How High Isn't Good 'n' Vulgar, It's Shameless 'n' Vulgar; Ali's Fails 100%; Angie Stone's Brotha Video Addresses Black Men's Phantom Identity
Yes, How High is funny. But funny ain't enough. Not good 'n' vulgar, the dope-sex-school jokes are just shameless and vulgar. Comparisons to Cheech and Chong don't defend Method Man and Redman's wantonness, because 25 years after Up in Smoke Cheech and Chong are still second-class Hollywood citizens. Redman's "Get high. Take test high. Get high scores," is a kewl bit, but it isn't kewl that two well-paid performers mislead viewers to think there's a safety net for the misdeeds of roguish young black men. Harvard isn't full of them, but Rikers Island is. Obba Babatunde does a near-classic comic turn as a Skip Gates-style Harvard don liberated by pot, yet his comic potential is undermined by the recent Harvard scandal involving Redman Cornel West and Method Man Henry Louis Gates struggling for position and self-esteem. That's real black comedy.
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The failure of Michael Mann's Ali is so complete (from concept to execution, acting, writing, down to the music heard throughout) that anyone who tries to defend the film merely accepts its mess. What went wrong comes from a deep cultural confusion that can be best understood by examining the new Angie Stone music video, Brotha. Stone, a plump, dark-skinned Soul Mama, is one of the recent self-conscious r&b vocalists (like Erykah Badu and Jill Scott) who declaim their cultural roots more than they sing about feelings. (Their songs often use awkward, didactic phrases like "support system" or "verbal elation.") She's shown in postcoital bliss, stating her adoration: "He is my king, He is my one/Yes, he's my father/Yes, he's my son." Director Chris Robinson moves from the bedroom out to the culture, illustrating Stone's reverie with montages of different men?a preponderance of them famous.
Stone is on the right track to propose respectful black male tribute against the demonizing media, but the Brotha video evinces a recent, troubling reliance on celebrity. It amounts to commercializing?in the heinous way that hiphop has made popular?those aspects of African-American living that are personal and should be inestimable. Stone chants about Wall Street brothas, blue-collar brothas, "down-for-whatever-chilling-on-the-corner brotha/Talented brotha/And to every one of y'all behind bars/You know that Angie loves ya." The range of her consciousness and affection is fine, and motherly, covering personal freedom and social oppression. But then the visual roll call highlighting Marvin Gaye, Kweisi Mfume, Bill Cosby, Malcolm X, Stevie Wonder, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Arthur Ashe, Jim Brown, Lenny Kravitz, D'Angelo and a couple dozen more is neither political nor obscure enough to make any point besides success.
Brotha's emphasis on celebrity (by which the tabloid reality of such as Chris Tucker, R. Kelly, Latrell Sprewell and Tupac overwhelms images of authentic, workaday black men) proves that in media terms, brothas' experiences have no weight without the notoriety of wealth (or crime). This cultural aberration is obscured by a movie like Ali: most people are unable to imagine average black Americans apart from media stereotypes. Brotha might have been an amazing, restorative music video if, like Lisa Stansfield's All Woman, it had dramatized universal black male experiences. (The richest moment comes as Stone's lyric, "Some say that he's up to no good around the neighborhood," matches a shot of an NYPD car on patrol. It's the only scene that dramatizes a situation.) Black men's phantom identity?the problem addressed by Brotha?is compounded by the phantom of celebrity. Who are these men to their families, to the world, to themselves? On Stone's album Mahogany Soul, the uptempo "Brotha REMIX," featuring Alicia Keys and Eve, expands Stone's perspective to suggest a community gaining self-recognition, not just ethnic pandering.
Michael Mann panders to the celebrity cult by replaying famous moments from past Muhammad Ali documentaries (the spurious When We Were Kings, not William Klein's superb Muhammad Ali The Greatest). Ali isn't a biography so much as an iconography. The black celebrity is the only black person the media can fathom, thus Ali essentially treats the black celebrity as chattel?grist for Michael Mann's idle, non-probing speculation. Such glib pop thinking is usually (and best) expressed in music video, a short, of-the-moment, almost journalistic genre tied to instantaneous expression and communication. (Recall Born to Fight, the 1989 video Spike Lee directed for Tracy Chapman. It turns out Lee is a pretty good music video director who, there, showed a better understanding than Mann of boxing as a metaphor for black struggle.) That's sincere tv iconography, unlike Mann's trite tv-style spectacle that apparently has bred a generation of viewers?and critics?who can't tell television from cinema and have done much damage by conflating the two. They accept tv's abbreviation, carelessness and superficiality: Mann's excessive rack focus goes to whoever is speaking; Ali's big ring entrance in Zaire is a Raging Bull cliche; and numerous sequences like Ali's trot through Kinshasa try to disguise a music video as psychodrama. This is not only an esthetic disaster; Ali shows it's basically a conceptual calamity, reducing Muhammad Ali and the cultural stereotype of the African-American male to nearly three hours of soundbites.
As often happens with poor films on black subjects, people's interest in the subject itself is never challenged, so they settle for less?for having their sentiments slaked, their prejudices confirmed, their ignorance undisturbed. This wasn't the problem with Panther or Basquiat, but it explains why the media rallies behind films as slack as Ali and Lumumba (one leaves both movies knowing less about their subjects than when one went in). Young audiences will be thrown by the miscast Will Smith, whose sleepy-eyed look and slow speech lack Ali's prettiness and exuberance?epochal qualities that, in the 60s, revolutionized the typical black media presence. Mann determines to make the same kind of meaningless style statement that got him a New York cover story when Miami Vice appeared. He does nothing to explore Ali's character?that is, Ali's beliefs on boxing, religion and sex are left to conjecture amid the familiar reenactments. The movie links up with celebrityhood (starting with irrelevant emphasis on Sam Cooke, then Malcolm X?an approach ironically patterned after Spike Lee's Malcolm X) rather than daring to treat Ali as a complex man (an approach that distinguished Scorsese's Raging Bull and Oliver Stone's Nixon). This happens in Ali because Mann is, obviously, not much interested in Muhammad Ali. You can't imagine Mann repeating Angie Stone's lyric, "I want you to know that I'm here for you/Forever true," because Ali, in every way that counts, is untrue.