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I think this article is good in discussing how the environment can change a person. Putting a nerdy kid in this environment and seeing what changes. I would use this if the topic comes up but i am undecided

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Light on its feet, gleefully profane and deliciously droll as it manipulates the notion of innocence (and plays with our expectations in the process), Rick Famuyiwa's "Dope" traces the rise-and steeper rise-of a geeky high-school senior who learns how to work the system.

Malcolm, the geek in question, is portrayed with shatterproof earnestness by Shameik Moore. That he's a black geek in The Bottoms, a tough neighborhood of Inglewood, Calif., only makes him more interesting. And that he's a nerd with a scholarly bent only...

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Light on its feet, gleefully profane and deliciously droll as it manipulates the notion of innocence (and plays with our expectations in the process), Rick Famuyiwa's "Dope" traces the rise-and steeper rise-of a geeky high-school senior who learns how to work the system. Malcolm, the geek in question, is portrayed with shatterproof earnestness by Shameik Moore.

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This compares how it is a good thing to be sort of nerdy today. When before it was frowned upon. Im not sure how I would use this just yet. I could also discuss the characters and how they represent certain things

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Is 2015 a bad vintage for American independent movies? This time last year we had Richard Linklater's transcendentally simple Boyhood to enthuse about, a breakout hit from Sundance. And although Linklater's hopes were not entirely fulfilled on Oscar night, pundits and awards voters always like to feel that among the glitz and bling of prizegiving ceremonies there will always be, metaphorically speaking, some indie underdog stubble among the sleek tuxed throng.

Dope is a case in point: a movie executive produced by Sean Combs and written and directed by Rick Famuyiwa. Really great things were hoped for from Dope. Excitement spiralled for it at Sundance in January and the film sold for headline-grabbing sums. But now that the auction excitement has worn off, and the film is re-examined in a cooler light, you can sense how something like buyer's remorse could be setting in.

It is a sporadically likeable, uncertain tonal mishmash of a movie about three geeky high-school students in Inglewood, California, each with a connoisseur's passion for 90s hip-hop. There is shy virgin Malcolm (Shameik Moore), gay woman Diggy (Kiersey Clemons) and wry Job (Tony Revolori -the lobby boy from The Grand Budapest Hotel). The day after a chaotic evening at a club, where Malcolm was flirting dangerously with a dealer's smart girlfriend Nakia (Zoë Kravitz), he discovers a handgun, phone and drug-stash stuffed into his school backpack, clearly hidden from the police. Somehow our three amigos are going to have to get these dangerous items back to their owner without themselves getting into very serious trouble.
Zoë Kravitz: 'Why do stories happen to white people and everyone else is a punchline?'
As ever when movies claim "nerd" or "geek" status for their characters, there is something very disingenuous going on. Genuinely nerdy high-school types would be wince-makingly unwatchable on the cinema screen. Malcolm, Diggy and Job are Hollywoodised nerds, attractive cool kids tricked out with designer geekery. They even play in a band, for heaven's sake. Oddly, considering their overwhelming passion for hip-hop, this is a punky guitar band. Maybe there are some deleted scenes in which they bang on about Green Day.

The movie's comedy teeters uneasily between reality and fantasy-farce unreality: occasionally it goes for a ghetto drama, perhaps like Boyz N the Hood, and then veers wackily into comedy, with the three teens cycling around madly, as if one of them had ET in his front basket.Gangbangers pull guns; they storm onto school buses in scenes weirdly reminiscent of the new NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton. There is a casual reference to three unnamed guys getting "smoked" - but certainly no tragic deaths for any named characters we're supposed to care about. Sometimes Dope resembles Doug Liman's Go, the one-crazy-night movie from 1999. It also has a worrying predilection for introducing its characters with a freezeframe-voiceover, a tired storytelling cliche from the 90s I thought had been retired long ago.

It announces itself as inspired by the title's various meanings: "stupid" - "drugs" - "cool": a laidback triple whammy of ambiguous associations. But really only "cool" is important. Nobody is stupid as such, not even the violent ones, and the drugs themselves are a MacGuffin taken unseriously in what is supposed to be a black comedy about aspiration and coming of age. Malcolm wants to get laid and he wants to get into Harvard.

