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Saturday, August 15, 2015

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Straight Outta Compton" Turns Straight Into Oscar Bait

Directed by F. Gary Gray
Written by Jonathan Herman, Andrea Berloff,
S. Leigh Savidge, and Alan Wenkus
(R - Universal - 2 hrs, 30 mins)

Alo Party Peoples.

As a general rule, the best life's story movies tend to be made after the life in question has come to an end, because the film makers are free to make a statement about that life without worrying that the person who lived it will take offense at what they have to say. And since most of N.W.A are still alive as of this writing, there's a limit to how good Straight Outta Compton can reasonably be expected to be.

It's not like you couldn't make a great film about N.W.A, there is absolutely something to be made out of their struggle to be taken seriously as artists, or the idea that they started to lose their revolutionary power after becoming famous, or that hip-hop is the only part of 90's music that would have any impact once the decade ended, or that "F*** Tha Police" is sadly just as relevant and resonant today as it was in 1988. There are so many approaches you could take that of course you could make a great film about N.W.A, but Straight Outta Compton is not that movie. 

The problem is not that there is nothing to say about N.W.A, the problem is that Straight Outta Compton has nothing to say about them, and not because the film-makers were afraid to say anything about N.W.A, but because two of its members were directly involved in its production. Rap, and especially the gangsta' rap that N.W.A. pioneered, is about image, and Straight Outta Compton only exists so that Dr. Dre and Ice Cube can sand the rough edges off of that image for posterity.

It's a real shame, because there is a lot of good in Straight Outta Compton. The first hour of the film where Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Easy-E get the idea to reject the electronic dance jams that dominated 80s hip hop and instead make what they call "reality rap" that reflects the world around them, one where brutal gang violence and an equally brutal police force are omnipresent, recording the album that gives the film it's title, and quickly rising to the national forefront as the face of a dangerous new genre of music, is intense, powerful, and simply spectacular. F. Gary Gray captures the passionate adolescent rage that fueled N.W.A. so well that even if you deplore everything they stand for, you simply can't help but be swept up in it.

Easily the film's best scene is when N.W.A. performs a live show in Detroit, and are lectured by the local police beforehand, who inform them that they will not tolerate any profane language, and certainly will not tolerate playing "F*** Tha Police" (this comes shortly after they received a letter from the F.B.I advising them to not perform it, something so insane that I'm sure you're assuming that it was made up for the movie, it wasn't) So they of course wait until the end of the show just to make a point, and immediately officers hiding in the audience start moving towards the stage, badges held high, to put down this dissent, the group makes a break for the parking lot, where a silent line of officers is waiting to arrest them. After they are apprehended, the kids in the audience start pooling up on the roof and throwing burning trash, one of them shouting "F*** the police!" as N.W.A is driven away to jail.

This scene captures what defines gangsta' rap; the glorification of that which is decidedly inglorious. It's a scene where our heroes are at once standing up to a corrupt government regime that simply will not tolerate dissent... but they're also sort-of inciting a riot and getting arrested in the process. If the rest of the movie was able to keep up that dynamic, if it could continue emphasizing that theme of the impossible to surpress power of ideas, or even if it ended on that scene, then Straight Outta Compton would be pretty spectacular, maybe even this year's Selma.

Unfortunately, once that scene ends, and once Ice Cube leaves N.W.A over contract disputes, Straight Outta Compton turns straight into Oscar bait as it drifts into a loose collection of scenes in chronological order that have no connective tissue between them, as befits most bog-standard biopics aiming for Oscars. Much like N.W.A. itself, the back-half of Straight Outta Compton gets lost in itself and loses sight of what made it work in the first place. The Rodney King trials are a constant background presence on TV news throughout this part of the movie, and for a while I thought the fact that we only see them through TV news was supposed to represent N.W.A. having grown distant from their roots... until they drive right through the LA riots and that pretty clever visual conceit falls apart.

I wanted to like Straight Outta Compton a lot more than I did. That a movie about N.W.A. can exist as a bog-standard biopic released to a mass audience during Oscar season is in and of itself amazing, it's equality in action, it's just a shame that bog-standard biopics are the norm for musicians.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 3/5

Saturday, August 8, 2015

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Fant-Four-stic": As Bad As That Name

Directed by Josh Trank
Written by Josh Trank, Jeremy Slater,
and Simon Kinberg
(PG-13 - 20th Century Fox - 1 hr, 46 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

If there's one downside to Marvel Studio's ascendency to the forefront of the blockbuster scene, it's that it has become impossible to get excited for a superhero movie from anyone else. Granted, the competition has pretty frequently dropped the ball, Man of Steel was a complete butchering of the Superman mythos, the X-Men movies (at least not the ones made by Matthew Vaughn) have been okay at best and terrible at worst, and the now defunct Amazing Spider-Man series was such a disaster that Sony now has to share custody of Peter Parker with Disney.

Fant-Four-stic (following in the naming convention of Se-Seven-en and Scre-Four-m) is Fox's desperate attempt to avert that fate. They are contractually obligated to release a Fantastic Four movie within a certain time-frame lest Disney get their toys back, so they slapped this together on the quick to fulfill that contract despite having no ability to do it well and clearly having no respect for or even interest in source material. If not for the title and the names of the five main characters Fant-Four-stic would be completely unrecognizable as a Fantastic Four movie or even as a superhero movie. 

To wit, Fant-Four-stic involves a bunch of Millennial college brats being conscripted to work on an inter-dimensional teleporting machine, only to take it out on a joy-ride and end up with horrible mutations as a result- and if that plot synopsis makes you think that this wants to be less like The Avengers' CGI beat-em-up and more like the Space Race inspired pulp sci-fi stories that the comics started out as, Fant-Four-stic will quickly disappoint you with its moody melancholic tone, washed out David Fincher-esque color palette, and by at first treating the powers at first more like PG-13 body horror. (Which is admittedly the only kind of interesting part of the movie)

Fant-Four-stic is so divorced from the comics on both a thematic and aesthetic level that it almost feels like self-parody. "It's clobbering time!", the most gloriously cheesy catchphrase in the entire Marvel canon, here starts out as something that Ben Grimm's abusive brother said to him before beating him. Doctor Doom, possibly the greatest supervillain in the Marvel canon (he's a dictator and a mad scientist, sometimes he's also a wizard, how do you screw that up?) once the movie remembers that he exists after the Budding Superstar Squad left him in the alternate dimension, comes back as a mummified energy monster that looks like it sprung from a moody fourteen year-old's sketchbook.

It also has the production values of a fourteen year-old's sketchbook. It's a shockingly cheap production, since the Army kidnapped the Four and forces them to spend most of the film takes place in an interchangeable underground-bunker set in the middle of stock Vancouver forests. The CGI is so bad and the green-screens so obvious that you'd be forgiven for thinking this was a bad episode of Doctor Who where the actual stars forgot to show up, leaving a bunch of untrained brats to badly stumble their way through bad dialogue.

There isn't even much action, the only real set-piece in the entire movie comes at the very end once Doom shows up and decides to destroy the planet for unexplained motivations with unexplained means, and it's a terrible fight scene. If you can't expect anything else from a crap-tastic summer blockbuster like this, they at least shouldn't be boring, right?

Fant-Four-stic is just plain terrible. The screenplay is pointless, the acting is atrocious, the effects look like they were done in 2006. and it's just so slow, joyless, and devoid of action that it makes the Roger Corman version look like Guardians of the Galaxy by comparison. It's a complete waste of time for everyone involved, I do not recommend it, and you'd be better off doing literally anything else with your time.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 1/5