Krumpled

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.

The Lords of Dogtown

Directed by Catherine Hardwicke

Skateboarder Stacey Peralta improves his 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys by writing the drama The Lords of Dogtown. He also rescues director Catherine Hardwicke's editing skill (and good-sense use of cinematographer Elliot Davis) after her debut/debacle Thirteen. Peralta's awareness of class struggle among poor Cali kids-set in motion by the invention of polyurethane wheels-is both succinct and breezy. He avoids viewing skateboarding as a way out of poverty (though it was that for a lucky few) by implying that such release was a particular benefit of both youthful ingenuity and California esprit.

The contrast to Rize is striking. Peralta's mixed-ethnic brood refutes the exoticizing tendency that traps black-youth reportage. Instead, his autobiographic sense of freedom (in the metaphor of movement, of circling rivalry and friendship) shows what's wrong with LaChappelle's view. The imagery and performers (especially Heath Ledger and Rebecca DeMornay as perpetually stoned adult mentors) embody white caste issues, but nothing is overly romanticized. The vision seems authentically, appropriately dazed. It grasps the ambivalence of pop success rather than trumpeting the promise of commercialism. If krumping is an atavistic ritual, as LaChappelle implies, it can only be validated if it is part of community subsistence. No amount of fame or trendiness disguises the important lesson that Peralta's skateboarders must surf the streets for their humanity. In Rize, ghetto kids sink into mania.

-A. W.