Set in the Deep South in the Deep Depression, an all-black musical from the hip-hop duo OutKast and their sometime music-video director, Bryan Barber. One of the two (André Benjamin, alias André 3000) plays the introverted son of a mortician and the spotlight-shunning pianist at a jerkwater juke joint, while the other (Antwan A. Patton, alias Big Boi) plays the extroverted son of a bootlegger and the club's studly headliner. Both are inhibited actors, if not downright mortified. The songs and dances are in an anachronistic modern style, as if the filmmakers feared the authentic style would drive their audience out the exits or into the madhouse. Though the intention may have been to build a bridge -- to connect the dots -- between the African-American culture of the present and that of the past, the effect is of something rather more self-absorbed, self-satisfied, ethnocentric, phobic, insular, and separatist, a monument to cultural provincialism. We do not, of course, expect musical fantasies to conform to the musical modes of the periods in which they might be set -- Oklahoma, Phantom of the Opera, Man of La Mancha, or, for the most extreme example, Camelot -- but when the musical numbers move out of the realm of fantasy and onto the stage, our expectations change. Further enticements to the moviegoer of today -- the animated notes on a sheet of music, the talking rooster on a whisky flask, the digital colorization of a boutonnière from white to red, etc. -- seem designed to ward off boredom where the real threat was revulsion. With Paula Patton, Terrence Howard, Faizon Love, and Ving Rhames. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
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