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It's not too good when the best things you can come up with to say about a movie are "the production company's logo is nice" and "nobody gets a hit in the head with a machete."
This over-hyped entry from writer/director James Toback, whose 1997 Two Guys and a Girl also had to be cut to avoid the dire NC-17, purports to be a provocative exploration of white kids who "try to catch the life force from black guys." Uh-huh. What it does is start out with a young biracial threesome humping against a tree in Central Park while a fourth takes pictures, and proceeds headlong downhill from there. One of the group, blond pixie Charlie (Bijou Phillips), supplies what is supposed to be an explanation for her pale circle of friends' proclivities when we next witness her at dinner flaunting a gold tooth and de rigeur ebonics in protest of her family's unbelievably cartoonish, Upper West Side, Bill Buckley WASPiness: her mom is named Muffy; and is played by Marla Maples (which would make a great name for a pancake-flavored ice cream). Living with that tribe might just make me want to bust a rhyme.
There's more-destructive behavior than mere incautious sex and poor table manners at stake -- namely, dialogue that was largely improvised around a plot that appears to have been supplied by the beta version of Microsoft Random Story Element Generator 1.0. Let's see if I can sum this up without spraining any fingers: Charlie's posse all look up to Will (William Lee Scott), a pretty-fly-(on-the-wall)-for-a-white-guy employed by semi-reformed gangsta Rich (Wu-Tang front man Power) to spot intruding caucasians in an Italo/African turf war. Rich was the one getting poison oak on his, umm, clan in the opening scene, and is now trying to quit crime and cut a rap album. But his long-time b-ball friend Dean (New York Knicks star Allen Houston) has been sucked into a point-shaving sting by a corrupt cop (Ben Stiller) who offers him immunity in exchange for testimony against Rich. Who then turns to Mike Tyson -- the real Mike Tyson -- for advice on how to murder a bro after Dean's amoral New Age feminist anthropology-student paramour Greta (Claudia Schiffer), who used to live with the cop, gives him the idea. Sam, a white documentarian played by dreadlocked Brooke Shields (!), tries to capture the whole thing on videotape, while her husband (Robert Downey, Jr. in yet another one-dimensional gay role) gets the bejeebers slapped out of him for coming on to Tyson: "I dreamed you were holding me."
That's leaving out the stuff you'd think I was making up.
I will admit laughing a couple times, when Brooke says "I can't find my nose ring" and Tyson tries to whip up a sentence around the words "decipher," "vernacular," and "fastidious ." But the cumulative effect of sitting through Black and White was not dissimilar to watching a bad two-hour "SNL" sketch from inside a clothes dryer set for "permanent press." The intriguing subject -- why do some white kids seem to feel more comfortable acting black? -- gets hopelessly lost on the way to setting a new record for the largest cast of characters (other players include Gaby Hoffman, Jared Leto, Method Man, Joe Pantoliano, Wu-Tang's Raekwon, and Elijah Wood) with absolutely no redeeming qualities. Worse, it helps strengthen the racial and sexual stereotypes it aspires to break down. And here's a little suggestion for Mr. Toback: leave improvisation to the folks on "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" D-
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