As for the comedy, sometimes it works but more often it doesn't. One tough guy has a funny routine about using Find My iPhone on his iPad to track Malcolm down. There some broad zaniness and mockery as a hot girl desperately needs to pee and is videoed doing so in a public place. One wannabe rapper has a weird shtick in which he replaces the "c" sound in words with a "b". Perhaps Famuyiwa was influenced by a very similar Monty Python routine on these lines.

But Dope is clearly unwilling to distance or ironise anyone in the service of comedy, basically keen to maintain its cool status and also the all-important sympathy quotient. Tellingly, we begin with a quarrel that Malcolm has with his principal about the "personal statement" he intends to submit to Harvard University. He has prepared a scholarly and well-argued dissertation about Ice Cube. It's a smart, funny moment when he defends the originality of this essay and rejects as tired and lame his teacher's suggestion of an autobiographical piece about how tough he's had it in the neighbourhood. But by the end he has a very different and more solemn attitude to this "statement". Dope is a film that you find yourself longing to like, but the strain of disappointment takes its toll.
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Is 2015 a bad vintage for American independent movies? This time last year we had Richard Linklater's transcendentally simple Boyhood to enthuse about, a breakout hit from Sundance. And although Linklater's hopes were not entirely fulfilled on Oscar night, pundits and awards voters always like to feel that among the glitz and bling of prizegiving ceremonies there will always be, metaphorically speaking, some indie underdog stubble among the sleek tuxed throng.

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I think it would be would be helpful to use a video as a resource. I will be able to see body language and tone while questions are answered. It will be interesting to see how the actors do or do not relate to the character.

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This article discusses the idea of an african american kid who is not your stereotypical child. It could be helpful to compare and contrast what we expect to what actually happens in the film. Not sure if will be helpful until I watch the film.

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Drug dealers or dorks? Hip-hop or punk rock? Harvard or the 'hood?

There's no need to chose sides in "Dope," a comedy-drama that takes pleasure in redefining what it means to be young, black and growing up in a tough part of town.

Set in present-day Inglewood, nerdy high school senior Malcolm (Shameik Moore) and his equally nonpopular friends Jib (Tony Revolori) and Diggy (Kiersey Clemons) aren't like most of their classmates. They openly discuss their Ivy League aspirations, play in a pop-punk band and have a fixation with 1990s pop culture that manifests itself in unfashionable flattops and baggy TLC-wear.

But when they accidentally cross paths with neighborhood drug dealer Dom (rapper A$AP Rocky), the naive trio is forced to rely on their geek smarts to navigate a world of crime, gangs, profiling cops and corruption. In the process they come to find who they truly are, or at least what they want out of life, and it's of course far more complex than a Tupac song.

Part "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," part "Boyz n the Hood," the film doesn't fit neatly into any particular marketing niche - and that was always director and writer Rick Famuyiwa's intention.

"It's not a 'hood film or romantic comedy or Tyler Perry," says Famuyiwa, 41, the son of Nigerian immigrants who grew up in Inglewood. "It's like there's only two or three things black films can be, and it's none of those."

Not surprisingly, Hollywood didn't get it.

After unsuccessfully shopping his screenplay around various studios, Famuyiwa found backers from the music world, including Pharrell Williams who became executive producer and Sean Combs (a.k.a. Puffy), co-executive producer. "Dope" ended up being made as an independent film with the help of producers Forest Whitaker and Nina Bongiovi, who had just finished producing "Fruitvale Station."

Once "Dope" premiered to enthusiastic audiences at the Sundance Film Festival in January, it was bought for a reported $7 million by Open Road Films and Sony Pictures Worldwide. It arrives in theaters June 19.

It joins a small wave of films, TV and books that are playing with and testing tired notions of race, especially blackness-"Dear White People," "Blackish," "The Sellout," to name a few.

"Dope" co-stars Zoe Kravitz as the gang-tattooed love interest and Rick Fox as a suspiciously smooth banker. L.A. rappers such as Casey Veggies populate the film's large cast. Whitaker narrates "Dope," and Williams composed four songs for Malcolm's band.

