Rough and raw documentary by the Hughes brothers, Allen and Albert: rough and raw in treatment as much as in subject. And highly educational, too, though it fails to provide a full answer to the innocent question of why pimps are necessary. The names of the garrulous participants are an education in themselves: Rosebudd ("with a double-D for a double dose of pimping"), Schauntté, C-Note, Payroll, R.P., Ken Red, Fillmore Slim, Gorgeous Dre, Sir Captain, and (the winner is...) Bishop Don Magic Juan. Then, too, there are the vocabulary lessons: "ho," "bitch" ("That's more of a pet name"), "players," "the game," "the turn-out," "gators" (the de rigueur alligator shoes). Nothing would seem to be more essential to the vocation, however, than the ability to insert, without pause or stumble, a "You know what I'm saying?" or any of its various elisions ("Ya-know-I'm-sane?" "No say?" "Whime sang?"), or at the very least its standard abbreviation ("Ya know?"), into each and every spoken sentence. And who knew there was an annual "Pimp of the Year" convention? (Surely, for some enterprising cable network, a counterprogramming possibility opposite the Miss America Pageant.) Clips from blaxploitation films such as The Mack and Willie Dynamite, as well as from a 1937 white-bread exploitation film named Highway to Hell, are illuminating also. Eventually and inevitably, the steady drone of materialism and mundanity, the dearth of reflection and self-scrutiny, will become deadening and depressing, but not much more so than sitting next to a table of stock traders at a coffee shop. And the latter will lack the sartorial hilarity. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd