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Gleaming the Cube
A
star's journey from getting angry to getting money.
'GET MONEY&
quot;: that to-the-point Junior M.A.F.I.A. song title could double as a two-word synopsis of Ice Cube's Hollywood story to date. True, applying the grab-happy greed of Biggie's era to Cube isn't quite right – he first reached fame years earlier through N.W.A., back when the "gang" associated with hip-hop had a -ster rather than a -sta attached to it; even during his post-N.W.A. musical heyday as a solo artist, anger took precedent over flossing. But in Cube's trademark films, the ones most associated with his screen image, his characters first and foremost have got to get money – or else.
The 1995 chronic cult hit Friday finds Craig Jones (Cube) and tweaky sidekick Smokey (Chris Tucker) sweating the final deadline of a $200 debt to a loan shark named Big Worm; when a variation of this simple story line returns in last year's Friday after Next, the sum Jones and his sub-Tucker best friend Day Day (Mike Epps) owe isn't even disclosed – all we're told is it's rent money. Cube's biggest mainstream hit to date, 2002's Barbershop, also tacks skits and sketches on top of a threadbare payment plot, but protagonist Calvin Palmer (guess who?) needs to come up with 200 times the $200 that Jones owed. The time frame hasn't changed – in Barbershop, yet again, payment within less than 24 hours is required – but the price has gone up considerably.
That's what's known as inflation, and the need to pay and get paid, right quick, could be viewed as a metaphor of sorts for box-office performance: after all, a film's victory or failure is essentially determined the first day or weekend of release. Cube has made paying bills (a dilemma an audience can relate to) into a profitable endeavor. He is arguably the most successful hip-hop-to-Hollywood star because of his ordinary-man image; Friday's Craig and Barbershop's Calvin aren't glamorous roles – both have nerdy characteristics. Calvin is essentially a slightly older and more responsible version of the hardly working Craig: as Cube's characters move into middle age, the legacy of father figures looms larger.
Maturity is an oft-delayed process for both characters. When the Friday films retreat to bachelor Craig's bedroom, it's hard to ignore that he's maintained a teen's sense of interior decoration – not that a Parliament poster doesn't look good on a wall. (Director F. Gary Gray brings a playful weedy consciousness to the film's increasingly high good-day-in-the-'hood portraiture: open windows and sound effects draw characters from one scene into another.) Ironically, Barbershop's happy ending requires Calvin to forsake his music dreams, so his money can keep a family business alive instead – a decision his sensible wife helps him make. Has Cube's music making also taken a backseat due to the realities of the hip-hop marketplace, his age, or perhaps his lack of inspiration?
When Cube made his movie debut as Jheri-curled Doughboy, the neighbor of Cuba Gooding Jr.'s cry-a-lot protagonist in John Singleton's 1991 Boyz N the Hood – a violent After School Special version of Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep (1977), replacing Burnett's realist art with commercial cliché – his career longevity wasn't as assured as his charisma. Other MCs who have parlayed a persona at recording and film studios haven't had the same long-term results. In less than a decade, slightly older iceman Ice-T has gone from the relatively lucrative New Jack City to low-budget alley knife fights against the freestylin' little Irishman ("I'm here to collect me golden shillings / Give 'em back or there might be killings") of Leprechaun 5: Leprechaun in the Hood.
Cube hasn't been reduced to bumrushing a murderous green sprite – he has generated his own, albeit steadily decaying, sequel franchise (and Barbershop 2 is in the works). While his ventures into horror have also resulted in humor, they haven't hurt his career. In 1997's Anaconda, he and a clothed-but-wet Jennifer Lopez battle a 60-foot flying, digitally animated snake and – more intimidating – a campy Jon Voight, whose Paraguayan accent has to be heard to be disbelieved. In John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars (2001), as wrongfully convicted James "Desolation" Williams, Cube dons a sleeveless T-shirt and bonds with a blond drug-addict cop (Natasha Henstridge, who replaced a well-cast Courtney Love) to battle Martian phantasms. In both cases Cube adopts an action-hero guise, getting buff – at least in comparison to his comedy guise, which tends to be puffy.
These are the kinds of roles other MCs turned actors have relied on to establish and in some cases sustain a screen presence. Both LL Cool J and Busta Rhymes, for example, have battled Michael Meyers. On the surface hip-hop's machismo might be ideally suited to the strutting menace of action and/or horror; Snoop Dogg's Bones exploited this idea, while also tipping its stylishly villainous hat to blaxploitation, a major influence on hip-hop. But perhaps only DMX – in Romeo Must Die and Cradle 2 the Grave – has found genre roles that reflect and in some ways enhance his image as a recording artist (partly because his audio image is so two-dimensional). Will Smith's combination of muscle and comedy in the Men in Black moneymaking enterprise might count as an example if Smith didn't come across like a Hollywood actor impersonating a hip-hop performer from the very start.
Though Cube's filmography is far from faultless, it at least has allowed room for idiosyncrasy. His role as Chief Elgin in David O. Russell's prescient Iraq war movie Three Kings is an example of his occasional unpredictability. His sole directorial effort certainly isn't what one might expect from him – for a start, it tells a woman's story. (Cube did appear on Sister Souljah's album 360 Degrees of Power, so he isn't without a feminist side.) "Introducing Lisa Raye as Diamond," The Players Club is like a less glamorous and ludicrous version of Showgirls, observing a young woman's student-by-day, stripper-by-night existence from a sympathetic if semilascivious perspective. The film's pace is slack, to put it kindly; considering the effectiveness of Cube's own voice-over in the first entry of the Friday series, it's surprising how flat that narrative tactic becomes when he's directing.
Legend has it Tupac Shakur was the hip-hop icon with the greatest potential as an actor, though the films he made in his short life only hint at that expressiveness. Cube's surprising achievement – most often commercial, sometimes artistic, rarely both – has been his aptitude at expanding beyond, at times even contradicting, his initial hip-hop persona. On wax or on-screen, one thing hasn't changed, though: he's essentially played the straight man. Back in the days of N.W.A., the man whom Jay-Z (on Missy Elliott's "Back in the Day") recently called "Solid Water" was the uneasy bee buzzing around Eazy-E – now he's paired with Tucker, Bernie Mac, or Cedric the Entertainer. Perhaps there isn't much difference between the violence of "Black Korea" and the grocery-store caricatures in Friday, but they reflect a major shift in mood. Comedy pays. Once upon a time, the nigga you loved to hate loved to hate you right back. Today he makes date movies.
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