This story originally appeared in the Village Voice in 1997, issue 41
UNTITLED.

How To Be a Player Directed by Lionel C. Martin

In the latest black-dog flick to pimp-stroll into theaters, MTV's Bill Bellamy plays Dray Jackson, a superdick with a bevy of women doing a time-share in his bedroom. These gullible, often maniacally cock-hungry cutouts fall into broad categories like hippie chick, dominatrix, and white girl, and Dray juggles them with smooth talk, reverse psychology, and multiple answering machine tapes, all the while dispensing player advice to the camera with smug matter-of-factness. (On the more esoteric tip, Max "the Mack" Julien makes a sad cameo as a philosopher-king who rambles about "the fish.") The film's main fish is Katrina (Mari Morrow), a vaguely human-type woman who is doing an anthro paper on Dray. Will Katrina fall for Dray? Will he survive the climatic party to which all his women have been invited? Player's answer to those questions falls into the genre's titillation-and-comeuppance format, but no amount of last reel lesson-learning makes up for the fact that How To Be a Player is basically a collection of familiarly low images of black sexuality. I'm not sure if the right response to it is a boycott (at one point rumored to be under way at the NAACP and the Nation of Islam), but some kind of mass inaction at the box office would be nice.

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By GARY DAUPHIN