Rize

"A documentary look at "krumping," a dance-form emanating from the streets of South Central Los Angeles, with movements including quick syncopated body gyrations fast enough to warrant a disclaimer that the film was not sped up. It centers around "Tommy the Clown," and focuses on the form of an expression as a positive alternative to the stereotypical hip-hop images and criminal pursuits."

http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040329/images/crumpets_180.jpg

(hey, how many krumping DVDs are out that you know of?)

(Krump is a terrible word. WAY too close to "grumping.")

By Armond White

Rize

Directed by David LaChappelle

Fashion photographer David LaChappelle wears two hats as the director of the documentary Rize. First is a backwards baseball cap to prove he's a style maven. The second (if you look hard) is a safari hat. Rize gives one the impression of a great white hunter snapping pictures of wildlife in deepest, darkest Africa. LaChappelle's video-slick view of black-youth dance culture in South Central Los Angeles is just a new form of racial stigma. Now that the hip-hop revolution has won capitalist approval for inner-city degradation, LaChappelle can boldly indulge his exploitation instincts. By deliberately misspelling the film's title, LaChappelle pretends solidarity with the kids most sorely affected by America's economic disparity and the nationwide collapse of its education system. In Rize, LaChappelle's celebration of a new ghetto dance craze is teeth-gnashingly dubious.

It's also damnably acclaimed. Critics hail LaChappelle for discovering a little-known subculture, but these are the same clueless trend spotters who disdained the film version of Tyler Perry's vaudeville-drama Diary of a Mad Black Woman. They prefer Rize because it doesn't require sympathy with middle-class black gospel or an appreciation of black showbiz tradition. The wildly gesticulating dancers in Rize reinforce apprehensiveness about urban youth being out of control. LaChappelle sells this distorted sociology to the same gatekeepers who ignored the astonishing street choreography in You Got Served. That musical-drama, vibrantly staged by music-video veteran Chris Stokes, asked audiences to imagine the ambitions and emotions of black teens. Rize merely insists they be objectified.

LaChappelle's failure began in concept. Rize opens with a facile recounting of the 1966 Watts riots, then the 1992 Rodney King riots. It was in '92 that L.A. resident Tommy Johnson began performing professionally as a clown at children's birthday parties; he became a Pied Piper for those Compton youth who were temperamentally unsuited to the lawlessness of the Bloods and the Crips (resisting even the gangsta antics of their clownish rap-music offshoots, N.W.A.). Billing himself as "the Hiphop Clown," Tommy enlisted these kids in dance competitions, dressed in the "different" colors of a jester's costume. A movie about the gentler breed of black urban youth might be fascinating, but an entire sexual subtext seems missing. Because LaChappelle can't get past liberal condescension, he posits this dancing ("krumping") as an expression of political frustration. What's more frustrating is the Rize review that hailed the dancing as a resurrection, rising out of the miasma that followed the Rodney King beating. This buys into LaChappelle's ignorance about black youths' impudence (the kids performing a satire of King's misfortune); seemingly unaware that the word "krump" derives from both "crunk," for inebriation, and Eddie Murphy's The Klumps. Worst of all, this praise sentimentalizes the self-destructive habits of life behind hip-hop's Black Curtain.

When Tommy's kids put on clown's white-face and then shake themselves into conniptions, it doesn't suggest tribalism but a Ku Klux Klan fantasy. They jiggle violently, like death-row inmates being electrocuted. LaChappelle romanticizes because he doesn't think politically; he's an artiste eager to sell. Rize appears at a time when the culture accepts even negative associations as potentially commercial. Plus, LaChappelle taps into the undying infatuation of the White Negro; he's an Interview magazine wigger. Treating the grotesque animalism of krumping as a natural attribute of black youth, LaChappelle flaunts the frowning faces, the pugilism and convulsions yet never shows that these moves are practiced—the same insult that racist sports writers make about black athletes. LaChappelle's au courant strategy is to have the dancer Lil C proclaim, "We're gonna take the art world by storm!" Rize perpetuates the fallacy that after the voguing showcase in Paris Is Burning, after M.C. Hammer's phenomenal gyrations, after Jeffrey Wright's dazzling gnomic performance in Basquiat—that mainstream culture is still opposed to outré Negritude.

