Daily Archives: June 12, 2009

Pick Up the Mic

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Hip hop, more than most musical genres, seems built on and around machismo, but of course there are plenty of gay fans of rap, too. It’s with that fact in mind that director Alex Hinton set out to shine a spotlight on the so-called modern revolution of “homohop” with his superb, festival-minted documentary Pick Up the Mic, which features gay, lesbian and even transgender emcees both rapping about issues important to them and talking about their place, collectively and individually, within a music world that still marginalizes them.

Shot over a three-year period in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Houston and even the Ozarks, Hinton’s movie captures the birth of the homohop movement, and chronicles its growth into a global if still somewhat understated and underground community of artists that has managed to thrive despite improbable odds. Rainbow Flava’s Deadlee and Dutchboy open the film, performing their radical, thumping ditty “No Fagz Allowed,” which seeks to wrest back control of the title-checked epithet in much the same way that urban trailblazers N.W.A. did with the word nigger a couple decades back.

Before long, though, we’re launched back to the late 1980s and early ’90s, and a thumbnail history of how homohop sprouted up in the Bay Area of Northern California. Current A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. Records head Matt Wobensmith talks about his move to San Francisco nearly 20 years ago, and the launch of his self-published ‘zine, Outpunk. After learning that he didn’t need to actually pay for all his publishing costs (a friend within Kinko’s would let the publishers of various fringe ‘zines run off free copies after closing time), Wobensmith expanded his operation a bit, and served as a sort of catalyst for the uniting of all sorts of gay men currently dabbling in various forms of indie and underground music. Combining their creative passion with his business acumen, a legitimate community was born.

Owing to the fact that their personal experiences often stand in contrast to many of their heterosexual rap brethren, gay rap, on the whole, has an understandably steep political and sociological bent, with everything from personal coming-out stories and lingering issues of prejudice informing the rhymes. Still, those thinking that was the end-all, be-all of homohop subject matter would be mistaken, as Rocco Kayiatos, lesbian rapper JenRo and others prove, sharing wild stories of dating and boozy hook-ups that would certainly rival any straight rapper.

At its heart, though, Hinton’s film has a sociopolitical streak, because homophobia continues to stain a lot of hip hop. In this vein, perhaps most interesting and eloquent is spoken word artist and Deep Dickollective emcee Timm T. West, who talks about many in the African-American community rejecting the tags of gay and lesbian as being too part of and associated with the dominant, mainstream culture, and instead referring to homosexual individuals as “same-gender loving” or “in the life.” This articulation of this perceived cultural split — with Ellen DeGeneres, Will & Grace and Queer as Folk for largely white audiences, but little to no correlative national mainstream figures for black gay and lesbian audiences — is an interesting thing to ponder, and makes one wonder if sub-cultural prejudices or detentes ultimately do more to advance overall equality for gays and lesbians. In a related strand, there’s also an interesting exchange where West gets hailed down on the streets of New York by a would-be rapper intrigued by the camera following West around; after a while it comes out that West is gay, and the dialogue that follows runs refreshingly counter to expectations. Just like much of Hinton’s film, overall, actually; one needn’t be a huge hip hop-head to enjoy Pick Up the Mic, such is the universality of its story of growth and connection.

Housed in a clear plastic Amaray case with a striking red cover, Pick Up the Mic releases to DVD next week; it’s presented in 1.33:1 full screen on a region-free disc, and comes with more than 40 minutes of deleted scenes. Included in this mix are several musical performances — perhaps most stirring being Deadlee’s “Suck My Gun” — but also a collection of coming-out stories from interviewees like Cazwell, Paradigm, QBoy and Soce. There are stories of parental arguments, screaming and tears, but perhaps most amusing is a story that evokes Anne Rice’s blood-sucking Lestat as triggering a moment of inwardly blossoming revelation. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; for more information on the film, click here. B+ (Movie) B (Disc)

Food, Inc.

Film Reviews

Discussing the slow-drip revelations of steroid use in baseball with a friend recently, I made the point that if a professional athlete didn’t know what he or she was putting in their body (as Barry Bonds and now Manny Ramirez have each claimed, among others), it was only because they didn’t want to know. My friend agreed. If your livelihood depends on peak-performance physical fitness, knowing the details of any supplement you ingest takes on extreme importance.

That point is still valid, I think. And yet, watching Robert Kenner’s powerhouse, revelatory documentary Food, Inc., one comes to realize just how much of our diet is outside our personal control, almost no matter how healthy we aim to be. Unless you grow and locally source all of your own food, we are each, to varying degrees, prisoners of a system in which mega-companies like McDonald’s — to use but one example, since it’s the world’s largest purchaser of beef — can virtually dictate the terms by which cows are raised all across the United States. This means that even if you’re not pulling into the drive-thru for a Big Mac, you’re apt to buy ground beef from cows fed with corn, something they weren’t biologically designed to eat.



