'GhettoPhysics': Documentary about pimps and ho's in politics and finance

GhettoPhysics: Will the Real Pimps and Ho's Please Stand Up! is a radically ingenious, in-your-face documentary hybrid that takes the basic street relationship between pimps and hookers and holds it up on a global scale.

"When the leader is pimpin' you on some game like patriotism," says E. Raymond Brown, GhettoPhysics' wily onscreen guide and codirector, "it's the ho's that go marchin' off to war gettin' shot up and stabbed."

Or, credit card companies: pimps. Everyone in debt to credit card companies: ho's.

Bursting with insights into, yes, world politics and the machinations of capitalist culture, GhettoPhysics features Brown - a dynamic presence - addressing a college class. "Professor Brown's" course is Ghetto Physics, and he uses blackboard diagrams and PowerPoint presentations to enlighten his initially jaded students on the dynamics that rule their life. From the street corner to the boardroom to the White House, the same paradigms are in play, Brown argues.

So, too, argue Cornel West, Ice-T, KRS-One, and Norman Lear - among other talking heads and man-on-the-street interviews that bring Brown's provocative points home.

William H. Arntz, whose 2004 release What the Bleep Do We Know?! similarly mixed doc techniques with dramatizations to explore connections between spirituality and quantum physics, co-directed, and also appears.

GhettoPhysics caroms audaciously from "pimpery and gangsta activity" (per Cornel West) to metaphysics and numinosity, incorporating cartoon segments and a mock awards show - the Global Pimp Awards. It's worth checking out the honorees.EndText