8 Mile

Before I get to my reviews/How ’bout some muthafuckin’ previews THE 25TH HOUR–A new Spike Lee joint with Edward Norton as a convicted gangster (or something) who has 24 hours to live his life before being sent away for (probably) the rest of his life. His friends, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Barry Pepper, try to help him out in any way possible as he tries to make good after a life of crime. His girlfriend, Rosario Dawson, wants him to spend his last day as a free man with her. And his dad, Brian Cox, just wants him to be a good man.

Maybe not your typical Spike flick, but it looks great, and with a cast like that how can it lose? Well, easily actually, but we’ll hope for the best. I’m there.

THE LIFE OF DAVID GALE–Filmed in Austin! It’ll probably bomb!

Kevin Spacey plays the title character who was a major opponent of the death penalty. The catch is that he is now on death row for murder with only three days to live. Kate Winslet is a reporter who is trying to figure out exactly why he’s in jail. Did he really kill those people? Or is there dirty work afoot?

I would watch Kate picking her feet in Poughkeepsie. And the fact that she was in my town filming it makes it even better. And the fact that a friend of mine actually MET HER AND DIDN’T TELL ME WHERE TO GO TO MEET HER, well, that just pisses me off.

You’re a bastard, D. You know you are.

EMPIRE–This is really the only preview that actually fit the movie it was attached to. John Leguizamo owns his block. Everybody in his neighborhood respects him because they know that he’ll blast their asses if they don’t. Oh, and he takes care of them. When Peter Sarsgaard comes along and gives him the old schpeal about making him millions on the stock market (John’s trying to go clean, ya see) and takes him for thousands of dollars, the score has to be evened.

Strangely, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie with this kind of twist. I’m very interested to see where they take it and how far the good bad guy will go to get the bad bad guy.

CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND–George Clooney’s directorial debut is a biopic (maybe) of Chuck Barris, the mastermind behind The Dating Game and The Gong Show. He also may or may not have been a top hitman for the CIA. Chuck is played by Sam Rockwell (who I really don’t like too much) it looks like with a bit of sliminess that the role needs. George takes the pivotal role of Chuck’s CIA boss and Drew Barrymore is Chuck’s wife. And with a screenplay by the perpetually weird Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich and Human Behavior), how can this be normal? AND the film stock is even cool. Nice and grainy and washed out. Can’t wait for this one.

Now here’s my review/I’m bringin’ it to you/from the ass of Pepe Le…nevermind. I’m never going to do that again. I promise.

I’ll get one thing out of the way right now: Eminem CAN act. He’s actually really good. Sure, he’s playing himself, so it’s not much of a stretch. But one of the hardest things in the world to do is play yourself.

Before I get to the review proper, I think I’ll say a little something about my experience at the theatre. It was a unique experience not because of the audience, but because of the employees.

First off, I went to see this at a suburban mall. Not any kind of urban stand-alone theatre. It was a mall theatre in white suburbia. So, what happens when I walk up with my ticket? The kid at the booth says, “Make sure you keep your ticket because they’ll check it.”

Huh? I’ve never been told that before. I’ve never been checked before. Especially not at this theatre that you can usually sneak into. (And everyone in Austin suddenly knows what theatre I’m talking about and exactly how to get into it for free.) So I keep my ticket in my hand (a little tighter than usual, but it’s totally unconscious) and walk towards my theatre. What do you suppose I see there? That’s right. A small line of stantions keeping people from coming from all directions…and a cop. He’s standing there with a small teenage girl employee checking out all of the audience members as they walk in.

A couple of kids came up to me and my friends asking if we would be their guardians so they could get in. Meanwhile we could see the cop eyeing us. Nope. Can’t do it. Not with him looking at us like that.

When we got in and more audience members (including those kids…without a guardian figure) filed in we realized that the cop must have been thinking, “At least it’s overtime.” He must have felt pretty ridiculous standing there making sure that all of the blond-haired, blue-eyed teenage girls didn’t pull guns on their fellow patrons. There was one kid who looked like a Slim Shady lurking, but he didn’t look like he meant to be one. He looked like he actually liked the haircut and was actually blond.

This is fucking stupid. It’s a movie, folks. Yeah, it stars an angry young rapper, but it’s no more violent than Good Will Hunting. (More on that later.) It’s about hope, not hate. Fuck them for thinking that riots are going to break out because Eminem says, “How can six dicks be pussies?”

But what’s the movie all about? Well, 8 Mile, if you haven’t been paying attention to any press lately, is the stretch of road that lies between white Detroit and black Detroit. That may be a pretty blunt way of putting it, but it’s true. And, like all towns with “bad sides” to them, there is some mixing, but those who are mixed in get kind of lost in the shuffle.

Eminem was (and is playing) one of those lost kids. The only life he knows is the one that he learned in the streets and the trailer parks. He grew up poor, but he’s no dummy. He knows that he can get out if he just catches a break.

Jimmy “Bunny Rabbit” Smith (Em’s character here) is stuck living with his white trash, co-dependent mom (Kim Basinger) and her boyfriend, Greg (Michael Shannon from Pearl Harbor and Vanilla Sky), who he went to school with. (And, yes, there are some Bill & Ted moments.) Another, even more tragic lost kid is Rabbit’s little sister, Lily. Rabbit tries to keep her sheltered from the shit storm that’s going on around her, but he’s not always successful. He takes care of her the way I imagine Em takes care of his daughter. (In fact, in the beginning I thought maybe she was supposed to be his daughter.) He dotes on her and keeps her safe when he can.

