Gimme the Loot

I’m not sure Gimme the Loot is a bad movie, or if it is a movie I just did not like very much. It shares a lot of similarities with other movies I like, but I was never able to connect with the material in quite the same way. The story centers on two young adults from Queens, New York; friends and graffiti artists. After finding their work painted over by another crew, they set out to earn the respect they think they deserve by achieving New York City’s graffiti Holy Grail: tagging the apple at Shea Stadium / Citi Fields, home of the New York Mets. This leads to a series of micro adventures in their borough, sometimes together and sometimes apart, as they attempt to scrape together the money they need to bribe a guy to let them into the park.

In truth, not much really happens. They wander the city getting up to hi-jinks of various kinds, much of it committing petty crime and having petty crimes committed against them. They talk about things, some of it substantive but most of it not. They meet an interesting cast of characters, albeit a relatively small one. Ultimately, they can’t even get into the park, let alone tag the apple, and the movie ends.

This kind of meandering story where not much happens is not an inherently flawed concept. Linklater’s career is full of successful versions of this, from the sprawling ensemble of Slacker to the ultra-minimalist romance of Before Sunrise. You can also make a lot out of young people having quirky adventures around New York City, as in Nick & Nora’s Infinite Playlist or After Hours. However, here neither the adventure of the city nor the choice to focus on character over plot hooked me.

As a quiet and personal piece of dialogue heavy character exploration, like the Before series, I felt that too little of substance was said and the way it was said was off-putting. My bias is towards the kinds of deeper intellectual conversations found in Linklater’s works, so take this with the appropriate grains of salt, but my initial reaction to Gimme the Loot’s script was that basically all the conversations in the movie, excepting maybe one or two, are just fairly empty. She is mostly angry, he is mostly an insecure goofball and that’s about the end of it. There are some subtextual themes that can argued on issues such as gender relationships and the importance of pride in their community, as well as the othering nature of their interactions with outsiders both rich and poor, but it is found below a surface layer of these simplistic conversations that rarely, if ever, clicked with me. As a result, I felt I only got a very cursory understanding of the central characters as people, which is a big whiff in a movie that is banking on intimate character portraits of its small cast.

As a vehicle for rag-tag adventures around New York, the things they ended up doing weren’t that interesting to me either. While crime in movies is often fun to observe, and even root for, in the slick heists of the likes of Oceans Eleven or the self-destructive absurdity of the likes of Fargo, there was something about the petty, small time, indignity of the crimes in Gimme the Loot that kept me from getting on board. So many of the stories involved just ripping people off or getting ripped off themselves. This creates a sort of no honor among thieves ethos to the movie’s environs that is, at times, quite clever and cogent in its social commentary, just in a way that didn’t resonate with me. Often ripping off and being ripped off are shown to be links in these long chains of crimes, showing a kind of cycle of criminal poverty; like the cycle of violence but with petty theft instead of physical brutality. The problem is that, as I mentioned earlier, I didn’t feel enough plugged into the world or its characters to care about that subtext.

The film wishes to capture an air of realism with its dialogue but the end result is something that I found more abrasive than grounding. It reminded me of my reaction to Deadwood. As someone who was repeatedly accused of swearing like a sailor as a teen, the so-called authentic dialogue of Deadwood was so over the top that it began to feel a bit much, even for me. Similarly, in Gimme the Loot, the dialect and word choice of basically everyone, but especially the two leads, is aggressive, dismissive, and racialized to a fault. Normally, I’m not turned off by this kind of use of street vernacular, heavy swearing, and the like, but for some reason here I found myself bristling like an old fuddy-duddy each time they communicated with such toxic language. This made what little meat there was in the film’s many conversations less enjoyable to experience.

So for those who are deeply immersed in this environment, who talk like these people and experience a life very much theirs, this movie may feel like a beautiful snap-shot of reality the same way early NWA records tapped into something authentic and important in black communities of America, and especially of the greater Los Angeles area. However, as someone who was raised suburban white and middle class, it might be harder to connect with the material. I generally pride myself, perhaps incorrectly or from a place of hubris, on my ability to empathize with the lives and experiences of others, especially through the medium of film, and yet I found the limited plot and alienating dialogue a bridge too far. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

Would Recommend: If the streets speak to you.

Would Not Recommend: If Weird Al’s White and Nerdy speaks to you.