Waist Deep...in crap

It has been smurfing hot around here lately. I live in Oregon because summer means 70 degrees with a breeze. If I wanted 100 degree days I would move. I don't. I hate them. With a passion. Yesterday made me very cranky and unhappy. It was too hot.
Well, last night Emily and I had an appointment with some photographers, so after that it was about 8:30 and still somewhere between a million degrees and hell, I could not quite read the temperature guage. The brimstone gave me a clue which it leaned towards. Like any geniuses, we elected to find air conditioning, so into the theatre we stopped to see Waist Deep (2006), a popcorn fare movie about a criminal trying to regain his lost son.
The movie had a lot of stereotyping. If you are not familiar with it, it stars some rapper as "O2" along with a beautiful lady who also happens to be black. Now, at the risk of losing some readers, I am going out on a limb here. Beware, entering dangerous waters.
There is a sub-culture of cinema designed to attract the black viewers. They star black stars, have different themes, different forms of music, and different expectations. For example, Above the Rim was a basketball movie designed for the black audience. As a result, it dealt with themes of gangs, violence, women as butt shaking breast carriers, and oh, the profanity. Contrast that with, say, Glory Road, designed and marketed for a white audience. Sure, the movie was about a black TEAM, but it was not designed for the black community. Hence, the music was different, the language was different, the themes were different.
To be sure, there is getting to be more and more overlap, particularly in regard to sound tracks, as rap becomes more mainstream. However, even there the differences are obvious...softer lyrics, modified beats.
In Crash some of these subtexts were examined fairly thoughtfully insofar as it looked at many forms of racism...not just black v white but Indian v Mexican, etc. In Waist Deep it reverted to more of the same:
The movie had the heightened level of profanity, expectation of gun violence, portrayal of women as breasta, shaking butts, and heels, and everyone being part of "the life", where the life is involvement in gangs, robberies, guns, drugs, and sex. Women were all "bitches" and no more. I cannot remember a single woman in the movie who was not presently or in the past a prostitute. And the audience "felt" it. They expected it. They thought that was how things were, how they should be.
Two-time loser O2 (don't ask...the genesis of the name is stupider than the name itself)battles his stoned cousin Lucky (and the expectation that Lucky would be unreliable and smurf things up was there both for the characters and the audience because of his constant usage of a blunt...go figure. People know what that stuff does, they just want it to be "cool" so they pretend it has no ill effects.), time, and street kingpin Big Meat to save his sun, roaming LA with his prostitute companion/partner, robbing banks, breaking into houses, and generally "doing what it do", as he says at one point.
For a time the movie thinks about exploring themes of hopelessness, the impact of "the life", redemption, escaping past deeds, trying for a better life. In one scene that is supposed to be poignant and thought provoking, Lucky gets hauled out of his car at gun point, threatened for smoking the weed he was supposed to be selling, and beaten up...as the backdrop to a rally to "Save our Streets" by ending gang vioence. The crowd was laughing so hard I doubt any message got across.
Then again, this movie missed it's intended mark almost the whole way. The closing scene where the woman and son are living in Mexico, having given up all hope of seeing the theretically dead O2 ever again is set with emotion-laden soft music...and there he comes, O2, out of the haze, walking towards them. You can tell by the set-up this was meant to have a huge emotional impact such as the reunion at the end of another profanity laced, violence fueled bloodbath, Die Hard. I hesitate to say it failed to achieve its objective...people were laughing so loud at the schmlatziness for any of us to actually hear the lines.
There is no real point to all this. I guess just some random observations...the different ethos of a movie specifically designed for an audience of a specific skin pigmentation, the realization that when people are laughing harder at your emotional close than the rest of the movie put together it is not a good sign, the missed opportunity to actually SAY something....this movie could have done well but instead turned left at Glendale. But hey, it kept me cool for two hours.