*½/****
starring John Bowles, Erin Stewart, Ashley Bowles, Larry Bowles
written and directed by Kevin Jerome Everson
by Alex Jackson Taking my cue from the official description in the Sundance Film Festival Film Guide, I've been referring to Cinnamon as "the black race-car driver movie." Depiction of race in the movies is a real dilemma: being black is either meaningful or meaningless. If it's meaningful, that means that the black identity is distinguished from non-blacks and is more or less alien and incomprehensible to non-blacks. If being black is meaningless, well, then why make a racing movie with an all-black cast? You see the problem. I don't know what "black" is, but whatever it may be, Cinnamon isn't black enough. The actors (despite the digital cinematography, laggard pacing, and lack of score, it's not a documentary) were cast at best out of convenience and at worst in an attempt to artificially beef up the film's esoteric quotient. (It's not just a Sundance movie about race-car drivers, it's a movie about black race-car drivers.) It doesn't really matter, though: in addition to not being black enough, Cinnamon isn't human enough. This is a film with tunnel vision: Cinnamon and everybody in it are interested in racing cars and little else. The distinct personalities of the characters blur into one another until they're one big cipher reciting shoptalk about how they need to shorten their time. Director Kevin Jerome Everson offers no psychological, sociological, or philosophical motivation for why these people race, they just do. Cinnamon is a nothing movie, and not even a particularly well-made one. Scenes don't build, individual moments don't build, and the film is disjointed and messy. What heat it has is generated by its cinéma vérité format–it's unprocessed and raw and the intentional emptiness fools you into thinking you're purging all the impurities of a diet of popular cinema from your body.