"The '90s were a great decade for music, not just hip-hop," says Williams. "The era is defined by many unique voices, it was the perfect soundtrack to represent the spirit of the movie. In creating the songs for Awreeoh [Malcolm's band], I was inspired by the angst of these characters, how they see the world, their dreams and aspirations."

"Dope" is a funny and unpredictable ride through Malcolm's rough neighborhood, known as the Bottoms. His journey is fueled by teen lust, miscommunication and scenarios so absurd they could happen only in his corner of L.A. "Everything that happens in the [film] world seems to happen to white suburban people - alien invasions, house hauntings, whatever," Famuyiwa says with a laugh. "When people see that L.A., they're only seeing the L.A. of Judd Apatow."

The film is also meant to upend preconceptions about coming-of-age films and race - but done with a light touch.

"You might go into 'Dope' feeling you already know what this movie is because, all right, there's kids, they're from Inglewood, oh, it's drugs," says Famuyiwa on the phone from Atlanta, where he's shooting his very different next project, the story of Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas for HBO.

"But actually the kid who's the drug dealer is the white kid from Brentwood, and the black kids from the 'hood go to him to get help because he's the expert on [selling] drugs," he says. "I wanted to take everything and subvert your expectations."

The goal of subversion interested Whitaker and Williams from the start. Like Famuyiwa, both self-identify as misfits, and both cut their own unorthodox paths in their respective fields.

"I was a loner," says the Oscar-winning Whitaker ("Last King of Scotland"), referring to his childhood growing up in South LA. "I was really isolated and to myself, almost like a hermit. In that respect I can relate to these characters, and the struggle to feel like they fit inside of a world that maybe seems oblivious to the way their brain or heart is constructed."

Before Williams became involved in "Dope" or launched his indelible song "Happy," he was part of an eclectic music duo called N.E.R.D. Needless to say he also related to Malcolm and his gang.

"We weren't the toughest guys in the world in high school, but we also weren't afraid," said Williams in a statement about the film. "And we felt like being intelligent was not necessarily a negative thing. Rick brilliantly sews that together in DOPE."

Famuyiwa's earlier projects include "The Wood," another coming-of-age story set in Inglewood that he made straight out of USC film school. He also wrote the screenplays for several comedies and dramas geared to African American audiences, such as "Brown Sugar" and "Our Family Wedding."

But after a couple of decades dealing with risk-averse studios and film execs, eventually Famuyiwa was ready to break loose from cinematic conventions.

"I was fortunate to write pretty much a year out of film school and start making movies in the Hollywood studio system," says Famuyiwa, still based in L.A. "But with each progressive film it became more frustrating not being able to speak and say things I wanted to say. I wanted to rediscover something artistically that I felt I was losing and say things I never really had a chance to say."

Famuyiwa describes "Dope" as "Risky Business" for the social-media generation. Bitcoin, YouTube, iPhone apps, texting, streaming and the dark Web are major players here. Technology is a large part of what sets these kids apart from the Inglewood Famuyiwa grew up in.

"Everyone would assume these kids from Inglewood would form a hip-hop group, but I thought Malcolm would be into so many different [genres] that they would form a band that played everything," he says. "Because of technology, there's no longer the social shaming that goes on if you're a black kid walking into a record store to buy Nirvana.

"Dope's" teens, however, are still teens - obnoxious, annoying, fast-food obsessed and occasionally stupid.

To keep the characters fallible, Famuyiwa had to fight his own instincts. That's because he was writing "Dope" around the time Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by George Zimmerman. The way Martin's character was picked apart by the media and in the courtroom affected how Famuyiwa would portray Malcolm and his friends

"There's pressure as a filmmaker to combat that [narrative] and try and show how great these teens are by polishing off all the hard edges," says Famuyiwa, who has a young son. "But I wanted these kids to be as raw and emotional and young and mistake-prone as all kids are, because at the end of the day they are just kids. They have value and potential.

