Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

Sight and Sound 2021 #93. Senegalese magic realism meets the French New Wave in the guise of a lover's journey.

  A stunning debut from a first-time director that still holds up. John Singleton's story about a young man coming of age amidst gang violence in South Central Los Angeles has aged better than many of the other New Black Cinema films because of well-developed characters (at least for the most part) and realistic relationships. The compassion and decorum the film displays reinforce strong performances by Lawrence Fishburne and Ice Cube. Despite the rapper's brief role, Cube brings fresh air to his performance as wise-cracking and dogged Doughboy. Fishburne steals most of the scenes he appears in as Tre's (Cuba Gooding Jr.) tough but fair father. The chilling scene where he manipulates the stress balls as his son goes for revenge still hits hard thirty years later. If its been a while since you have seen Boyz n the Hood , you should revisit it. While a product of its time, this stylish movie  remains one of the best of the 1990s so-called hood films and one of the most moving...

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.