Menace II Society

You almost have to like Menace II Society. What other film presents a bunch of gun-tot­ing homeboys sitting around watching It's a Wonderful Life?. And, it's a reasonably interesting piece of street film making.

But its ironies are a little too ham-fisted, and it occasionally smacks of a social worker delivering a lecture.

The double homicide that opens Menace II Society possesses an authentic sense of casual shock. Likewise, the film offers an insider's view of drive-by shootings and drug dealing. The Hughes brothers have hit home with their unrelenting chronology of gang life and urban pathology. Most vivid is the film's presentation of violence that is passed on as a grim legacy from generation to generation.

But the movie contains a primary prob­lem — its odd distance from its own subject matter, almost as if it's a re-enactment from a "reality-based" TV show.

Which isn't surprising, given that the filmmakers, twin brothers Allen and Albert Hughes, previously directed episodes of the Fox network's America's Most Wanted. They've also made a series of rap videos. Menace II Society is influenced by both of these formats.

Caine (Tyrin Turner), a de facto gang leader, is the movie's central, tragic figure. Actor Larenz Tate's O-Dog, however, embodies the film's most chilling quality. When he takes offense at a Korean grocer's comment, O-Dog coolly kills both the man and his wife. Then he steals the videotape from the store's surveillance camera — not because he's trying to cover up the crime, but because he just likes showing the video of the murder to his friends.

Menace II Society strives for a hard edge, even as it attempts to be a hip hop version of Bunuel's classic film Los Olivdados.

It also wants to be a message picture, and presents critically important moral lessons: Violence breeds violence. Crime doesn't pay. Blacks killing blacks is just another form of racial genocide.

But, too often, their presentation bears a dry, lackluster quality that's over-ridden by the charged energy of gang activities. The movie lectures about the destructive nature of violence, but only comes to life when the homeboys start popping each other. Menace II Society will be an eye-opener for many viewers, but its morality is almost lost amidst the kinetic kicks of its storyline.

Posse

It's mad and bad. It's angrier than a dozen rap artists, and more politically correct than Sinead O'Connor.

It's Posse, the new Hip Hop Western directed by and starring Mario Van Peebles. It's also screwier than last year's election, though it does move a lot faster, and may prove to be more controversial.

But beneath its radical militancy, Posse mainly consists of grunge fashions and cool postures.

There are two ways to describe Posse:
1. It's a post-modernist deconstruction of the ruling-class ideological text of the tradi­tional Western, and a demystification of its oppressive racial legacy.
2. The script is a crazy quilt stitched together from about 40 other movies. A
large chunk of Posse is a mix of parts of The Magnificent Seven, Nevada Smith, Once Upon a Time in the West and Heaven's Gate.

Added to this stew are elements from some of the underground classics of the 1970s, including a wardrobe from El Topo, and a radical chic attitude inherited from Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. The director of the latter was Melvin Van Peebles, Mario's father, which provides a sense of tradition (though little else).

Melvin is also in the cast, along with a large list of other oddly prominent figures who have almost no reason for being there. Isaac Hayes and Big Daddy Kane hang around just long enough to get blasted, while Pam Grier and Paul Bartel look as if they accidentally wandered in from another movie.

Posse has more cameos than the "We Are the World" video.

Not surprisingly, Posse is screamingly incoherent. It has high energy and lots of great visuals, but it just doesn't make sense. Van Peebles wants an over-the-top, mythic Western, but he mostly ends up with missed opportunities. He wants to celebrate the black cowboy, but ends up creating an allegorical apology for youth gangs.

The white man's West is repeatedly pre­sented as racist, decadent and crazy. When we arrive at the black Utopia of Freemanville, it has fallen into a state of apathy, decadence and decrepitude. In a West this rotten, it is amazing that the Posse gang doesn't just shoot everyone (actually, they almost do).

In his previous film, New Jack City, Mario Van Peebles came across as a strong and witty action film director. With Posse, however, he wields a heavy hand that lacks warmth or humor.

Even worse, his political pose smacks more of pop glitter than of heart-felt conviction. As the movie's hero, Van Peebles is out to avenge his peoples' degra­dation by redneck loonies, but he looks too much like he just sauntered off of Rodeo Drive to be believable.

Where's Jim Brown when you need him?

Jason's Lyric

Some films have the power to make you rethink your atti­tude. That's certainly true of Jason's Lyric. It was while watching this mishmash of a Freudian gangster movie that I sud­denly found myself reconsidering Sugar Hill (Wesley Snipes' brooding gangster film). Like most critics, I gave Snipes movie a sound dissing for its half-baked existentialism that never got out of low gear. But it of­fered some memorable moments, and at least it had the guts to stick to its offbeat brand of loony sincerity. Jason's Lyric travels through some of the same turf, but Sugar Hill emerges as a masterpiece in com­parison to this tired exercise in frat­ricidal angst.

The distinctive feature of Jason's Lyric is its use of the ghettos and open countryside of Houston as a location for a minor tale about two brothers whose lives are doomed to violent explosion. Jason (Allen Payne) is the straight-laced older brother who's, chosen to pursue a clean life as a wage slave for an ap­pliance company. Bakeem Wood­bine plays Josh, the younger sibling, who's opted for the gangbanger road. Despite their differences, the two men are emotionally locked to­gether by the long-suppressed secret about which one of them acciden­tally killed their father (Forest Whitaker in a brief appearance that's almost too good for this movie).

Along for the ride is Jada Pinkett as Lyric, the nice girl whom Jason falls in love with. Unfortunately, the romantic side Of this movie is lifted, for the most part, from the weaker moments of Poetic Justice (another film that was better than many crit­ics gave it credit for being). Add to this an ending that borrows heavily from the old James Cagney picture Public Enemy, and you've got a movie that groans under the weight of its own unfulfilled pretensions

The Inkwell

It isn't a good sign when a movie's screenwriter refuses to use his own name. Its even worse when that screenwriter also authored the original novel on which the movie's based. But when that writer adopts as a pseudonym an Italian phrase that implies the director is an idiot, you've got big trouble.

That's the background to The Inkwell, the movie over which novelist Trey Ellis and filmmaker Matty Rich (Straight Out of Brooklyn) have been trading insults. The movie itself is basically an African-American version of The Summer of '42, with every cliche intact and not a single original thought in its head.

Set during the Bicentennial summer of 1976, The Inkwell stars Larenz Tate as a teenager whose progression toward man­hood is slightly stunted by his shy sensitivity, as well as by his strained relationship with his polit­ically radical father (Joe Morton). But a vacation to Martha's Vineyard — and his sexual initi­ation by the genre's obligatory older woman — firmly places Tate on the road to adult­hood.

Haven't we seen this film three dozen times already? This isn't even the first time that it's been done within an African-Amer­ican context (e.g. The Learning Tree). And The Inkwell doesn't bring anything new to the party. It's a ham-fisted piece of movie­making that's barely salvaged by some fine actors.