I ain't watching it
A Rapper Torn Between Cash and Dignity
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
"Just Another Story," which has its premiere on Showtime tonight, recalls the early work of Barton Fink, but that's not all bad.
True, the accusations of self-righteous sentimentalism leveled at fake grit — the kind the Coen brothers savaged in "Barton Fink" — come to mind while you watch "Just Another Story." (How about that self-effacing 40's title?) But the efforts by left-wingers to conjure street stories seem innocuous in hindsight.
Maybe in the day certain Marxist playwrights didn't know the real common man as well as we did, but they still wrote big monologues about how dirty money is, and these continue to bring out the best in American actors and impel audiences to their feet.
In that spirit, "Just Another Story" — with its speechifying and stylization of, oh yes, the common man — is a pleasant but slight movie even as it inspires more than one cringe with its labored ebonics, images of broken chain link and insistent references to cool street themes of the 50's like sex and getting high.
