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Oh, What a Mangled Web We Leave After flirting with fame and fortune, Nashville's most decadent local rockers The Pink Spiders lost a major-label deal and two of the three founding members—so now what?
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Reckless Love Caitlin Miller died after a collision with her boyfriend's speeding truck. The teenager's friends and family say it was no accident.
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The Grass Ceiling Finally competitive, Vanderbilt still has one big problem: playing in the SEC.
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How to Be a Hollaback Girl To be a Titans cheerleader you don't have to be thin, tan and busty. Well, actually, you do.
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National Features >
SF Weekly
Identity Plagiarism
A blogger steals someone else's life story and calls it her own.
By Ashley Harrell
Westword
Fuel's Gold
How William Orr's quest for better, cheaper gas became a crime.
By Alan Prendergast
Miami New Times
Mold Over Miami
The family of a dead judge blames a creeping fungus in the federal courthouse.
By Tim Elfrink
The Pitch
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I worked at Kmart with John McCain's director of strategy.
By Alan Scherstuhl
About a Boi
OutKast’s Depression-era hip-hop musical has a loving respect for the old South
Michael Atkinson
Published on August 24, 2006
One of the weakest and most ridiculous aspects of popular culture is its narcissistic now-ness. There’s often no then or later, and without past experience or the messy knowledge of life, modern entertainment media often seems poached in a neurotic teenage brainpan, entranced with its own ignorant tunnel vision. A quick-fix solution is simply to reach back and engage with yesteryear, and few recent Hollywood films have done this with as much loose energy and invention as Bryan Barber’s Idlewild. Set in a 1935 Georgia backwater with a nonetheless busy moonshine industry and a funeral home the size of Tara, the first starring feature for rap duo OutKast assembles a Depression morphed and tickled with hip-hop, digital animation and movie memories. (Barber, a music-video vet, has no shyness about reusing some of the Coen brothers’ visual trademarks.) But Idlewild has a sober, loving respect for history and the old South, and thereby grants itself a measure of distinction.
It’s also the most substantially conceived movie vehicle hip-hop stars have ever gotten, which isn’t saying a great deal. Idlewild’s thicket of genre-stuff does suggest, though, that ironic riffs like Francis Coppola’s The Cotton Club and the Coens’ Miller’s Crossing are already old enough to be homaged themselves. Tinted sepia and dolled up in supreme period duds, Barber’s all-black universe revolves around surely the era’s only nightclub/speakeasy/whorehouse with fire-breathing, body-painted strippers, a cavernous enterprise with chicken coops onstage, and a seething backstage warren of clutter that never, despite the film’s reputedly tiny budget, feels redundant.
The opening-credits sequence is nostalgic and lovely, an archival reminiscence by André Benjamin’s Percival about his motherless childhood spent in a mortician’s office, elbow-rubbing with rum runners, mourners and Rooster, a wily orphan as rootless as Percival is confined. From there, the two pals’ stories run more or less parallel: a faithless family man and “singer” on the club’s stage, Rooster (Antwan “Big Boi” Patton) witnesses his boss getting whacked by a rabid hood (Terrence Howard, out-acting everybody), and thereby inherits the establishment’s debt and managerial duties. Meanwhile, piano player Percival, who works dressing corpses by day under the eye of tyrannical dad Ben Vereen, meets cute with an out-of-town chanteuse (Paula Patton, no relation), and pursues an awkward romance.
Ever since Liza Minnelli ceased being a movie star, making musicals has required the steely self-absorption of a penitent, and never less than when a heartsick Benjamin rises in the morning below several dozen synchronized cuckoo clocks and warbles about destiny and loneliness. Most of the numbers flow from the nightclub stage, armed with video-rehearsed dance routines and Barber’s frantic editing, which always cuts on the upbeat movement but could give you a tic as well. (When Paula Patton’s nervous diva belts out a few notes in a single shot that lasts six or more seconds, it feels like a cold cocktail in a sandstorm.) Barber even bullet-time-slo-mos the hoofin’ acrobatics, reminding me of Winter Olympics replays. Offstage, the songs are outrageously wrong but have a stubborn absurdity, especially when Patton’s Rooster raps out a duet with his (animated) drinking flask while driving in a dusky, tommy-gun-peppered car chase.
OutKast themselves are a bit of a muddle. Patton, having made a fortune with hip-hop’s standard-operating-procedure supercool introversion, rarely opens up and actually acts. (This is a cult-of-personality genre in which the stars rarely take off their shades.) Benjamin, stuck with a mopey role, fares better, and carries with him (as in John Singleton’s otherwise shruggable Four Brothers) a self-pitying darkness that’s not on the script page. But his post-climactic ballad, warbled over an undertaker’s slab, can only produce sympathy for the uneasy performer, not his heartbroken character.
Unfortunately, Idlewild grows more conventional and slack as it rolls on. The gang war we’re promised never coalesces, Percival’s romance takes eons to consummate, and for long stretches everyone seems to be waiting for someone else to push the old-fangled story over the next edge. I would’ve appreciated, too, an even deeper sense of the era, when individuals as old as Ving Rhames’ crime boss or Bill Nunn’s hooch supplier would’ve remembered slavery. As it is, though, and easy for me to say since I’m as white as toothpaste, it’s a pleasure to note Idlewild’s racial self-assurance, which owns the caricatures as well as the stereotype busters and bullishly obviates any potential NAACP objections. (Its regard for women, however, isn’t far above the hip-hop schema of crazy whores and nagging wives.) The film is so cornpone that class and poverty aren’t even issues—crime and decadence are their own reasons to get the hell out of Georgia while the getting is good.
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