Movie Review

[Reporter] The two women in the parking lot gave "Sugar Hill" a four out of four, but admitted it was mostly because they like Wesley Snipes and the music and admitted they didn't care much about the subject matter. Well I always like Wesley Snipes and don't pretend to know anything about music and the subject matter is legitimate, but I hated the point of view. Wesley Snipes and his brother Michael Wright are much up in arms over the fact that their parents were made into heroin junkies. But the father was and both sons are professional heroin dealers and "Sugar Hill" is careful not to show any of the heroin junkies they must have produced over the decades they were in the business. It's as if writer Barry Michael Cooper and director Leon Ichaso wanted to share the value system of people whose highest claim to morality is "do not sell to the family" and to want to retire after earning enough heroin money to live higher for the rest of their lives than most of us can live once a year on vacation. Theresa Randle claims to object violently to drug pushers but she takes forever to accept what she was told about Wesley Snipes before they even met. And the alternative options she's offered are carefully

selected to make Snipes look good. If you can buy the moral stance from which "Sugar Hill" proceeds, you're a long way toward liking it, but I still thought it pretentious and arty, full of obviously symbolic camera angles that pushed the to me unacceptable philosophy in my face. Abe Vigoda's grocery store especially symbolizes the grand old tradition of the dope trade back when Harlem was heaven and the only addicts were musicians. Vigoda mourns the corruption brought back from Vietnam by veterans who were already hooked. The general impression I got was that we were supposed to approve the Horatio Alger type heroin pushers who had struggled upwards from the streets but despise the really big boys who are even richer than Vigoda and furthermore were from out of town. One thing you have to give "Sugar Hill", photography and every other element in it preaches the same seedy message. But the pace seems slow and Bojan Bazelli's camera meandered about or held still forever to urge significance upon us. Snipes acted like a bashful teenager with Randle and

otherwise brooded and sulked about like James Dean and it was difficult to see how he could run any operation except that brother Michael Wright was so high all the time that he clearly couldn't have counted change on a pushcart. So Snipe's idea of retiring and leaving a thriving dope business to him was a tad unconvincing. Allowing for point of view and artsy distractions, "Sugar Hill" does offer a few satisfactions. Acting was uniformly good and it's interesting to see Abe Vigoda again and Clarence Williams III of TV's classic "Mod Squad" was effective as the drug-soaked father. The lifestyle is strictly rich rich and famous and a lot of people seemed to enjoy that. The music may have been less monotonous than I found it. And some of the audience roared with approval when a woman got beaten up and a wounded man got shot in the knee. I guess "Sugar Hill" just isn't my kind of thing. Jim Erickson, over and out.