Fear of a Black Hat

Rap may indeed be the music of modern urban rebellion. It's also the boom-box harbinger of fast-buck fashion, pseudo macho posturing and crotch-grabbing misogyny.

But most of all, rap music is often guilty of being more style than substance – its hostile sense of social defiance often bends under the enormous weight of its performers' gold-plated jewelry.

The whole scene is primed more for parody than revolution, which is what the comedy Fear of a Black Hat does with relative ease and effectiveness.

Overtly modeled on the rock spoof This Is Spinal Tap, Fear of the Black Hat is a faux documentary about a year in the career of the rap group N.W.H. (Niggaz With Hats). They're an odd mix of pop radical attitudes, inner city bravado, half-baked pretensions and Dr. Seuss-derived headgear.

N.W.H. violently opposes censorship (unless threatened with arrest), oppression by the white man (well, actually, they're really against their ex-manager, who's name was White) and gun control. They spend most of their time in violent backstage shoot-outs against rival rap group the Jam Boys.

Writer-director Rusty Cundieff plays Ice Cold, the closest thing the group has to a leader. The only problem is, neither Tone Def (Mark Christopher Lawrence) or Tasty-Taste (Larry B. Scott) want a leader. Whether or not they want a leader, they certainly need a road manager who's better at ducking bullets than the last five guys who had the job.

Any parody of a single subject starts to drag after awhile, but for the most part, Fear of a Black Hat is a sly and hysterical treat that lampoons several ripe targets.

Love Affair

Warren Beatty isn’t actually an idiot, though it’s hard to tell sometimes. He does, however, have an increasingly lackluster sense of material that’s registered in every movie he’s starred in for the past decade. In the 1960s, Beatty became his own producer because it was the only way that he could steer his fledgling career in a major direction. Now, he has become that supremely ironic critter: a “producer-auteur” who doesn’t know what to make of himself.

That’s one of the major problems in Beatty’s new film Love Affair. He’s become his own worst leading man, delivering a performance that wavers between indecision and, seemingly, indifference. Beatty has always been an extremely odd “sex god,” especially since his romantic appeal is based upon a strange sense of egoistic shyness. His shambling mannerisms and verbal flounderings come across like a man who’s constantly surprised to find himself at the center of attention – while his eyes are constantly fixed on the rest of the room, making sure that everyone is watching him. It’s as if he’s willing to stand in a dark corner at a party, but only so long as the rest of the party comes to him.

In the right movie, this quality can give Beatty a distinctly modern dimension. But in a worn old shoe like Love Affair (first made in the 1930s and then remade in the 1950s as An Affair to Remember), Beatty’s non-mannerisms virtually gut the movie of emotional charge. Maybe his character really is deeply in love, but Beatty plays it with all the excitement of a guy ordering a pizza.

Not that he’s helped any by his co-star, Annette Bening (Mrs. Warren Beatty). Normally, she’s a reasonably engaging performer: a little perky, a little tough, and never too much of anything else. But in Love Affair, Bening mostly adopts a wan look and acts as if the slightest sign of histrionics would be impolite. She also may be deeply in love, but Bening behaves as if she can’t decide between pepperoni and anchovies.

Presumably, you already know the story to Love Affair (and if you don’t, then you’re one of the few people in the country who didn’t see Sleepless In Seattle). Likewise, you may also be aware that Love Affair is strongly wedded to the conviction that the heart must triumph over everything else. It’s an old notion, but a nice one. Unfortunately, Beatty’s version seems more preoccupied with the couple’s questionable future in light of his character’s infamous womanizing past. Guess that means ol’ Warren won’t be bar-hopping with Jack Nicholson anymore.

Rounding out this new version are Pierce Brosnan and Kate Capshaw as the two fiancées who learn to accept the changed hearts of their respective intendeds. Capshaw is the only cast member who actually sparks; Brosnan just acts bored. Gary Shandling is along for comic relief, but he’s not in the movie’s only funny scene. (The one where a minor character starts wondering why the OSU football team is called the Buckeyes. “Do their eyes stick out or something?”)

This season, maybe.

Crooklyn

Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to mind your own business. Take Crooklyn, for example. With this, his latest film, a surprisingly mellow Spike Lee makes a sentimental journey back to his old neighborhood circa 1970 – a trip filtered through the innocence and malleability of children, as they grapple with the high anxiety of the adult world. Crooklyn is a slow, subtle and often rewarding movie.

According to Time magazine, however, Lee’s trying to set a social agenda for black filmmakers.

Say what? Even Lee has given up on the idea that he can set any kind of an agenda for anyone else. Besides, if the over-the-hill white boys at Time want to blame somebody for introducing a social agenda into the African-American cinema (as if this were a unique idea), then they should take that issue to Charles Burnett (director of To Sleep With Anger). Lee himself has acknowledged Burnett’s influence on black film making, and in some ways, Crooklyn plays like an extended homage from Lee to Burnett.

Crooklyn is a will-o’-wisp of a movie held together by the slim but tender plot thread of a middle-class Brooklyn family that’s desperately holding on to its economic foothold, while the musician father (Delroy Lindo) takes a slippery gamble in the pursuit of pure music. The family’s held together by the sheer, harsh and often embittered tenacity of the mother (Alfre Woodard in the best role of her career). She frequently comes across as a shrew, but her love for her family extends even beyond death.

At its best, Crooklyn possesses a sense of emotional intimacy and an authentic feel for its place and time that makes it a joy to watch. Despite a few false steps, Crooklyn is a good slice-of-life study.