I had too much to drink the night before, but I managed to be early for my appointment at a Washington, DC hotel to talk with Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill, stars of the Major Motion Picture 21 Jump Street, a rebootery of the successful Fox TV show that launched the careers of Johnny Depp and Richard Grieco. In real life, Mr. Tatum's neck does not appear as disproportionately large as it does on the movie screen, and Mr. Hill appears thinner than when he was on the Oscars broadcast, in which he was a Nominee for Best Supporting Actor. Both gentlemen are very congenial.

Mr. Hill and Mr. Tatum [...]

Are we witnessing the commercial comeback for New-York-rap-besides-Jay-Z that everybody's been waiting for? Probably not. While you hear hear Lloyd Banks and Juelz Santana's"Beamer, Benz Or Bentley," on the city streets these days, the song hasn't yet cracked Billboard's national charts. I think it's just okay. A catchy-if-formulaic beat built off the kind of simple, ascending and descending keyboard line that worked for Lil Wayne's "Lollipop" two years ago, and Mims' "This Is Why I'm Hot" the year before that, and playboy rhymes about money, cars and women. Much less exciting, in my opinion, than the grittier sounds issued by Banks' G-Unit colleague Tony Yayo, or [...]

Watching Hodgy Beats ride through the suburbs, shooting lasers from the crotch of his Starship Troopers spacesuit, hitting patty-cake-playing white girls and turning them into cats, makes it very, very difficult to believe that the Odd Future crew is not thinking beyond whatever controversy and "troll-gaze" labels people put on them. I think they're having fun; largely innocent fun. And making good art ("violator art," maybe, though my head starts to swim with the word salad of critical terminology.) But I do think it's art that says, or is at least trying to say something about the world we're living in. And even if that [...]