Harlem Aria was produced and peddled on the festival circuit back at the start of the new century—quite significantly on the cusp of the independent film industry’s transition to digital video—but not released theatrically until 2010. This makes the texture of the movie difficult to date with accuracy, and it’s curiously jarring. We can’t quite believe that contemporary actors like Wayans and Camargo are interacting with the low-budget film grain and old school titles—along with odd “‘90s”-isms, like inappropriately vibrant color schemes that seem designed to underscore the hue of sneaker stripes—that we associate with TV flicks from two decades ago. We tend to forget, of course, how pervasive the “cheap film” timbre was before another method superseded its affordability, and there’s no doubt that Wayans and Camargo look younger than their current selves. But the movie has the dramatic dullness of a modern-day flop that, were it actually produced today, would have all the telltale signs of handicam immaturity rather than indicators of über-commercialized slickness. (How many indie films with an urban setting are shot sans handheld jitters today?) It’s like a twentysomething’s funhouse of anachronistic mirrors. Coming of age in the midst of technological revolution has its price: The technical motifs on which we were raised have already progressed from embarrassingly obsolete to disorientingly antiquarian.