White Chicks.
Why?
That said, some thoughts:
●Let's address the elephant in the living room, the one lounging all spring that no one has had the chutzpah to address: The white chicks in this new comedy White Chicks look nothing like white chicks. They didn't look like white chicks in the trailer. They don't look like white chicks in the movie. They don't look like white chicks in the picture to the right of this review. To the extent they appear to look vaguely like white women at all, they could conceivably be Michael Jackson.
●Let me explain: Two Wayans brothers, Marlon and Shawn, play FBI agents picked to shadow the Wilson sisters: rich, spoiled, dim-witted heiresses who have nothing in common with the Hilton sisters. Nothing at all. It appears there is a plot to kidnap them. The Hilt- Wilson sisters scratch their faces and decide their trip to the Hamptons will have to wait until Monday. Marlon and Shawn climb into their finest Jerry Lewis and suit up for a weekend-long impersonation. They are masters of disguise, though I found this hard to buy: At the beginning of the film, they botch a cocaine bust while dressed as some vague sub-Saharan nationals distinguishable only by the obvious creases where their prosthetic foreheads meet the real deals.
●The credits list nine makeup artists. Nine. So perhaps I'm missing the joke. Perhaps they're not meant to be convincing as white chicks. Perhaps as they do their shrill, girly voices and mince their way through the usual sitcom-y situations of mistaken identity, belief must be suspended. The way Marilyn Monroe never picks up on how Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon look nothing like women in Some Like It Hot. Marlon and Shawn hang out with real white chicks who do think something is fishy with the Wilson sisters. But otherwise the movie beats to death a few flatulence jokes, while nobody notices that the Wilson sisters appear to be wearing spooky plaster face plates. A man in a wig is funny. A man in a wig impersonating a woman with the complexion of dry wall nudges into David Lynch land.
●So if they're not white chicks, then what, pray tell, are they?
Some possibilities:
Mannequins of white chicks.
Hummels of Paris Hilton.
Rejects from the new Epcot attraction at Disney World, Hall of the Wives of the Presidents.
Those man-eating underground albino creatures from the 1960 Time Machine.
Partially-melted wax replicas of the 1980s supergroup Asia.
Joan Rivers.
●The premise of White Chicks has been greeted with condescension by people who think they know better, but it's not a horrible idea for a movie: Two black men dress as white women and infiltrate the affluent (and somewhat racially diverse) summer crowd in the Hamptons on Long Island. The second part of that - a send-up of social X-rays and the dumb ways they blow their millions - has been done by too many pictures to mention. But the first part - one race impersonating another - has never quite been done right. There's Soul Man with C. Thomas Howell as a white kid in shoe polish, impersonating a black student to get into Harvard. There's Imitation of Life, the Douglas Sirk tearjerker about a light-skinned black woman who passes for white. The best is Melvin Van Peebles' Watermelon Man, about a white insurance salesman who wakes up to find his skin turned black. None are great movies, and White Chicks doesn't intend to be the exception; but it takes a provocative, promising idea and strenuously avoids having to say anything insightful about women, men, blacks, whites, the rich - opting instead for yet another innocuous dance number and toothless female empowerment routine in yet another low-rent comedy.
Dull as a butter knife.
Funny as one, too.
●I don't want to sound humorless. The Wayans have no pretense to be anything but goofy. But speaking of Melvin Van Peebles, White Chicks got me thinking: There's a terrific movie out right now (playing at the State Theater in Ann Arbor, incidentally) called Baadasssss. It tells how Van Peebles was sick of blacks being only acceptable as comedians and made Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song in 1971, about a black outlaw. The film ends with Melvin (played in Baadasssss by son Mario) running for the Mexican border and a warning for The Man: Sweetback will be back "to collect some dues." But was White Chicks what he had in mind?
Contact Christopher Borrelli at:
cborrelli@theblade.com
or 419-724-6117.
First Published June 23, 2004, 5:14 p.m.
