MC Jemima: Queen Latifah turns back the clock.

"You obviously have pockets of intelligence, so why do you act the way you do?" Steve Martin asks Queen Latifah in Bringing Down the House. "Because it’s sexy!" sidekick Eugene Levy butts in. The fact that rappers’ vulgarity excites some people—white and black—might be the simplest reason this culture-clash comedy was made. But since Martin as the white lawyer involved in a romantic Internet exchange never falls in love with his ex-con blind-date correspondent (big, black, bodacious Latifah), the movie breaks the promise of its own cultural logic.

Bringing Down the House offers race comedy that leaves its audience unchallenged, unchanged. All stereotypes intact. It would be disconcerting if a movie this cynically calculated was a hit. But appealing to people’s prejudices and ignorance isn’t new; Monster’s Ball got away with it, and some fools even took its ugly message to be profound. At least Bringing Down the House mines racial division for laughs rather than sanctimony. Its bluntness about an uptight white man and a wild and woolly black woman is intended to relieve racial tension, but the sad fact is, the moviemakers rely on that tension (Latifah is described as "all tattooed and banji and welfarish") rather than trusting the best instincts that might be buried deep within the pop audience. Without an edifying belief—either in Love or Utopia—this film is uselessly exploitative. (Its title doesn’t refer to revolution but to crowd-pleasing applause.)

For the record: This is a distinctive kind of exploitation. Produced by Queen Latifah herself in her hiphop ambassador/entrepreneur mode, this quasi-screwball comedy denies any of hiphop’s advances in black female identity. (Although Latifah’s bodyslamming fight with a white woman at a country club is more violent—and even-fisted—than you’d expect.) Martin’s always good for a laugh (including his belated Bulworth parody), but the best comic moment belongs to Dame Joan Plowright as a bigoted houseguest moved to sing what she calls an old Negro spiritual: "Mama, is massa gonna sell us tomorrow? Yes, yes." Latifah, calculating white surprise and black bemusement, would surely be down with the marketing.

Of her own accord, Latifah plays a ghetto throwback wearing a variety of wigs, weaves and falls. She’s stuck in the kitchen in an Aunt Jemima headscarf and cooking; then darning, babysitting, housekeeping. This is the kind of role Whoopi Goldberg might have turned down 15 years ago; it’s not enough to see Latifah assay it, rummaging through her pockets of intelligence and coming up empty.

Bringing Down the House Directed by Adam Shankman

Laurel Canyon Directed by Lisa Cholodenko

Goldie Hawn contributed a glorious piece of acting last year to The Banger Sisters, an otherwise wretched movie. Playing a middle-aged former groupie now waiting tables in a rock club, still hanging on to drunken passes as compliments and braving younger waitresses as competition, Hawn drew a memorable portrait of farcical desperation. When faced with the square life of an old groupie pal who opted for suburban motherhood, Hawn’s loser was all the more sharply affecting for her unsentimental humor and the piquancy of her smile. Thinking of Hawn’s characterization while watching the female sexual experimenters in the new film Laurel Canyon isn’t a knock against the stars, lovely Kate Beckinsale and fierce Frances McDormand. But I couldn’t help recalling how veteran comedian Hawn brought abundant liveliness to that piece of junk—proving herself a keenly sensitive artist—while the serious efforts of indie pros founder.

It’s a lesson against pretentiousness. Hawn transcended The Banger Sisters’ contrived nostalgia for the 70s sexual revolution while Laurel Canyon so thoughtlessly indulges contemporary sexual freedom. As Beckinsale and McDormand play the girlfriend and mother of a young psychiatrist (Christian Bale)—frisky women who are brought closer to their inner lesbian by drugs, alcohol and depression—they get trapped in writer-director Lisa Cholodenko’s uninsightful feminist contrivance.

Cholodenko, Beckinsale and McDormand lack the insight that Hawn used to make personal sense of a story’s sexual and political issues. The Banger Sisters falsely suggested that Hawn’s conformist friend (played by Susan Sarandon) had been stifled by middle-class values (even though she chose them herself). Hawn’s character suffered the sacrifice and loneliness that comes with flouting convention. Despite the film’s trite critique of the cultural shift toward conservatism, Hawn acted out its consequences. She seemed to intuitively understand the stress of being wild, staying young—as if intentionally correcting the misguided groupie performance of her daughter, Kate Hudson, in Almost Famous. None of the women involved in Laurel Canyon risk characterizations that can be read as self-critique—or that might honestly teach Angelika viewers about their own sexual folly.

Laurel Canyon smugly indulges the indecision of youthful careerists. Sam and his fiancee Alex (Bale and Beckinsale), both recent graduates of Harvard’s medical school, foolishly move out to L.A. to live with Sam’s mother, Jane (McDormand), a free-spirited record producer. Cholodenko ignores the irony of young ingrates still willing to feed off the privileges of the previous generation, which makes her seem as disingenuous as the Hollywood hacks behind The Banger Sisters. Instead of holding Sam and Alex to account for their choices, Cholodenko plants frivolous intrigue about whether these young neo-cons will succumb to the libertinism proffered by Sam’s unrepentant hippie mom. Of course they will! All Mom’s toking, fucking and recording with a hot young British pop star is exactly what they missed out on at Harvard.

If Cholodenko wasn’t committed to simply promoting a personal sexual agenda, she might have had the clarity to see that Laurel Canyon echoes the cliches of movies made when sexual transgression meant something. (Though not the revelations of, say, Joseph Losey’s subversive masterpiece The Servant.) Sam and Alex’s temptation by L.A. Jane inadvertently recalls the horror movies where a straight-laced young couple enters a vampire’s lair. McDormand plays Mom hammily, the way British actors play Dracula. ("I’m 16 years older than you," she tells her pop star. "That’s a lifetime of fucking and I’m not apologizing. My past is not about you!") Unlike Hawn, McDormand’s an excess of quiet anxiety hidden within a cloud of reefer smoke and a dirty AC/DC t-shirt.

Given Cholodenko’s predictable script, it takes far too long for Alex to put on that t-shirt; whether she will succumb to bisexual licentiousness won’t surprise anyone who saw High Art, Cholodenko’s debut feature. (In that film, another flighty career girl also fell into the arms of a tough, bedraggled older female artist.) If any of Laurel Canyon made sense—if there was a single big-shot female record producer like Jane in the entire half-century of rock ’n’ roll—Cholodenko might have some claim on credulity, just as Hawn made palpable sense of a groupie’s sad destiny. But Cholodenko confuses unlikely storytelling with the need to validate female ruggedness and feminist choices.

What was the point of workshopping Laurel Canyon at the Sundance Institute if no one there could help Cholodenko realize—or clarify—her own confusion? Instead of a butch-cut lesbian coming-out story, the movie meanders around its swanky L.A. locations, hints and whispers at gay sexuality. That’s why Alex has a masculine name. That’s why a seductive female shrink (Natasha McElhone) tells Sam, "You’re like a girl; maybe that’s why I like you." He then compliments her, "You know how to control your heart." In life, one struggles to control heart, mind and body. But at the Sundance Institute this eternal dilemma is reduced to a will-she-or-won’t-she tease. Alex, Jane and Sam stave off realizing what it is they really want, delaying taking responsibility for their actions, which is far less convincing than Hawn’s simple yearning for companionship in The Banger Sisters. Cholodenko, McDormand and Beckinsale are so busy making female characters who are audacious, they’ve neglected to make them believable.