By Armond White

The Soul of Wit
Dave Meyers kills Bill in a fraction of the time.

Stand Up
Directed by Dave Meyers

"Masterpiece" isn’t a word critics often have cause to use, especially for modern–pop–filmmaking. But it’s the best word to describe Stand Up, a new music video for the comic-rapper Ludacris (Chris Bridges) by director Dave Meyers, because in three and a half minutes it aces pop impulses that several feature film directors have recently stumbled over. To visually interpret Ludacris’ song, Meyers strings together inspired moments that only come about when popular culture is well understood as a simultaneous occasion of creativity and a vivid encapsulation of life.

That’s what doesn’t happen in Kill Bill: Vol 1 or its template Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. Directors Quentin Tarantino and McG exploit pop genres–from tv shows to old movies to old records–without achieving a sense of how people actually live (as opposed to superficially enjoying pop). Plus, they don’t have Dave Meyers’ chops. Tarantino’s palsied imitation of the great action directors from Tsui Hark to Brian De Palma is...well, ludicrous. (Note his bland, non-vertiginous cop of De Palma’s split-screen technique.) And McG emulated the paper-shredding effect of tv commercials, frequently losing sight of how and what viewers should follow (as in his unintelligible motocross sequence). Absurdly, one critic lamely praised Tarantino for "the movieness of movies."

Meyers once had some of those same problems. The big-fun videos he conceived for Missy Elliott (One Minute Man, Work It, Gossip Folk) were full of half-digested "brilliant" effects. Mixing folk humor with urban legend and hiphop extravagance, his outlandish imagery flew by–often too fast to follow. In Work It (co-directed with Missy), Meyers used the striking image of a bewigged black slave having the "white" slapped off of him–thus reversing an age-old Negro taunt. That scene accompanied the lyric "Kunta Kinte a slave again?/No sir!/Picture blacks saying ‘Oh, yes Suh, Massa’?" followed by an adamantine "NO!" in the song’s video remix. The combined pop, history and politics in that audacious image wasn’t the try-anything work of a pop dilettante. It had instantaneous resonance and a thoughtful vibe. Meyers was combining pop thrill with real-world values.

Now, in Stand Up, Meyers’ kinetics move just as nimbly but his ideational flow is clearer. The "slave again" image in Work It was barely related to the video’s other wild caricatures; Stand Up’s epiphanies connect, interweave and cohere. Imagining Luda and his friends at a club called the Furnace, Meyers surveys everyone from the club owner to patrons lined up outside as they might appear to Luda’s perfervid consciousness. The video has that glowing, intensely-saturated look drawn from Hype Williams’ post-production palette but Meyers never before used it with such consistency or naturalism. That’s what establishes a lifelike sense from which the surreal special effects can all spring (Luda stomping a gigantic sneaker on his right foot; dreaming of himself as the man in the moon; or a female hottie’s butt inflating a la Nelly’s "Hot in Herre"). Each jubilant symbol expresses Luda’s nightlife joie de vivre.

In Stand Up Ludacris announces a teenage craze ("Take note to the brand new dance") just the way Smokey Robinson did with the 1963 "Mickey’s Monkey." Communicating a new pop pleasure allows Meyers to expand on the choreographic ingenuity of Gossip Folk where Missy’s schoolmates marched toward their bus in synchronized visual patterns. He achieved the visual clarity and delight absent from the fragmented, so-called dance musicals Moulin Rouge and Chicago. There’s genuine satisfaction in seeing Luda and his boys strut past the wannabes into the club and then, at climax, pose together in their color-coded threads. "We’ve got to co-oooor-dinate," Luda humorously boasts. (And there may never be a better comment on hiphop flamboyance than the image of a silver-plated midget swinging to the beat from a chain around Luda’s neck.)

This joke on black dandy couture also celebrates a ripe esthetic; that’s how Stand Up–Luda’s mock dance–conveys the urge of life. (When Meyer switches to an anime sequence–including a Vorkapich-style montage of stacking gold coins–it isn’t incongruous like Kill Bill’s anime tangent; it completes Luda’s fantasy.) Meyers’ feel for fantasy includes a brigade of wheelchair-bound clubbers spinning and rolling to Luda’s command. At the end they too stand up! This club-set mini-musical is like a revival meeting with Luda’s pop-ministry ("When I move, you move!") having miraculous effect. Stand Up doesn’t stress a connection to gospel; you just feel it.

