Slam

Let's imagine that you're a vicious, brutal, incarcerated thug. You're out in the yard one afternoon, and this new fish disrespects your person, perhaps by brazenly breathing the same air, and just when you're about to demonstrate for him in fairly graphic detail the difference between a regular old fracture (crunch) and your basic compound fracture (crunch + rip)...suddenly, without warning, the dude in question begins spouting really bad poetry. "Slamming," if you will. Just abruptly launches into this improvisational rhythmic monologue, out of nowhere, mouthing a lotta pseudomystical non sequiturs about, like, life and so forth. What do you do, in this hypothetical scenario? If you retreat in awestruck wonder, cowed by the sheer magnitude of this fellow's creative passion: Congratulations! You're the ideal audience for the opportunistic exercise in feel-good phoniness that is the inexplicable Sundance prize-winner Slam. It might have been tolerable had director Marc Levin fashioned the thing as an ostentatious wish-fulfillment fable, but the lurching verite-style camera and breathless air of self-importance--plus a cast that seems to believe that great acting = yelling stale homilies at the top of your lungs--virtually beg you to take the movie seriously as a gritty tale of contemporary urban strife and redemption, even though it's clearly set in the magical land of YeahRightSure. Not recommended. (M. D'Angelo)