Three Puffs for Revolution

An outsider arrives in a venal and corrupt society. Denigrated and excluded, he
rises up in righteous anger to proclaim his own humane values, and by dint of
an eloquent tongue, a stout heart, and a bounty of strong-jawed masculinity, he
and his motley rabble of followers grow into a force of change. He may not win
his crusade, but he will never be forgotten.

Yes, itís Spartacus, this time in collegiate form. How High, the
creation of Danny DeVitoís Jersey Films and starring multiplatinum rap legend
Method Man, is the most politically daring youth sex farce since Porky.
The tone-perfect exposition takes place on Staten Island, where Silas (Method
Man) attends community college, scores beautiful women, and runs his own,
highly prosperous drug lab. Shortly into the film, Silasí friend Ivory dozes off
while watching Field of Dreams, and his blunt lights his dred extensions
on fire. After surviving being engulfed in flames and falling from his window, he
is run over by a bus. Silas, hewing to the filmís ruthlessly unsentimental logic,
grows a pot plant from his friendís cremated ashes. At the test site for his THCs
(ìTest of Higher Credentialsî) Silas meets Jamal (Redman) when both men are
fumbling for drug paraphernilia in their late-ë70s vintage American sedans.
Smoking Jamalís rolling paper and Silasí pot, the two have a vision of Ivoryís
spirit, who gives them answers and gets them into Harvard.

The remaining hour of the film introduces the familiar caricatures and plot line of
the college comedy and then proceeds to alienate the audience from it. The first
indication of this may be when Silas and Jamal pull up on campus and run over
the Harvard sign, and thereís no punishment. What is new about How
High is not the comedy (projectile vomit, the Revenge of the Nerds
standard-issue accented Asian kid, geeks losing their awkwardness and
discovering themselves through psychotropic substances, a smoke-filled car
straight out of Scary Movie). What is new is that dramatic tension has
been eliminated, and in its place is inserted what might be termed ìretribution:î
60 minutes of the often profoundly satisfying desecration of an Ivy League
campus (as filmed at UCLA). When Silas and Jamal destroy the office of a
Booker T. Washington-like dean or pull down the statue of the hatefully stuffy
ancestor of the jerkish trust-fund baby crew team captain, there is never any
question of whether or not theyíll be caught and punished, only a hasty segue to
the next, even gutsier assault on public mores.

So it is that Silas and Jamal are barely moved in before they get together with
two Caucasian co-eds with ponytails, exploits they get on video and sell around
campus under the title of ìSmart Girls Gone Bad.î By the time the movie hits high
gear, Jamal is dating the mysteriously black daughter of the white Vice
President (in a character actor mixed metaphor, itís Jeffrey Jones, who played
Ferris Buellerís principal), and Silas leads his housemates to a Boston cemetery
to exhume the corpse of John Quincy Adams, which they then take home and
attempt to smoke. (Donít ask, though thereís some very arch editing, matched to
when the viewer flinches, when Method Man starts working on the skeleton of
the passionately anti-slavery ex-President with a pair of bolt cutters.)

Method Man and his creative team show a courageous willingness to make
uptight white suburbia uncomfortable, which, considering the sums that uptight
white suburban kids plow into hip-hop-themed products of all kinds, is more
daring than it may seem. Nor, for all of its chutzpah on issues of class and race,
can How High expect a warm reception from the contemporary left, since
the filmmakers seem committed to the old Marxist stance that feminism is the
digression of professors and society ladies. (I refer viewers to substantiate this
reading in Jamalís exclamation, ìHow did I fail womenís studies? I love bitches!î)
What counts is that the rarefied world of elite, private higher education is almost
completely insensate to what goes on in the American inner city, and Method
Man is ready to bust up Ivy League campuses and nail Ivy League girls until that
changes.

How High is not a didactic picture. The friend I saw it with complained that
there wasnít a stay-in-school message, and there is fair criticism about a film that
admires the African-American who succeeds as a cannabis cultivator and
ridicules the African-American who sells out as a Harvard dean. (The latter, a
Punchinello married to a tippling, somewhat plain white woman, calls Clarence
Thomas to mind, though with more interest in art history.)

But How High is about things other than setting a good example. It
shows, as Leopold von Ranke preached, how things actually are, as in its rare
depiction of a white crackhead, a species that never makes it into those gritty,
ìrealisticî Robert De Niro pictures about the big city. And it blossoms into a
phantasmagoric vision of a bottled-up, buttoned-down Harvard redeemed by
ghetto culture, in particular with the arrival of show-stealing Mike Epps as Baby
Powder the pimp, a man who wears a Columbia blue cap and whose sidekick
ritually dusts his hand with talcum before he slaps his women. How High
can be raw, but itís a good, well-paced, thoughtful kind of raw, the kind that tests
your prejudices and broadens your horizons. ìOpen your mind,î George Clinton
used to say, ìand your ass will follow.î

How High opens Dec. 21.