Full-Length
Audio Commentary By Director Rick Famuyiwa and Film Editor Dirk
Westervelt, Deleted Scenes with Optional Commentary, Music
Videos: Love Of My Life (An Ode To Hip Hop) By Erykah Badu
Featuring Common and Brown Sugar (Extra Sweet) By Mos Def
Featuring Faith Evans, Theatrical Trailer
The group of actors that make up the
cast of "Brown Sugar" do their best to save a movie that
would make an NBC Sunday Night Movie look like "Gone With the
Wind".
An uninspired movie, without anything original to help it, "Brown
Sugar" is about lifelong friends, played by Taye Diggs and Sanaa
Lathan, who are too stupid to see how good they would be together
until Diggs marries another woman. And then Lathan comes to realize
that they should be together, but still spends pretty much the rest of
the movie denying it, even going so far as to become engaged herself
to a basketball player. There is a consistent theme of Hip Hop and
love and how the two intertwine, but it is overdone. It is as if the
writer thinks the audience isn't swift enough to pick up on it, not
only after the opening credits, but right up until the final scene of
the movie. We get the analogy. Give it a rest. And at 109 minutes,
this movie feels like it easily broke the two hour barrier. If you
like romantic comedies, then there are better movies than this one
that accomplish a gratifying ending to predictable plots. Too boring,
despite good performances.
But if you're into hip hop music, then the music in the movie might be
of interest, as well as all of the cameos from hip hop pioneers. The
music does sound good on DVD, I'll give it that.
Special features on the DVD have little to offer. The deleted scenes
are rightfully deleted, particularly a ridiculous one in which the
Lathan character mediates a dispute during a meeting where two people
are holding guns to each other's face. There are a couple of music
videos which, if you like hip hop, you might appreciate. The audio commentary
by the director and editor (who really cares what the editor of a
romantic comedy has to offer) is just about as lively as the movie -
they sound like they've been lying on a couch for hours before they
began to record their commentary.
