Goddard), as she escapes from the police. The Tramp works on an assembly line that causes him to have a nervous breakdown in the film's most famous scenes. Another high point occurs when he sings a gibberish song, "Je Cherche Après Titine," or as Chaplin's version was known, "The Nonsense Song," at the cafe where Ellen works as a dancer. This scene serves as a fitting final tribute to the character as Chaplin's voice is heard in a film for the first time.