Black and White

I just don't understand how some people can comment on this film saying that it had little structure yet can comment about Independance Day being good!!!! This film is realistic and quite humerous. It doesn't depict Blacks as wanting a quick lay and it doesn't potray White as trying to be bling!!

It just depicts the characters we see do what they want to do... And besides, if you hated the film so much, you should have turned it off. The fact the very vast majority did not suggests you are not at all being honest in your opinions of this film.

Get a life people and carry on watching your Hollywood Superflicks!!

My verdict: 7/10

It's the one Tobackonists have been waiting for since the thrill of his debut movie FINGERS--a movie with the soar and rush of obsession that also has the sanity and craft of a grown man. This movie about the uneasy millennium-era relationship of black and white people in America is not, as many people have said, a work of moony White Negroism. It resembles one of Godard's mid-sixties essay-movies like MASCULINE FEMININE or TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER, but with race substituted for sexual politics, and with a heavy dose of pornography and melodramatic pulp. Toback keeps cranking up the heat as the cast--a conceptual-art demonstration of stunt casting--leaves the audience openmouthed.

Bijou Phillips is a wonder as the wigga-talkin' Upper East Side chiclet who proclaims, "I wanna be black--I'm a kid in America." Ben Stiller, as a tormented dirty cop, gives the performance of his life in a high-speed monologue of self-analysis that's like a speed freak's channeling the essence of Robert Downey, Jr. The great man himself appears here as well, as a gay artist who comes on to Mike Tyson (playing himself) at a party. The scene of violence that ensues should have James Toback clinking a glass in celebration in the mirror: he managed to top the Jim Brown/Tisa Farrow head-smashing sequence in FINGERS. Brooke Shields is an amazement as a fervent, sincere documentarian with dredlocks--she's like a deadpan version of the Geraldine Chaplin character in NASHVILLE, and Shields astonishes.

Toback wants to cram everything into this bird's eye view of race--sexual fantasies, money machinations, the class strata of New York City. That none of the scenes is a dud, that the movie is beautifully shot and edited, that nothing feels merely "excessive," is a testament to the passion behind the camera. BLACK AND WHITE is a miracle to this viewer: it renewed my excitement and faith in movies at a moment when I felt it falling down.

I wish the the summary line I wrote was a joke, but unfortunately, it isn't. This film catered to every tired-out racial cliche known, and the dialogue was stilted and wooden. Every character was completely unbelievable. Nauseating. That anyone reviewed this film positively is a sign at just how far we have to go on matters of race...most people would rather lie to look PC than tell the truth and actually embrace people based on their own merit instead of having outmoded racial stereotypes.

By the way, it's "bass", not "base", Mr. Canadian Reviewer.

Well, at least that's what this movie becomes in the end. Actually, I couldn't finish the movie. I got 90 minutes into it, and gave up hope that the movie would return to its beginning. The movie starts out good, with a nice angry premise. It seemed so full of venom and froth that the movie would turn out to become a great statement about white culture, black culture, inner city culture, middle class culture, etc.

The movie begins with a black man and two white girls having sex. Then jumps to show that one is middle class. Then, in one of its greatest moments, it has a white guy explore the difference between N-a and

N-r. That was a priceless moment. It adds to the fun with Brooks Shields, and Downey (unnecessarily, but fun). And it keeps going with brutality.

However (There's that nasty word), the movie loses itself fairly quickly. It gets caught up with a basketball player being bribe to lose a game, then blackmailed for accepting it. It goes on, and the movie begins to have a plot instead of a theme, which has nothing to do with the theme. Its like, the movie lost its way, and had nothing left to say. I think I knew where it was going to go with it, but it didn't go there. Maybe it was still on its way, I dunno.

But, in the end, the movie would have made a better episode of "Strangers With Candy" than anything else. It lost its way, and I wonder how it ever got greenlighted, nevertheless had all the big stars in it. Well, we all make bad choices (check "Ready to wear (Pret-a-porter)"), but this one should never have been made.

3/10 (for the beginning)

Hip-hop is not just a style of music, for it comes associated with an attitude, an attitude that notoriously does not wholly reject the ghetto from which it springs. Whether the music, and culture, should thus be seen as the free expression of the dispossessed, or as one of the chains tying them down, is this a moot point (though it's worth noting that every revolution in popular music over the last half-century has been seen by respectable society as the end of the world). 'Black and White' is a celebrity-studded collection of small stories about characters living the hip-hop life, its focus on the interplay of the white community with this essentially black form of music. It's not badly executed, although it's hard to get very interested in any of the characters. One peculiarity, though, is how little hip-hop there actually is on the soundtrack, a strange vacuum at the heart of the film; also, we see little in the way of everyday life in the world from which the music emerged. The result is watchable, but there are no real insights, sociological or musical, to be had.