The astounding ubiquity of corn and its many spin-off uses, including high-fructose corn syrup (all deliciously subsidized by governmental policy), serves as the leaping-off point for Food, Inc., which features interviews with author-experts such as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma), as well as forward-thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield Farms’ Gary Hirschberg and Polyface Farms’ Joe Salatin. Kenner lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that’s been hidden from the pastoral fantasy — red barns, white picket fences, rolling green hills — American consumers have been, ahem, fed.

In the wake of documentarian Michael Moore‘s box office successes and Al Gore’s Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, politically agitative nonfiction works have a certain cachet they didn’t have a decade ago. Apart from its thought-provoking value in this arena, though, what helps truly distinguish Food, Inc. are three things. First, the polished sheen of its production; there’s just a pinch of the wry, pop vibrance of Super Size Me. Second, a counterbalancing optimism as to how to make positive changes. And third, true heart. In fact, the inclusion of a story strand concentrating on a Colorado mother who lost her two-year-old son to E. coli from a hamburger gives Food, Inc. a tangible emotional connection that a lot of mainstream dramas, let alone like-minded docs, simply don’t have.

In revealing surprising truths about what goes into the foods we eat and how they’re produced, Food, Inc. not only makes obvious links between our high-caloric modern choices and rising obesity, heart disease and adult-onset diabetes rates, but also the relative collective impotence of our government’s regulatory agencies, the USDA and FDA. In clear, concise terms, Kenner correlates how efficiencies achieved in food production and packaging are precariously built on a house of cards, since the trade-off comes via a food supply now controlled by an ever-dwindling handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health and the livelihood of the American farmer.



Perhaps most chillingly emblematic of this is Monsanto, whose genetic modification of a soybean resistant to the weed-killing chemical spray Round-up has given them a patent on the seed. With skull-crushing efficiency, including lawsuits and private investigator enforcers, the company has driven small farmers who don’t adopt their seed out of business, growing their market share from two to 90 percent in just over a decade. In a few years, it may be possible that regular soybeans won’t be domestically available at all.

No matter how much of a cinephile one is, it’s reasonable to say that only a handful of films in any given year might actually impact your life. And it’s a tough thing — to be interesting and progressive, persuasive and affecting, all in almost equal measure. And yet Kenner pulls it off. Food, Inc. certainly isn’t the sort of film that puts a feel-good spring in your step, but it appeals to both the head and heart in such a clear-eyed fashion as to make you want to take better care of yourself as well as those around you. And that’s a powerful thing. (Magnolia, unrated, 93 minutes)

Twitter Film 140 Nears Date with Production

Casting About, Ephemera

Irish filmmaker Frank Kelly is only two directors away from the final bookings on his Twitter compilation film, to be shot simultaneously, on June 21, by 140 different directors. In true entrepreneurial fashion, though, he already has a design… and T-shirts, even. Should be interesting to see how this turns out; hopefully I’ll have an interview with Kelly shortly after completion.

Poisoned Waters

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Water isn’t just something that sweeps in from the sky and swelling ocean, causing massive destruction in our port cities, it turns out. More than three decades after the landmark Clean Water Act, two iconic American waterways — the great coastal estuaries of Puget Sound and the Chesapeake Bay — are both in perilous condition. With polluted runoff still flowing in from industry, agriculture and massive suburban development, many scientists fear contamination to drinking water for millions of people, and the food chain in general.

This PBS Frontline documentary, running approximately two hours, examines the rising hazards to human health and the surrounding ecosystem, and why it’s so hard to keep our modern water clean. Director Rick Young knits together a compelling work, interweaving interviews, archival footage and newly collected comparative images. At the core of the movie’s success, though, is the fact that Young and co-writer Hedrick Smith do a good job of streamlining information in a way that imparts facts without losing viewers in a sleeve-tugging swirl of exclamatory, quantitative analysis. While addressing the growing list of endangered species also threatened by the rate and reach of man’s development and action, the film doesn’t come across as advocating for animals over or more than man; it presents a persuasive case for shared fate, which helps Poisoned Waters strike a chord across any mere political divide, at least with most reasonable minds.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Poisoned Waters is presented in 16×9 widescreen, with an English language stereo audio track that more than adequately handles the meager, talking-head aural demands of the program. Unfortunately, there aren’t the sort of get-involved bonus features that mark many other threatened-climate documentaries, like An Inconvenient Truth. Still, this far and away trumps most of the educational/scholastic viewing of my day; ergo, to purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) C- (Disc)