Exoticism is the game by which LaChappelle fancies himself a pioneer. Rize spreads the idea of minstrelsy no less than a Lil Jon video. That's why Tommy and the kids don't discuss krumping beyond surviving ghetto turmoil. (The good thing about You Got Served and Charles Stone III's Drumline was the awareness of art-practice; those youths had minds, voices and talent—not self-pity.) Krumping looks like glorified sociopathy. One confused kid says, "This is ghetto ballet. We didn't have to go to school for this. It was already imprinted in us from birth." Here's where LaChappelle inserts footage from Leni Riefenstahl's The Nuba Materials—no kidding. Critics shamelessly endorse this triumph of the swill.

The gaudy bad taste of LaChappelle's music videos and tv commercials (from Christina Aguilera to Burger King) proves Rize is part of his formula. Uninterested in the etiology of krumping, or seriously addressing African cultural geneology, LaChappelle mounts his second terrible mistake: After zipping through the big Battle Zone competition, suspiciously eliding the losers' jacked-up disappointments and recriminations, he photographs the final dance sequence with the krumpers oiled-up and silhouetted against the blue sky (writhing to "Oh, Happy Day"). They're not immortalized; they're insensitively commercialized. Rize may have the most culturally misleading use of the documentary format since the b-ball clichés of Hoop Dreams. From here on, I'll think of both docs as The Sorrow and the Pity.

I'm assuming the New York Press?

BTW I don't think people are "weirder" in this country about race. I just think we tend to be a lot angrier/more defensive about it, which given our history isn't ya know real shocking.

xp

I am always saying that I AM the center of the universe.

Uninterested in the etiology of krumping, or seriously addressing African cultural geneology,

these fragments are....odd.

Here's where LaChappelle inserts footage from Leni Riefenstahl's The Nuba Materials—no kidding. Critics shamelessly endorse this triumph of the swill.

ah. ah ha ha. ah yes, i see what he did there. Such punnery.

Say, didn't the guy who did Drumline, Charles Stone III, also do the "True" thing that Budweiser copped as an advert campaign?

Yes, well there ya go.

Her nipples would also conceively be banned from TV at 3 in the morning, much to the lessening of our current national discourse on fine tittays.

or the WaTimes, which would finally give value to that moonie rag.

Japan to thread!!!

(don't bring Momus with you, tho. Actually, wait, DO.)

I swear, this one's worth it!

http://babelogue.citypages.com:8080/pscholtes/2005/07/12

However I did cringe at the cut to the African rituals/dancing, which seemed like the first association an Archie Bunker would make. The Pentecostal moves brought in later were what I thought of first. And I'm dubious at one of the krumpers' claim that a 4-year-old pumping her little ass fiercely "isn't sexual."

me too

The dancing: new hotness.

The movie itself: meh. Gimme Style Wars.

Morbius, you're engaging in the same kind of multiple projection as White: You really cringed because you imagined how a fictional character would react?

That's no excuse for making a movie that begins with Rodney King and proceeds to show a bunch of black people dressed like clowns in the most shallow way possible. Without the King / Watts footage, I might be more sympathetic to LaChappelle's lazy documentary style.

Yes.

No, I didn't imagine how a fictional character would react, I used 'Archie Bunker' as shorthand for the sub/urban working-class racism I grew up with. Some of my late relatives, if confronted with krumping, would've declared "Well, they're only 300 years out of the jungle," and been helped along by the juxtaposition of that footage.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051116/ap_en_mo/oscars_documentaries

You want the Noize board

http://fnbtvshowcase.techweenies.com/about.html

Some of the dancing is similar to krumping, some of it is breaking/popping/stepping or even Madonna back-up dancer type stuff. But some of it is really crazy next-level stuff, where the music is this total collage of old-school stuff, hits, novelty songs, samples from robo-cop and terminator movies, video game sounds and the dancing is all this weird hong-kong action/video game gun fight stuff. Hard to explain, totally fun to watch though.

OMG you went to school with a Huxtable!