Rappers in movies are doing fine – Ice Cube (Boyz n the Hood), Ice-T (New Jack City), Tupac Shakur (Above the Rim). Movies about rap are another story – remember CB4? At the Sundance Festival, where Fly by Night inexplicably won the Filmmaker's Trophy, some audiences expressed indignation that the film's director, Steve Gomer, and screenwriter, Todd Graff, were white. Fly has enough problems without bringing up race. It's an unnervingly slick package.

The band's scratch master, Kool Kayam (Darryl "Chill" Mitchell), listens while his cousin Rich (Jeffrey D. Sams) fights with "I" (Rich Brice) to define the band's sound. Rich raps soft, "I" raps angry. And so a complex issue is reduced to an either-or TV-movie cliché – solution guaranteed before the last commercial.

Graff, who co-stars as a brutal junkie, acts better than he writes. His script for Fly belongs to the same genre as his scripts for Used People and Angie: soap opera. The talented cast, including female rapper MC Lyte as Rich's long-suffering wife, are helpless against the tide of bubbles. The actors and the subject deserved better.

“Satisfied”

Only the genius of Tom Waits could combine the subject of mortality, a reoccurring theme in his work, with wordplay that name checks both Mick and Keith, whom he calls "Mr. Jagger" and "Mr. Richards," and the title of their magnum opus, "Satisfaction." And to show just how cool Waits really is, he even got Mr. Richards to play along, one of nine guest appearances the guitarist has made on three Waits albums. "This growling roadhouse stomp is a late-breaking response to the Stones' greatest hit," Rolling Stone said of the track.