Screen Picks

Wild Style ($19.95 DVD) In every way except the one that counts, Wild Style is a dreadful movie. Indifferently shot, with a flat, uncomfortable lead performance by legendary graffiti artist Lee Quinones, it's a shambling, threadbare story that manages to find plenty of dead space in its brief 82 minutes. But it's safe to say that nobody watches Wild Style for the story. If you saw Scratch earlier this year, you'll recall that its pioneering DJs were unanimous on the two events that introduced them to hip-hop culture: the success of Herbie Hancock's "Rockit," featuring the turntable scratching of Grandmixer DST, and the release of Wild Style. Twenty years after its release, Wild Style -- which has been referenced and sampled in jams and commercials dozens of times -- still stands as an unequaled document of hip-hop's early years, with appearances by South Bronx royalty almost too numerous to name.

Quinones plays Zoro, a spray-can savant who's tempted by the glitter of the Lower Manhattan art scene, but is happiest making art for himself and his community. Really, though, Zoro's story is just an excuse for the film to make its way into the 'hood. With the help of impresario Fab 5 Freddy, who was a pivotal enough figure in the relationship between uptown and downtown to earn a shout-out in Blondie's genre-busting "Rapture," director Charlie Ahearn captures live performances by legends like DJ Theodore, Grandmaster Flash (scratching in his kitchen), breakdancers the Rocksteady Crew, and the Cold Crush Crew (including Grandmaster Caz), not to mention dozens of lesser-known lights like Chief Rocker Busy Bee, Double Trouble and the Fantastic Romantic 5. These sequences are only nominally integrated into the story: Typically, a character walks into a club, and then we watch the performances on stage for several minutes, with occasional clumsy inserts to remind us that the characters are in the audience. But when you're watching performances like these, who cares how you got there?

Ahearn and Freddy's commentary offers both nostalgia and perspective. On the one hand, there are matter-of-fact shots of the burned-out Bronx, piles of rubble a few doors down from the clubs where hip-hop was born, in areas that today are suburban-style developments. On the other, there's the image of rappers Double Trouble taking the stage in the climactic scene dressed in a pimped-out version of Depression gangster chic, complete with undersized plastic machine guns. Arguably, it's a premonition of gangsta rap, a connection Freddy makes clear in the commentary, but there's something sweetly nostalgic about it as well -- their garb looks like a Halloween costume, not a pretension to the kind of authenticity that eventually has to be backed up by bullets. With Jam Master Jay gunned down and Missy Elliot calling for a return to the days when hip-hop was "fun," Wild Style might be more important than ever.

The Long Goodbye ($19.98 DVD) Every once in a while, the digital video gods throw an unexpected boon our way. Robert Altman's 1973 neo-noir, based on Raymond Chandler's novel, was a minor hit upon its initial release, but it's never made it into the pantheon with Nashville and McCabe & Mrs. Miller, despite being (at least) their equal. Elliot Gould is brilliantly cast against type as Philip Marlowe, a sleepy caricature of Chandler's hard-boiled private eye, one who spends the first 10 minutes of the movie trying to find the right kind of cat food. Tagging their hero "Rip van Marlowe," Altman and co. set out to create a '50s hero who'd been instantly transported to the 1970s, unaware that all the rules have changed. As he did with Gosford Park, Altman uses the detective genre as a tool to investigate itself, which in this case means peeling back the layers of artifice from a Los Angeles where even security guards do Barbara Stanwyck impressions. This is the movie Brian De Palma was trying to make with Femme Fatale, a movie-movie that's satisfying both as a deconstruction of the form and as a plain old yarn.

There are the flourishes, like the fact that every time you hear music, be it lounge piano or a Mexican marching band, they're playing a different arrangement of the title song (a trick later nicked for the "Live and Let Die" moment in the similarly overlooked Grosse Point Blank). Or the fact that the Chandlerian stock role of the graying patriarch is filled by B-movie veteran Sterling Hayden, or the fact that the screenplay is credited to Leigh Brackett, who collaborated with William Faulkner on the original version of Chandler's The Big Sleep. (Of course, as is ever the case with Altman, it's only the barest blueprint for the movie.) Where a lot of modern noirs are just an excuse for directors to shine lights through Venetian blinds, Altman stages a car crash between the shadowy world of '40s noir and the sun-dappled corruption of Hollywood's L.A. (And he doesn't let himself off the hook, either -- Hayden's pleasure palace in the Malibu Colony was filmed at Altman's own house.) The result is a reinvention of the genre that has rarely been matched (Miller's Crossing is neck-and-neck) and never been surpassed. The DVD includes a straightforward but informative making-of as well as an in-depth explanation of the flashing technique cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (who also shot McCabe) used to give the film its gauzy, druggie look.

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May 26, 2005
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