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Whiteboys

1999, Movie, R, 89 mins

Whiteboys: Review

WHITEBOYS | WHITEBOYZ
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You can't get much farther from hip-hop's urban cradle than middle America's rolling cornfields. But that doesn't trouble Flip (Danny Hoch, who also cowrote the screenplay), a lily-white, wannabe b-boy straight out of Iowa. Dressed in his Fubu jerseys, baggy shorts and cockeyed baseball cap, Flip (who seems to have learned everything he knows about African-American culture from rap lyrics and music videos) likes to think he's really black, his pale complexion the unfortunate result of a "mad serious skin disorder." Flip dreams of moving up to Chicago's notoriously dangerous Cabrini Green housing project, keeping it real with his black brothers and eventually becoming a rap star. In the meantime, he'll settle for gangsta dope-dealer, and convinces pal Khalid (Eugene Byrd) — who really is black and acts as a foil for Flip's foolishness — to ride shotgun on a road trip up to Chicago along with Flip's best friends (Dash Mihok and Mark Webber), a trip that inevitably goes bad. The irony, of course, is that while trying to escape the land of white biscuit-heads and cowtippers, Flip is completely oblivious to the very real desperation in his own hometown: Failing family farms, widening class differences, his own father (Rich Komenich) losing his job. Flip originated as part of Hoch's one-man, multi-character performance piece Jails, Hospitals and Hip Hop, but deserves the longer treatment he gets here. Hoch's very funny satire on racial stereotyping cuts both ways, and the fact that Flip's slang has already grown stale perfectly sums up white America's ex post facto co-option of black culture. Hoch also points up the real danger of rap's popularity: it allows dopey white kids who think they know what being black is all about. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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