Whiteboyz

I saw this movie on HBO during my senior year of high school (2000-2001) and thought it was great, and it had a message. It is definitely a message that needs to be spread. Back in the town I grew up in in Upstate New York, the "whigger" thing (white n 1gger) was really big to the point where I was probably the only kid in my town who still dressed normal and listened to heavy metal and punk instead of rap. It really got to be aggrivating because I couldn't relate to hardly anybody accept my close circle. Then I saw this movie and after the end, I am thinking that all of these kids at my school should take a look at this movie and then take a look at themselves. I loved Danny Hoch's performance by the way. As far as a rating, I give this movie a 7 on my scale of 0 to 10.

I get the feeling that this film might've been advertised as a comedy, but yes, it does border on some serious issues that should be acknowledged.

Still, there are several scenes in WHITEBOYS that had me busting up, most notably Flip's daydreaming sequences, which has him imagining about being accepted by urban thugs just because he's "down" with hip-hop.

Overall,I ended up being impressed by this film. Well acted, well written, and well filmed. I would'nt mind catching it again!

I love this movie. It hits the nail on the head portraying suburban white kids trying to be thugs by imitating rappers from MTV. You tend to find more of these kids in backwoods towns and deep in the suburbs than in the inner city and this movie seems more like a non-fiction representation of that ridiculous subculture. They even address the fact that these kids weren't dressing the same years ago or listening to the same music. Basically, acting like these kids is similar to deciding to dress like a cowboy because you start to like country music.

Anyone who doesn't like or appreciate this movie - the joke's on you, thug life with a North Carolina jersey.

i can understand why the makers of this film would want to exaggerate the situation, but i didn't think it need to be set in Iowa. as previous users have mentioned, Iowa is not drug- and black-free, but its image is of wholesome, all-white nostalgia. i didn't really buy Danny Hoch's Flip as an Iowa native, he still sounds too Brooklyn. i think it would have been better if it taken place in Jersey, but i understand the director's desire to show just how far Flip stretches.

That said, i think it's a brilliant, if flawed, movie. it spends a bit too much time watching Flip do his misguided thing, before getting to the climax in Cabrini-Green. Hoch is great at affecting that 'what the hell is going on?' look, and tho this may sound weird, he doesn't overplay the character, except when he's in full blown hip hop mode. other than that his character is completely believable. he nails that character so well, the guy we've all known who has some idea in his head so large he can't hear anything else. Until he takes it too far.

Someone needed to make a movie like this, a commentary on how white suburban teenagers have latched onto hip-hop and "ghetto" culture, and made it part of their identity, when in reality they don't have a solitary clue of what it means to be Black in America. Someone needed to make a movie that made the point that white America's affinity for Black culture rarely translates into actual understanding of Black people as actual human beings, or into an understanding of their situation. Someone needed to make a movie that showed hip-hop-as-consumed-by-white-kids as what it is: a new version of a very old theme in American popular culture -- the Black man as dirty savage, cunning and dangerous, yet stupid and witless at the same time.

But "Whiteboys" is not this movie. The movie can't seem to decide if it's a comedy or a cutting social commentary, or both. So it fails as both. The central problem is that the main characters are stereotypes themselves, the East Coast-imagined version of what someone in Iowa is supposed to be like. It's impossible to believe that Flip and his gang are for real. Flip especially comes off as a delusional mental patient, not as a misguided, out-of-touch kid. The images of farm life were as cartoonish as the images of hip hop life the movie was mocking. Perhaps this was part of the point, but all of the overlapping of targets of parody just made the whole matter confusing.

The movie would have been much better off if had ditched the whole Iowa-farmer theme, stopped reveling in stupid images of kids rapping in farm fields, and instead focused on a group of kids in Any-Suburb USA, the kind of kids that we all have met -- privileged white kids who are drawn to the false glamor of ghetto life presented on TV, utterly oblivious to their own privileged station in life.