Original Gangsta

Anyone who's watched one episode of MTV's Cribs knows that all rap stars are obsessed with the film "Scarface".

It's almost a requirement: Gold records on the walls, Benz in the garage, stripper pole in the living room and a copy of "Scarface" on DVD.

I've never understood why this is so popular with the rap crowd. There's hardly a black character in the film and most of it centers on Pacino doing a bad Cuban accent.

Today I watched the excellent and underrated "Deep Cover" for the 126th time. Few people regard this movie as great and they're all wrong. And if the rap stars have any taste (few of them do, look at their houses on cribs) they'd all worship this film.

This film flows like poetry. LL Cool J wishes he was a smooth as this movie.

Larry Fishburne plays a cop who gets drafted, against his better judgment, into infiltrating a drug operation by going undercover as a dealer. Since his psychological profile pegs him as having criminal tendencies, Fishburne finds that playing a drug dealer is easy --- he just does it. But his conscience tortures him the whole time and he ends up concluding that the government agency that employs him to bust drug dealers is no better than the criminals who he seeks to arrest.

It's a big F-you to the man --- the kind of film any anti-authority hip hop artist should endorse. I've seen this movie 126 times and it never gets old. Fishburne owns this movie. Unfortunately Larry (he goes by Lawrence now, but his momma calls him Larry, so I'm calling him Larry) has never done a role as good as this one since.

So I urge all up and coming rap stars to turn in their copies of Scarface and replace them with copies of "Deep Cover." If nothing else, this film will allow you a lot more time to staff the stripper pole because it's an hour and 15 minutes shorter than the Tony Montana epic.