Straight outta compton 20151/25/2024 ![]() ![]() Eazy-E and Heller, when facing down threats from Knight, teamed up with Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League. These scenes are excruciating, especially since there are other titbits about these characters that would have been far more interesting. Not since The Phantom Menace has there been such an emphasis on uninteresting litigation. Just when it looks like the reunion will happen, Eazy-E dies from Aids.īetween these bullet points, there are a great many scenes dedicated to arguing, in the vaguest terms, about contracts and distribution deals. Oh, if only the original troika could bury the hatchet and get back together, especially with the urban community in turmoil after the Rodney King trial. NWA never really recovers, and soon Dr Dre teams up with the large, menacing former bodyguard Suge Knight, whose megalomaniacal style (which involves keeping intimidating dogs) isn’t just shady but dangerous. He destroys his previous colleagues with a barrage of homophobic slurs, and makes an antisemitic comment about Heller. The remaining members of NWA record a diss track on their next album, and Cube fires back with No Vaseline, one of the most viscous (and toe-tappin’) rebukes in the history of hip-hop. Ice Cube is the first to leave, unhappy with the contract being offered by Heller. (Or, should I more accurately say, with a situation that has always been prevalent in America but is now more widely publicised owing to the availability of portable communications technology).Ī still from Straight Outta Compton. It’s a harrowing sequence, one of many featuring thuggish cops that resonates with the recent tensions between black citizens and the police in the US. He is also scandalised and repulsed by the ubiquitous police harassment his artists face, and uses his white privilege to defuse a tense situation. Heller is a fascinating character, in that he genuinely respects the group’s talents and is key to getting them their initial exposure. Eazy-E cuts their first independent record, Boyz n the Hood, which gets the attention of a half-angelic, half-sleazebag producer Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti). When the three work together, the formula is magic.įor a while, they’re riding high. There are additional members of the group hanging around, but it’s clear that Eazy-E is the heart, Ice Cube is the head and Dr Dre is the central nervous system. Eazy-E puts up the initial money, Ice Cube writes the lyrics and Dr Dre lays down the tracks. After a series of everyday indignities such as getting pushed around by police and having to work dead-end jobs, they form the collective NWA (Niggaz With Attitude). Also in the mix is a wise-beyond-his-years teen poet O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson (played by producer Ice Cube’s son O’Shea Jackson Jr). He is chums with Andre “Dr Dre” Young (Corey Hawkins), a skilled DJ far more concerned with spinning records than looking after his newborn child. Drug criminality is rampant, and one such low-level runner is young Eric “Eazy-E” Wright (Jason Mitchell). ![]() But it’s Hawkins, Mitchell and Jackson (the latter playing his own father) who really light up the screen, bringing energy and vitality to the film even as it misses the wider picture (and stirs up old rivalries), aided by an urgent and enthralling powerhouse soundtrack.We open in late 1980s, in the economically disadvantaged Los Angeles neighbourhood that will soon become synonymous with this new form of “reality raps”. ![]() Scenes of LA burning in the wake of the Rodney King trial provide an apocalyptic political backdrop, although the film itself seems more interested in the battles (both contractual and physical) between artists and record labels, with R Marcos Taylor’s Suge Knight providing much death row threat. After his caricatured turn as the svengali-esque Eugene Landy in Love and Mercy, Paul Giamatti offers another wiggy performance as NWA’s manager Jerry Heller, whose contracts spark rifts between the rappers even as the authorities get federal on their act. Instead, F Gary Gray (whose CV includes Friday and Set It Off) plays it rather more straight, following Corey Hawkins’s Dr Dre, Jason Mitchell’s Eazy-E, and O’Shea Jackson Jr’s Ice Cube on a pulsating rags-to-riches journey involving all the usual rock-pic elements: talismanic recording sessions, boisterous concerts, riotous parties (replete with unquestioned misogyny), corrupt managers etc. ![]() Boyz n the Hood director John Singleton was initially due to direct this NWA biopic, and he may have brought a more nuanced edge to the tale of the band’s controversial cultural status. ![]()
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