Top Five (2014)

In Chris Rock's best and boldest movie to date, he channels comedy master Woody Allen, even naming his protagonist after him.  Like Allen, Rock stars in, writes, and directs Top Five.  It is an indie-type film that stars a big name at the helm and Rock's film is packed with small cameos from a multitude of stars, some who play themselves.  Rock plays a comedian who has found great success in his cheap comedies (as a voice in a bear suit--analogous to his voice-over work as the zebra from the blockbuster series Madagascar?), but has tired of them and wishes to be taken more seriously.  This is very much the same dilemma that Tracy Jordan faces in 30 Rock; Tracy Morgan has a hilarious cameo as well. And much like Birdman, this is a case of art imitating life imitating art, in which Rock plays a version of himself searching for new success.  However, while his in-the-movie film Uprize is panned, Top Five deserves praise.

Chris Rock and Rosario Dawson are excellent.  They walk around New York chatting (as one does in a Woody Allen film) about just about everything. All of the cameos are brilliantly funny.  Rock muses about comedy, his art (as Allen likes to do).  There are a lot of funny moments, but perhaps he is at his best in his natural habitat on stage, doing stand up, as his character fittingly does.  But this is not just a comedy, there is a nice balance of drama and a twist that I didn't see coming.

The opening scene is a fast-paced, hilarious, back-and-forth between them about race.  This is unmistakably a "black movie" (the same way that Allen's films are "white movies"), but it is not explicitly about race.  They talk about race, and Rock penned a guest column in the Hollywood Reporter about blacks in Hollywood when the film was released.   Now for the big question, why is it called Top Five?  In the movie, the characters ask each other to name their top five hip-hop artists, like a party game.  It recurs, but is not central to the movie.  But hip hop is at the core of Rock's generation of black culture.  In an interview in the New York Times, Questlove said the co-star of the is the "hip-hop midlife crisis."  Hip hop is important, and it is an underlying theme that is not primary but constantly in the background.