His friends (they call themselves 3 1/3 because there’s four of them, but one isn’t quite all there…and, as near as I could tell, their zip code ends in 313) all know that he has talent and try to push him to use it. Future (Mekhi Phifer) hosts rap battles at a local hip-hop club downtown and signs Rabbit up for them whenever he can. At the first one, though, Rabbit chokes. After this defeat he has to prove himself not only to the rival rap gang, The New Free World, but also to himself.

Enter Alex (Brittany Murphy), the sister of a fellow car factory worker. (Who doesn’t work at a car factory in Detroit?) She walks into his life and quickly takes the place of his ex-girlfriend. Alex is trying to get to New York to be a model and Rabbit’s friend (sort of), Wink (Eugene Byrd), says that he’s going to help her with his connections. Of course he’s been telling everybody about his connections for years.

I read a review saying that this movie was like a hip-hop Rocky. I can totally see that. You’ve got an underdog who has a dream and comes out from the bottom to try to prove himself. The movie is about as predictable as Rocky and nearly as inspirational. Yes. I actually said that. The “Eminem movie” is kinda inspirational.

In another weird turn of my stream of consciousness, I kept thinking that Will Hunting and his crew were going to come out to fight with Rabbit and his boys. Yep. Even reminded me a LOT of that movie.

Now, I always have to put this disclaimer in here. I know next to nothing about hip-hop. I’ve never really been a fan. I don’t hate it as much as I used to (mainly because of Em), but I still don’t choose to listen to it. (Although I did notice that a lot of the smaller roles were taken by Em’s buddies from D-12.) But I saw this with my friend who is a bit of a hip-hop scholar and he thought that it portrayed the culture pretty close to how it actually is. And he was glad that they didn’t put any of the more pop crap in the movie and kept with the real hip-hop music. Since it takes place in 1995 (just before a lot of it went to pop) they were playing a lot of the old(-ish) stuff that influenced a lot of today’s stars.

Oh, and the battle raps were great.

This is all the more surprising when you figure that director Curtis Hanson didn’t know a damn thing about the hip-hop world before making this film. But he took his cast and crew to Detroit (against Universal’s wishes) and shot what he saw. It’s a dirty, dilapidated place where these kids were growing up. It down-right sucks. Every house and building looks like it should be condemned. When Rabbit goes into a friend’s house there are mold stains on the walls. They hang out in (and burn down) an old house that looks like it was at one time a very nice house. Now it’s a pile of bricks and wood just waiting for bums to squat in it. The streets are lined with gun shops, pawn shops, liquor stores and rap bars. The people look as dangerous as the guns that a lot of them carry. There’s just not a lot of good going on there. For someone to make it out is damn near a miracle.

Now I know what the guys in Airplane were talking about. I don’t ever want to visit Detroit.

Besides using his amazing eye for place and time (along with ace cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (Amores Perros, Original Sin and Frida)) he had Eminem and the boys along to help him keep things in perspective. He used a mostly local and untrained cast (who all did very well alongside a few veterans) and all local locations.

And aside from all of that, he’s just a great director. He knows how to keep us interested even if we know the plot points. The sense of immediacy during the battles makes it seems like we’re watching a boxing match. The scenes between Rabbit and Lily are loving and close. Whereas L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys were glossy Hollywood confections (although VERY good ones), this was a gritty, documentary style nightmare with hope embedded under the dirt.

The best decision he made was to tell screenwriter Scott Silver (The Mod Squad…I know, I know. He did a great job this time.) to just write the screenplay in normal English and let the actors say the lines the way they normally would. That’s the only way he could ever get true performances out of them.

It paid off, too. The actors were all great throughout. Eminem, as I said, was great in his first real role. Kim was better than she ever has been as the schizo mom from hell. One minute she’s kicking her son out because he boyfriend is a dick and the next minute she wants to make him pancakes. They should have waited to give her the Oscar for this role instead of the not-so-different role she actually won it for. Mekhi Phifer is always great and he’s no different here. It’s good to see him get good roles. And Brittany is really coming along as a gutsy actress. From Don’t Say A Word to doing sex scenes with Eminem in a factory (pretty damn good one, too even though there’s not a lot of skin shown), she’s proved that she’s willing to do just about anything for the art. And she’s got the talent to back it up. Funny that she’s overshadowed her Clueless co-star who was supposed be the next best thing. She may not win any award with her performance here, but she’s very good.

There was one weak link, but she was only in the movie for a couple of minutes, so she didn’t get a chance to ruin anything. Taryn Manning (from Crossroads and Crazy/Beautiful) played Rabbit’s ex and she pretty much sucked. Cute, but not a lot of talent. (And she didn’t seem to grasp the language at all. She said something like, “I’ll not do that!” Huh? No. That’s not the way she would say that. She would say, “I won’t fuckin’ do that, muthafucker!”)

I really liked this movie a lot. It may have been predictable, but it’s a story that we can all relate to even if we didn’t grow up in a trailer on the wrong side of the tracks. Everybody has a dream and we should chase it down with a vengeance. Go after it against all odds and it’ll come to you. Even if you want to be a white hip-hop artist.