GHETTOPHYSICS

GHETTOPHYSICS Co-directed by William Arntz, the theorist/funder behind pseudoscience quasi-doc What the Bleep Do We Know?, GhettoPhysics is an infomercial for its other co-director, E. Raymond Brown, the self-proclaimed "visionary" behind a self-published tome of self-help sociology, Will the Real Pimps and Hos Please Stand Up? (also the subtitle of this film). Brown's basic premise is that in a capitalist society, most of us are hos (i.e., powerless workers) at the economic and spiritual mercy of some kind of pimp. So George W. Bush was the "bottom bitch" to "Dick 'Gangsta' Cheney," and, you know — et cetera. GhettoPhysics boasts an impressively random list of talking heads — Norman Lear, Cornel West, KRS-1 ­— all of them preposterously puffed-up advocates of Brown's prostitution analogy, their voices set against montages of arbitrary archival footage (the pope, the Berlin Wall, Ronald McDonald — all of these things exist[ed]!) and crude but kind of hilarious non sequitur cartoons. The bulk of Brown's actual philosophy is delivered via scripted material in which he stars, including contrived interviews with unnamed female "journalists," and staged classroom lectures, which veer off into a subplot about a female student who protests, "I ain't no ho!" only to embrace Brown's philosophy when her law school of choice revokes her scholarship. It's basically the stuff of a Bill Maher monologue, knocked down a few reading levels and spun into a low-budg gonzo smorgasbord of brashly tacky styles. Bleep became a cult hit, and so could this — of the WTF?-camp variety. (Karina Longworth) (Rave 18)