Next Friday

Betcha never thought you'd hear a 19th century French author invoked in a review of an Ice Cube movie, but here goes: as Anatole France said when commenting on the state of his country's anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus Affair, "If fifty million people say a stupid thing, it is still a stupid thing."

Next Friday was the top-grossing film the week it was released.

Note to guilt-ridden white folks: you're not automatically racist if you think that a movie whose first line, a voiceover while the opening credits swirl up in weedsmoke, is "a real niggah movie," whose first visual gag is a chihuahua having a St. Bernard-sized bowel movement which a major character then wears (the bowel movement, not the chihuahua) for the rest of the film, whose heroes imbibe enough ganja to get favored trading status for Puff Nation, and whose deeper meaning can be summed up in the quote "fat bitches need love too," threatens to set African-American cinema back to the days of Stepin Fetchit, nevermind that a black filmmaker was in charge.

Mr. Cube, who wrote and produced this...thing, reprises his Friday role as Chris, a guy who discovered love, dope, and beat up the local Watts neanderthal bully in one day. Now his nemesis has busted out of jail and is looking for payback, so Chris flees to the burbs to stay in his uncle's lottery-spree home, where the neighbors are drug-dealing Puerto Ricans and a Korean named Miss Ho.

Spike Lee must be turning over in his Knicks seat. F

This page hosted by Get your own Free Home Page