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Wild Style

Wild Style

List Price: $19.95
Your Price: $15.96
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: BE WARNED!!! THEY RUINED THE BEST SCENE!
Review: It's a shame really. This classic among classics would have otherwise received 10 stars from me (even without all the extras, which are great btw). But they butchered what has got to be the best part of the whole film... the scene where Grandmaster Flash is cutting records in his kitchen!!! In the original print, you see (and just as importantly, hear) Flash cutting up The Headhunters "God Made Me Funky" and then Bob James "Take Me To The Mardi Gras" while the film cuts back and forth to members of the Rock Steady Crew break dancing (For those not up on their samples, the Bob James tune was most famously used as the backing track to Run DMC's "Peter Piper").
Well, my guess is that they never cleared the song for use in the film and didn't want to pay whatever it was going to cost to clear it, so...they simply cut the audio out and REPLACED it with a track made to SOUND like "Mardi Gras" .....with HORRIBLE results. They should have, at the VERY least, had a warning written somewhere on the back of the case, letting unsuspecting buyers know that this is NOT Wild Style as it was originally shown in 1983.
I don't know how other die-hard hip hop heads out there feel about this, but to me, Rhino straight up [messed up] this film.
...Over 25 years old and hip hop STILL doesn't get it's proper respect...even when it's well deserved as in this case.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: about the Paulie's review
Review: On thing is sure is that I find scandalous this changing of music in the movie, sorry for the company but won't buy it, I was going to. They could also have added lots of extras. Otherwise the greatest hip hop movie of all time.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: This flick is the raw hip hop fuzz yo!
Review: There are no actors in this movie (cuz nobody can act) but it's 2 funky...check it out 4 real.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The premiere hip-hop movie, a modern classic
Review: This is one of my favorite hip-hop movies. It crystallizes the submerging art-form of hip-hop in its budding stages. Wild Style has a myriad of classic scenes. Some of my favorites in the movie are when Busy Bee and the Fantastic Romantic 5 rap at the Dixie, the breakdance/Grandmaster Flash DJ scene, Grandmaster Caz at the amphitheater, Rock Steady b-boyin' (breakin') to Caz's flows, among others. The movie is thick with nostalgia, history, and most of all hip-hop. This video is manna for hip-hop purists and junkies alike. If you want to see hip-hop in its pure and untainted state, you must see "Wild Style." It's required viewing for anyone who dares to call themselves a "hip-hop head."

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: U MUST LEARN !
Review: To truly understand where the culture is and where it's going, wild style is the answer. I had seen clips of this flick when i was young, but i never experienced the whole movie. I was especially blown away by the cold crush and fantastic 5 scene on the basketball court. This is hip hop from where it came and what it should be viewed as. Beat Street was cool, Breakin was cool, but " WILD STYLE "is the authentic south bronx love from 1982 to the present.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The truest film reflection of Hip Hop
Review: Wild Style was created by independent New York filmmaker Charlie Ahearn with the help of Fred Braithwaite (aka Fab Five Freddy). The first movie to depict the elements of hip hop, it became an underground hit. It featured well-known graffiti writers Lee and Lady Pink as "Zoro" and "Ladybug", and included performances by Grandmaster Flash (in his own kitchen!), Grand Wizard Theodore, Busy Bee Starski, The Cold Crush Brothers, and b-boy champions the Rock Steady Crew. Lee admits, "It didn't really have a script, but we didn't have a script in real life. The film didn't call for acting because we were being ourselves. There's no Hollywood thing about it" (from the excellent book Yes Yes Ya'll, 2002). This lack of a "Hollywood thing" is precisely what made Wild Style so popular among the people who lived hip hop. Writers were played by writers, DJs were played by DJs, and the breakers were real b-boys.
Fab 5 Freddy wanted the film to tie together the elements of hip hop, and show the rest of the nation that graffiti, breaking, and DJing and MCing came out of the same place, and often the same people. The result is the most accurate depiction of hip hop in film. Lingering shots of boarded up buildings, junk yards, and filthy subway stops portrayed the Bronx for what it was. Zoro tries to balance street credibility with commissions to do pieces on canvas from wealthy art collectors. He is a young man trying to find his place in a difficult world. Blondie's Chris Stein describes it, "Wild Style was just so ahead of its time. I remember telling Charlie Ahearn, `As soon as this thing comes out, mark my words, Hollywood will eat it.' And Beat Street came out... which was a sappy, watered-down version".

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: AWESOME DVD!!!!
Review: Wild Style, the video bible of any real hip hop fan who grew up in the 1980s. The DVD version is a huge step up from the video that was released a few years back. First of all, the famous scene with Grand Master Flash in his kitchen has been totally revamped. In the original film, Flash is juggling Bob James' "take me to the mardi gras", however in the video version this music was replaced with a drab track that had no life. On this DVD however, that same music was replaced again, but this time, the track that was used was worlds better, and was fit into the scene much better as well. A must see.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: More "important" than it is "good", and sadly made worse
Review: With the recent release of the truly fantastic "Style Wars" on double DVD and its assorted surprises and added features, the errors, omissions, and ultimately negative tinkering with "Wild Style" on DVD are made even more alarmingly clear. Not a good sign for a movie that seemed always like a cute little story about the early hip-hop years than a powerhouse phenomenon. I can understand why people twenty years on might get excited about seeing it, but the truth is that it never was really something to get excited about in the first place.

To someone who was there when it all went down, "Wild Style" is a chaotic and somewhat-interesting "cute home movie" with atrocious acting, lethargic pacing, a disastrously bad ending, and an embarassingly poor sense of filmmaking. The film is so devastatingly predictable and laughingly mundane that it is a wonder that any sort of cult appreciation for it exists at all. As everyone will probably agree, the saving grace of the entire project is twofold: the soundtrack is still one of the top ten pieces of hip-hop music of all time, and the fact that the actors themselves are the real old-school heroes from the scene is more than an adequate excuse for their bad acting skillz. I mean, who wouldn't want to hear Rammellzee rap for another three hours, or see Lee and Zephyr screw around in the yards zooted out of their minds, or hear Fab 5 Freddie try to ad-lib the role of a cheesy promoter? The whole concept was fly, but it's the end result that is less than the sum of its parts. The scenes with Patti Astor make me sick, and the good scenes can be boiled down to a twenty-minute highlight film.

None of these faults should obscure the true simple pleasures the movie has to offer, however: a chance to see some legends dance around and act like actors while the equivalent of a home-movie camera seems to roll with no mercy for screw-ups, hilariously bad lines, or ... footage. So what, eh? I have at least once enjoyed the ride.

By the way, the kitchen scene with the REAL music is on my old (original) VHS issue of the film, and the excuses for not having the original music in the DVD version (Ahearn wouldn't foot the bill) is no excuse to tamper with an already damaged artifact. It says alot about Ahearn's attention to detail, self-appreciation for his supposed art, and his true feelings about an otherwise important film and piece of history.


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