Unlike QT, Meyers’ pop juxtapositions show true genius. A final etude depicts adult Luda wearing an afro the size of a hot air balloon while eying an afro-tressed woman and a infant Luda (memory? empathy?) wearing afro puffs and being tended to by an afro-tressed woman in the club’s baby room–presumably where young parents can stash their kids while out on the town. Here, Meyers intercuts seductive bachelorhood with baby-boy release (little Luda wetting his glamorous babysitter). The hormonal hair motif makes this sequence Oedipal; the "bush" humor makes it great. It was only on repeated viewings that I caught Meyers’ sensitivity to Luda’s emphasis on dance, imagination, eroticism, birth–the furnace of life. How does one transcend the questionable stage-name of Ludacris? By making a masterpiece like Stand Up.

The Human Stain
Directed by Robert Benton

Robert Benton deals with pop culture in The Human Stain when Coleman (Anthony Hopkins) talks about Gershwin’s "Cheek to Cheek": "Everytime I hear it I wish not to die, never to die." That poignant longing (followed by Coleman forcing his male best friend into a pas de deux) soothes the pain that The Human Stain explores. Coleman’s taste for Jewish-American pop music conveys his effort toward social and cultural transcendence. He is a light-skinned black man passing for a white Jewish classics professor. Benton hasn’t dealt with race and culture so persuasively since the magnificent coda of his 1984 Places in the Heart. This intelligent adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2000 novel fully becomes Benton’s own creation through the way his sense of pop culture conveys Coleman’s unthinkable desire and unconscionable (self-) betrayal.

Ideas about race, society, passing, sexuality and class resound throughout the best moments of The Human Stain. There simply hasn’t been anything like it since Louis de Rochemont’s 1949 production Lost Boundaries. For the flashbacks to Coleman’s collegiate days where he hatched his great charade, condemning himself to the restrictions of racism, Benton cannily cast an actor–Wentworth Miller–who closely resembles Mel Ferrer who played the passing-for-white Negro doctor in Lost Boundaries. Miller blurs Jewish and Negro physical traits; he moves carefully, with self-conscious rectitude. Every one of his scenes has a trenchant note, combined of longing and regret, tragedy and anxiety.

The time shifts between Miller’s scenes and the present-day Hopkins scenes are as grand as Godfather II (the past resembles that luminous modern "Cheek to Cheek" sequence)–a lesson to Tarantino’s facile, pointless Kill Bill time structure. Benton succeeds at weaving historical melancholy into modern domestic horror. Tricky thing is, he plays it as romance. This may, in part, be a concession to getting such a story financed, but Benton stays true to its essence. As in the climax of Places in the Heart, he pays close attention to America’s racial delusions.

Benton’s film-sense creates his own metaphor–exploring the very contemporary issue of bi-raciality, extending Roth’s metaphor for the quandary of ethnic Jewish-American identity into what now is increasingly commonplace. Yet Coleman’s guilt always recalls America’s–even as Benton daringly delves into the complexity of sexual/racial allure. To the tune of "Embracable You," then "Stormy Weather," both old and young Coleman is enticed by a white woman’s physical presence. These pop songs are re-contextualized to score the greatest examination of Other lust I’ve ever seen in a movie. The moments are so especially erotic, it’s clear we’re watching Coleman’s secrets and dreams. (Nakedness bathed in Jean-Yves Escoffier’s amber light; Coleman snorfling a young Wasp woman’s body with curiosity as much as passion.) Yet it’s all complicated by the fact that his whole life is hiding from Blackness–an attempt to live a white fantasy. Few scenes in recent movies are as tough as young Coleman abandoning his mother (Anna Deavere Smith plays the part with a strong yet crumbling face–perfect).

The Human Stain itself is not perfect. Hopkins is meticulous and convincing (complaints that he doesn’t seem black are, in fact, compliments). The problem is Nicole Kidman as Faunia Farley, the class-tripping white girl who is supposedly Coleman’s psychic/sexual match. Kidman plays her like Lauren Bacall but resembles Ann-Margret. Her wrongness is proof of a compromise that ruins Benton’s bold vision.