[.ca] Wild Style

legendary classic:
im from england and in 1984 the hip hop breaking and grafiti scene arrived. but it took me a good 6 months to really get into it. i use to bomb my school walls and break too. in 1985 the breakin scene died down, but in my heart i wanted to keep it alive. it wasnt till the summer of 1986 when i went to NEW YORK that i was looking forward to seeing the greatest breakers and graffiti artists, but when i arrived it was all finished. i even asked people on the street wheres all the breakin and graffiti, they replied its out of style man. i was just so saddened i could not have seen a culture which in my view was new yorks greatest. it wasnt till after that i saw WILD STYLE,WHICH made it more saddened for me. i actually stayed in the south bronx, in which was the centre of it all. Wild style bought the real fruit of the culture. if there was no wild style, i dont think there would of been beat street, breakin or any of the other classics. Even to this day i still have the pleasure in watching it. Many people in ENGLAND believed that going and bombing trains in new york was part of the film, but life in NEW YORK was exactly how you saw wild style. I remember a puerto rican guy named CHICO who i made friends with over in new york, said to me" wild style exactly how new york was in 1983,84. i guess my real sadness was i couldnt of gone to new york at that time to see it. GOD BLESS, all old skool lovers.... adesh kumar.... many thanks

classic:
If you are into Hip Hop and don't own this then you should! It's a capture of the early eighties scene on the edge of going worldwide..the very end of the old school. Classic rhymes and breaking. Worth owning alone for the A to the K scene...

More "important" than it is "good", and sadly made worse:
With the recent release of the truly fantastic "Style Wars" on double DVD and its assorted surprises and added features, the errors, omissions, and ultimately negative tinkering with "Wild Style" on DVD are made even more alarmingly clear. Not a good sign for a movie that seemed always like a cute little story about the early hip-hop years than a powerhouse phenomenon. I can understand why people twenty years on might get excited about seeing it, but the truth is that it never was really something to get excited about in the first place. To someone who was there when it all went down, "Wild Style" is a chaotic and somewhat-interesting "cute home movie" with atrocious acting, lethargic pacing, a disastrously bad ending, and an embarassingly poor sense of filmmaking. The film is so devastatingly predictable and laughingly mundane that it is a wonder that any sort of cult appreciation for it exists at all. As everyone will probably agree, the saving grace of the entire project is twofold: the soundtrack is still one of the top ten pieces of hip-hop music of all time, and the fact that the actors themselves are the real old-school heroes from the scene is more than an adequate excuse for their bad acting skillz. I mean, who wouldn't want to hear Rammellzee rap for another three hours, or see Lee and Zephyr screw around in the yards zooted out of their minds, or hear Fab 5 Freddie try to ad-lib the role of a cheesy promoter? The whole concept was fly, but it's the end result that is less than the sum of its parts. The scenes with Patti Astor make me sick, and the good scenes can be boiled down to a twenty-minute highlight film. None of these faults should obscure the true simple pleasures the movie has to offer, however: a chance to see some legends dance around and act like actors while the equivalent of a home-movie camera seems to roll with no mercy for screw-ups, hilariously bad lines, or ... footage. So what, eh? I have at least once enjoyed the ride. By the way, the kitchen scene with the REAL music is on my old (original) VHS issue of the film, and the excuses for not having the original music in the DVD version (Ahearn wouldn't foot the bill) is no excuse to tamper with an already damaged artifact. It says alot about Ahearn's attention to detail, self-appreciation for his supposed art, and his true feelings about an otherwise important film and piece of history.

HERE'S A LIL' STORY THAT MUST BE TOLD...:
C'mon, who can resist all that bummy-ass gear some of our Hip Hop hero's are rockin' in this movie? lol Or how about the infamous ball court face-off with Cold Crush and the Fantastic 5? Not to mention Double Trouble's classic set in gangster garbs and totin' "toolies". Wild Style, though low in budget, is definitely high in spirit and Hip Hop talent. One of the very few pieces of urban cinema to capture New York Hip Hop pioneers during their zenith, Wild Style is a cult classic. But before we head down to the "Dixie" to puff cheeba and jam; there is one bone that needs to be picked. What in God's name was director Charlie Ahearn thinking when he replaced the original music from the infamous "kitchen" scene with Grandmaster Flash!? For those of you who need more clarity - in the original version of Wild Style (i.e., pre-DVD) turntable legend, Grandmaster Flash butchers Bob James' infamous "Mardi Gras" on a pair of 1 & 2's in his kitchen. In the DVD version, (to my surprise) Flash is cuttin' up another breakbeat! My jaw dropped when I heard this b-list beat replacing a breakbeat classic. I think Mr. Ahearn n' gang were out on tour when Henry Chalfant and Tony Silver (creators of the classic, Style Wars) were teaching "Hip Hop Integrity 101" and "How To Release A Hip Hop Classic on DVD". Was Ahearn too cheap to pay for the rights to use that beat? Damn Charlie, I know Wild Style has been (financially) good to you; so, what gives? How could you sell the consumers short, (on DVD no less)? The lil' extras on the DVD are cool and the movie itself is still classic, but Ahearn definitely get's a 0 for "remixing" one of the illest Hip Hop scenes of all time! Nuff said. --James "Koe" Rodriguez

Don't expect Shakespeare, expect Hip-hop!:
I think it's possible that a generation raised on "realism" in movies, and now "reality TV" (oxymorons for morons), have come to expect De Niro-style dramatic acting in every movie they view. But drama is not reality. Real life might seem more like film, and perhaps as exciting, if God the Director would see fit to edit out all the bathroom breaks, stretches of boredom, mundane and inane dialogue, and blow things up more often. Alas, He doesn't. Still, people tend to ham it up when a camcorder's trained on them, as if this is more interesting than how they normally behave. Conversely, if they view a film where the actors behave normally, they malign it as "bad acting". Hence Wild Style's bad "rap" in the acting department. What's brilliant about Wild Style is that all the key roles are played by real emcees, deejays, breakdancers, and graf writers. Unlike Beat Street, where the center character (Ramo) is portrayed by some thirty-year-old white guy pretending to be a teenage graffiti writer. Or Breakin', which has as its cast everyone who got kicked off the set of the TV show Fame. And Wild Style's "poor plot" is another victim of the reality/drama confusion. Yeah, there's no awesome John Woo-style gunplay or revenge drama. Instead we have an honest and historical account of the merging of South Bronx subculture and New York's Uptown art scene. Fab Five Freddy, whose character "Fade" in the movie shuttles between these two worlds, was, in reality, a liason who helped hip-hop cross boundaries into mainstream culture (first, as depicted in the film, and later as vee-jay for Yo! MTV Raps). Lee Quinones really was a young artist trying to find his place in a world of alienation, and in the film is the archetype of the individual vs. society, who "comes of age" with the realization that he is an individual within society, a society comprised of individuals. Lee's pontifications on graffiti as outlaw-art throughout the film are key to understanding the essence of hip-hop as a whole. See my review of the Wild Style soundtrack for my list of how influential this film has been to hip-hop music itself. Thank Charles Ahearn and Fab Five Freddy for this time capsule, without which a gaping hole would exist in the musicological timeline. My one beef here is that, probably out of copyright considerations, the classic Grandmaster Flash scene has been butchered to remove the Bob James "Take Me to the Mardis Gras" bells. Oh well. The film still rocks.