"Sometimes that potential gets nurtured if you live in a place like Brentwood and discouraged and unseen if you live in Inglewood," he says. "But at the end of the day, the lottery of birth shouldn't determine your value to the world."

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The comedy-drama 'Dope' defies 'black film' expectations

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Drug dealers or dorks? Hip-hop or punk rock? Harvard or the 'hood? There's no need to chose sides in "Dope," a comedy-drama that takes pleasure in redefining what it means to be young, black and growing up in a tough part of town.

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This gives many examples of the racial stereotypes that happen in the movie. Im not sure if it will be helpful just yet because I havent watched the film. It could also be just a reminder to myself of things to talk about.

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Hollywood's racial clichés vs. Kendrick Lamar's bold hip-hop album.

The outdated title for the Sundance Film Festival hit Dope demonstrates today's cultural retardation about race. Its story of a black high-school student, Malcolm (Shameik Moore), who wants to escape his California ghetto environment by selling drugs and going to Harvard, trades on a checklist of politically correct clichés: 1) a protagonist named after a political icon, 2) his black single-parent home, 3) his ethnically and sexually diverse Latino and lesbian best friends, 4) his gangbanging environment, 5) his drug-dealing antagonists, 6) nostalgic pop hits as musical score, and 7) Obama-worship.

For writer-director Rick Famuyiwa, a first-generation Nigerian American, these clichés are a pass to mainstream acceptance. Millennial audiences may no longer care about Nineties hip-hop, but Famuyiwa is aiming at behind-the-curve whites who are just catching on (thus, Sundance marveled at the word "dope," which used to be hip-hop slang for "good" - decadently derived from old-time slang for drugs).

Famuyiwa's personal, stuck-in-time obsession with Nineties hip-hop culture (which was just as overbearing in his 2002 film, Brown Sugar) guarantees that his storytelling matches the racial befuddlement stirred by recent anti-police protests and the Rachel Dolezal scandal. Everything in Dope appeals to the obsession with black urban victim stereotypes and reinforces them.

To ensure crossover appeal, Dope incorporates contemporary trends: Malcolm and his friends dress throwback style (his flattop fade haircut and Nineties gear), and they like to "do white sh*t," calling themselves "geeks" and forming a rock band named Awreeohs - a play on the Oreo-cookie idea of black on the outside, white on the inside.

Yet Dope isn't caught up in cultural anxiety, like last year's Sundance favorite, Dear White People. Famuyiwa simply takes a comic approach to problems that still plague black Americans; he placates the mainstream audience, which is more than willing to both appropriate black culture and sentimentalize its social pain. This is the most egregious exploitation. Famuyiwa's terrible ADHD plot structure introduces tragic characters, then drops them with no follow-through: Rakim Mayers plays Dom, a Denzel-style sexy thug; Roger Guenveur Smith does a wild-eyed monologue as Jacoby, a corrupt community activist; and Chanel Iman, as his drug-crazed daughter, Lily, seduces virginal Malcolm, then goes on a vomiting, urinating binge (she's a Noah Baumbach gamine except she's not white).

Given how Famuyiwa manipulates expectations about contemporary black lives, it's no surprise to see Malcolm chase after the Harvard University carrot while also pursuing cute criminality. When Obama-aspiring Malcolm finally dons a Trayvon Martin hoodie, Famuyiwa mixes his metaphors unacceptably. It's hard to imagine a worse social comedy than Dope appearing this year.

* * *

It's still exciting to hear Eric B. and Rakim's "Juice (Know the Ledge)" and Public Enemy's "Rebel without a Pause" in Dope; these avant-pop classics overwhelm the dull movie. So does Malcolm's reference to Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day," the template for Famuyiwa's quotidian narrative. Malcolm defends his term paper on Ice Cube, saying, "If Neil deGrasse Tyson was writing about Ice Cube, this is what it would look like." Doubtful. Dope falls so far short of Cube's ribald-confessional social satire that it renewed my appreciation of Kendrick Lamar's new album, To Pimp a Butterfly.

