A$AP Rocky

Surely it is a sign of these hard cinematic times that an auteur-helmed remake of a midcentury international cinema classic is also the most exciting, engaging movie of the summer. Before Apple Original Films removes it from theaters for its future life on streaming, Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest appears in US cinemas amid the usual summer commotion: comic-book movies and assorted remakes or sequels. As noted, Highest 2 Lowest is a remake too, but a remake of a work so remote from the cultural consciousness of most 21st-century moviegoers (Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 masterpiece High and Low) that it feels fresh.

The nation waits with bated breath for news of one of its favorite and most delicate sons, the ‘rap artist’ A$AP Rocky. Mr Rocky is held hostage by the military of the barbaric regime of an anti-Western failed state called Sweden. The Scandinavian rogue nation is widely suspected of having colluded with the military of another barbaric regime of another anti-Western failed state, Iran, which last week kidnapped an entire oil tanker under similar circumstances. Mr Rocky claims to have been minding his own business with two of his minders when they felt it necessary to kick an Afghan asylum seeker in the body and head while taking an early evening stroll in the rubble of Sweden’s Mogadishu-like capital, Stockholm.

Despite his slender frame and greater affinity with high-end fashion brands than street gangsterism, 30-year-old American rapper A$AP Rocky has never been one to avoid confrontation. Videos on YouTube show him threatening to ‘snuff’ a giant English man, who promptly tells him to ‘do one, bruv’. Thank God some people have kept the spirit of the duel alive.Last month, however, words ended and fists flew. Rocky was arrested during a tour of Sweden, and video emerged of him swinging a young man through the air and into the pavement. Frankly, it was an impressive, if acutely dangerous, display of physicality. This, and he and his colleagues’ subsequent kicking and stomping of the young man and his friend, made this look like an open and shut case.