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There's a fascinating film to be made about the pimp culture and the myth of the outlaw sexual entrepreneur.
American Pimp, a slick and entertaining but rather timid documentary by filmmaking brother act Allen and Albert Hughes (
Menace 2 Society,
Dead Presidents) isn't quite it, but it's a captivating document nonetheless. Flashy, garrulous real-life characters with names like Charm, Rosebudd, Too $hort, C-Note, and the "internationally known" Bishop Don Magic Juan take over their interviews with silver-tongued charm, spinning self-aggrandizing, often contradictory stories of life in the trade. The Hughes never challenge those contradictions and give only token representation to the women in the life (who have either bought into the myth or are too cowed to say differently). Apart from a few unguarded statements by less cagey subjects, the film avoids the seedy flip side to the so-called benevolent relationship between pimp and "ho." More to the Hughes' point is the fluid relationship between media image (as celebrated in such blaxploitation classics such as
The Mack and
Willie Dynamite) and street image. Simultaneously embracing and decrying their outlaw status, these pimps transform themselves into peacocklike fashion statements inspired by the very images they find so denigrating. They are undeniably dynamic characters playing out a bizarre fantasy of wealth, power, and swaggering sexuality, but if the film shows the cracks in their masks, it never manages to reveal the men under the money or expose the fallacy behind the fantasy.
--Sean Axmaker
A relatively straightforward documentary that charts, in lurid, gritty color, one of the more constant and perplexing real-life metaphors in American cultural life-the black pimp. The Hughes brothers, who made their name with "Menace II Society," a rather sentimental evocation of ghetto life in Los Angeles, don't have any big ideas here, either. The film is an indictment of and a romance about black male life, ˆ la Robert Mapplethorpe's totemic portraits of black male genitalia, and only incidentally reveals the paradox of pimphood: the terror, self-importance, and ultimate impotence inherent in being powerful in a small, underground patch of the American dream. The movie is too clinical to be poetic and too solipsistic to be insightful; the most arresting thing about it is the language of the denizens of the night, which amounts to a form of jazz. -Hilton Als
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
DVD ~ The Bishop Don Magic Juan
DVD ~ Max Julien
by Pimpin' Ken
DVD ~ Roscoe Orman
by John Dickson
by Iceberg Slim
