Sophia (Tashiana Washington) and Malcolm (Ty Hickson) are a team of
teenaged graffiti artists - but of late, their artworks are routinely
sprayed over by another graffiti artist gang, so much so that they come up
with a silly plan to prove their superiority as graffiti artists: They
want to spray their tags onto the iconic Home Run Apple of the New York
Mets, which has so far happened only once in the eighties and is something
legends are made of in the graffiti world. However, to get into the Mets'
stadium, they need $500 in bribe money - which is an amount of money they
can only dream of. However, they try their best, stealing and selling
spraycans, sneakers and cellphones, selling dope and the like. But mostly
their moneymaking schemes fail miserably. During one of his dope
deliveries, Malcolm runs across cute young Ginnie (Zoe Lescaze), a spoilt
upper class rich girl whose parents are out for the weekend and who seems
to just swim in money. Malcolm promptly falls in love with her, and she
doesn't totally resent him either. However, that doesn't keep Malcolm from
planning to rob her. Their heist goes horribly wrong of course when their
lockpick Champion (Meeko) hasn't got the first idea about picking locks,
and Sophia doesn't succeed in keeping her away from home long enough. After
all their failed attempts to come up with the money, they have the
(less-than-)brilliant idea to produce a bundle of money out of newspaper
clippings - but then their contact who's supposed to smuggle them into the
stadium fails to show up, and their plans evaporate into thin air.
However, at a party that evening, Sophia and Malcolm get a lot closer to
one another than they have ever been. What might sound like
your typical MTV-compatible
celebration of mainstreamed urban lifestyle driven by spitfire-editing to
emphasize the "hey I'm cool"-factor and your interchangeable hip
hop soundtrack just to underline how "urban" the film really is
... is actually something completely different: A brilliant and very
subtle comedy about very little that manages to tell its story via
relatively trivial (yet highly amusing) situations and strong characters
and doesn't celebrate any old lifestyle (in fact, there's surprisingly
little graffiti in a film about graffiti artists) but concentrates on the
human factor. And it tells its story in a laid back way, comprised of long
takes mostly - in fact, the film is not at all unlike the best movies of
Eric Rohmer. And the film's music, mostly blues songs from decades ago, is
a wonderful contrast to what one would expect from a film like this, but
it complements the film's story rather nicely. Totally recommended!
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