Lamar, hip-hop's most conflicted artist, tries to make sense of history, reconciling fabled ideas of black revolution and deprivation with present-day trials; he's more moving than Dope 's antics. Lamar's vocals mimic historic pop voices with a panache that Richard Pryor would envy. Yet he's thoughtful - socially conscious - in ways most contemporary pop musicians - and filmmakers - have abandoned.

#related#In "King Kunta," the album's hardest, greatest track, Lamar combines swing and funk to express unabashed political awareness. Hollywood - let alone Sundance - still isn't ready for this kind of Afrocentricity. (When I was on the Sundance jury in 1990 and we gave the Grand Prize to Wendell Harris's Chameleon Street over To Sleep with Anger and Metropolitan, the gesture was meant to reward originality and audacity. That's what I hear in the Roots-referencing "King Kunta.") Lamar, not Famuyiwa, brings the spirit of Roots and Chameleon Street to pop music. The song's George Clinton funk ("Atomic Dog" remade to outdo Snoop Dogg's inventions) isn't mere R&B nostalgia; it's fresh, R&B purposefully reborn - a musical raised fist.

Yet Lamar doesn't go for blind defiance ("I'm mad but I ain't stressed"). He evokes Public Enemy's slave history in "Can't Truss It" and puts it in daringly modern terms. The Ferguson and Baltimore riots didn't evince Lamar's intelligence. When he raps "Everybody wants to cut the legs off ya," the castration fear is also a matter of social resentment - including resentment of black-on-black violence. When invoking Michael Jackson's "Annie, are you OK?" it becomes a supreme piece of pop. This sharp-mindedness is what's missing from Dope.

Lamar's recurring motif addresses black pop history: "I remember you was conflicted" is repeated throughout. The past is not just instructive to Lamar, it inspires him to speak more clearly, strongly, honestly. ("I got a bone to pick!") When he raps: "Rappers did it to themselves," he means to protect his sensitivity from the vagaries of showbiz exploitation. He has sensitivity that Famuyiwa has yet to realize. (The title Dope lacks the complexity implicit in the Seventies black classic Cooley High.)

But the halcyon era of black pop music and movies (the Eighties and Nineties) is over. No wonder the media haven't extolled Lamar's remarkable album, given tracks like "(We Gonna be) Alright," where Lamar proclaims: "Let me tell you about my life / Pain-killers only put me in the twilight." No one at MSNBC or NPR wants to hear that self-awareness. It refuses their pity - and their piety. That's why Lamar ends his opus talking to a dead man.

In "Mortal Man," Lamar engages a tape of the late rapper Tupac Shakur, asking for advice. Their mock conversation is pathetic, proof of a young black man's inability to find a living ideal. "I remember you was conflicted," he begins. What Lamar calls "survivor's guilt" is his self-consciousness about the morality young black men forge for themselves. That he trusts in Tupac's inanity ("I see myself as a natural hustler") shows that Lamar is desperate for role models. This same dilemma drives Alonso Ruizpalacios' Gueros, a superior youth film to Dope. Lamar's pretend conversation is heartbreakingly futile. It symbolizes the hip-hop fan's longing for guidance, yet there are only dead (or morally bankrupt) celebrities like Tupac to mislead them. Lamar's pleading voice contrasts with Tupac's experienced arrogance, illustrating the tragedy of a generation that becomes misinformed or politically deceived. Pop-star fame versus black anxiety.

Dope is appalling in its demonstration of how black filmmakers strategize getting paid by telling Hollywood's white power structure what it wants to hear ( Precious, 12 Years a Slave, The Butler, Selma) rather than expressing the problematical feelings heard in Lamar's "u" (his lyric "Loving you is complicated" addresses women, whites, the world) and in "i" (proclaiming "I love myself" in the midst of society's scorn and indifference). In both songs, Lamar's lower case is a rhetorical effect. The inauthentic racial identity in Famuyiwa's Dope is literally lower case.

Armond White, a film critic, writes about movies for National Review and is the author of New Position: The Prince Chronicles. @3xchair

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Dope Peddles Trite Racial Stereotypes | National Review

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Hollywood's racial clichés vs. Kendrick Lamar's bold hip-hop album. The outdated title for the Sundance Film Festival hit Dope demonstrates today's cultural retardation about race.