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By Walter Deller
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The clownish antics of white rapper Jamie Kennedy
are no laughing matter to the gunslinging boys of Bad
Boys II
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Let us now praise famous white honkies. Steve Martin's staid attorney learns to loosen up and shake his booty, thanks to a crash course in street culture courtesy of Queen Latifah's prison convict in the recent comedy blockbuster, Bringing Down the House. Mistaken identities via an Internet dating service is the means by which Martin's suburban home is invaded by the hoodlum played by Latifah The plot device opens the door for a steady stream of race gags.
By the film's end, Martin flashes baggy pants, clunky gold chains and a floppy ball cap in a clownish attempt to be the oldest rapper since Warren Beatty chased Halle Berry in Bulworth.
If there's a social commentary squeezed inside Bringing Down the House, it's this: Nothing is funnier than an uptight, middle-aged honky who learns to chill from a cool sister.
Latifah may be the ex-convict soul sister with the heart of gold who teaches Martin how to relax, but she's still portrayed as a drug-taking, criminally inclined and lazy burden to society. In Bringing Down the House, Latifah is the victim of the screenwriters' racial profiling. The laughs are clumsy when Latifah and a white female racist wrestle in a ladies bathroom at a posh country club. In fact, the laughs are clumsy throughout Bringing Down the House.
Betty White sums up Bringing Down the House perfectly as a racist neighbor who pokes her head through Martin's front door and mutters, "I thought I heard Negro."
Anyone attempting to understand America's dilemma with race need only need go to the multiplex. Race is Hollywood's choice gag of the moment, and there seems to be no end to the blackface-like buffoonery. At least in the headphones, Rap and Hip-Hop music strive for some street credibility among the gangster posturing. At the movies, blacks are wisecracking clowns, with or without handguns. Rumors of the 21st-century black arts renaissance are over. Denzel Washington and Halle Berry's dual 2002 Oscar victories have faded from memory. Bernie Mac has replaced Sidney Poitier as the most familiar black man, thanks to his TV show and movie roles in Head of State and Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. If that's not a step backward for racial equality, I don't know what is.
TV comic Jamie Kennedy could pass for Steve Martin's honkie nephew in Malibu's Most Wanted, a comedy as buffoonish as Bringing Down the House, although it never caught fire with movie audiences.
In Malibu's Most Wanted, Kennedy plays a white upper-class rapper whose antics are ruining his dad's (Ryan O'Neal) gubernatorial bid. To squelch the wannabe Eminem, the father's campaign manager (Blair Underwood) scares him with a taste of what hood life is really like. The problem is that nobody in Malibu knows anything about hood life except what they have seen in the movies.
Like Martin, Kennedy sports the requisite baggy shorts and exposed boxer briefs as a sign of his hoodlum credibility. Kennedy speaks in a singsong manner and syncs his flashing hand movements in time with his goofball raps about his Malibu life.
Kennedy's white rapper is a character he created on his sketch show, JKX: The Jamie Kennedy Experiment, and it's pure blaxploitation parody, albeit performed by a white guy. If the gag doesn't satisfy, it's not for Kennedy's lack of trying. Malibu's Most Wanted reminds us that what works well on TV seldom transfers to movies.
Kennedy is more than a one-note clown. He played a Desert Storm soldier in the smart political comedy, Three Kings, and is signed to star in Son of the Mask, a sequel to Jim Carrey's 1994 comedy. He is a comic who means no harm. Funky black culture just happens to be the subject of his clowning around in Malibu's Most Wanted.
The movie is too ludicrous to be mean spirited or harmful. In Malibu, Taye Diggs plays a classically trained black actor, hired to scare Kennedy by pretending to be a gangster. Asked if he finds the film offensive, Diggs answers with a matter-of-fact "no." He says blacks need to laugh at themselves, and Malibu helps them do it.
"One of the reasons I was drawn to this project is because it pokes fun at all those images of black culture and all the stereotypes, and it allows everyone to laugh at it all," Diggs says, speaking around the time of Malibu's release. "This is something I think we need to do sometimes. People take all this stuff too seriously. What is black, and what is white? Who is allowed to talk black, and who is allowed to talk white? If I speak a certain way, am I white? If I sag my pants, am I black? I think it's refreshing to see something so cliché done in an original way."
The racial divide is just as broad and farcical in Head of State, a political comedy that follows in the footsteps of Eddie Murphy's 1992 film, The Distin-guished Gentleman. Comedian Chris Rock stars and directs the film, playing a politician who ends up in the White House, where he shakes up the political system. Bernie Mac joins Rock for comic support with a steady supply of ghetto jokes. In Head of State, you get the impression that the American middle class has completely disappeared. You have the working-class poor (black) and the wealthy (white) with no common ground. It's as if The Cosby Show's Huxtables, that paradigm of the black middle class family, has ceased to exist.
In movies like Head of State and Malibu's Most Wanted, blacks and whites don't get along because we don't live together. The idea of diverse neighborhoods is too real for Hollywood. The jokes are broader when everyone is a fish out of water.
The smart-aleck banter is as fast and furious as the gunplay in Bad Boys II. It's summer, after all, and action movies are king. Will Smith repeats his role as Mike Lowrey, the narcotics cop, from the 1995 hit movie. Martin Lawrence returns as his partner, Marcus Burnett. Jerry Bruckheimer is back as producer, and Michael Bay returns to the director chair. Everything is as it should be. In fact, little has changed since 1995, so Bad Boys II fits perfectly with the gunplay and clownish behavior of current Hollywood movies.
Smith might have boosted the role of blacks in the movies with his starring role in the epic drama, Ali, but the ambitious film was a financial defeat. So it's back to his old action-clown ways via Bad Boys II. One imagines a Fresh Prince TV reunion is in the works for Smith if Bad Boys II is not successful enough to warrant a Bad Boys III. Smith keeps going backwards and, if a star like Smith keeps going backwards, American movies will never become racially balanced.
Smith might believe an action comedy formula like Bad Boys is a guaranteed hit, but he needs to watch Lawrence's early 2003 misstep National Security to see that wisecracks and gunfire do not always mix well.
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Jamie Kennedy (center) is a buffoonish white rapper in
Malibu's Most Wanted.
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Rock could have told Smith that Bad Boys II is not a sure thing, no matter how many exploding cars flip through the air. In the CIA action film Bad Company, Anthony Hopkins and Rock teamed up for a dull, gun-blasting comedy that never caught its stride.
Black America, as imagined by Hollywood, looks something like this: Chris Rock clowns around as a Presidential candidate in Head of State. Steve Martin plays the honky to Queen Latifah's lady hoodlum in Bringing Down the House. Jamie Kennedy's Malibu rapper pretends he admires black culture while acting like a buffoon. Only Eddie Murphy plays matters racially straight as an unemployed father in Daddy Day Care. It's the one positive attribute for a comedy with few laughs.
There are guns and wisecracks -- and not a serious black performance in sight. The race laughs keep coming, and it's hard to know when Hollywood will wise up and make something other than some Kentucky Fried movie.
What was it that Betty White muttered in Bringing Down the House? "I thought I heard Negro."
Her words sum up present-day Hollywood perfectly. ©
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