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Hustle & Flow (Craig Brewer)
First let me say I don't listen to rap music. I don't like it, I don't get it, it doesn't resonate for me on any level, and I haven't heard any over the years, hardcore or mainstream, that would make me want to seek out more. That having been said, I loved Hustle & Flow, which tells the story of a man who puts his heart into and pins his dreams onto rap music, as a way of expression and maybe a way out of his bad situations. That's really the core of the plot, and that it happens to be rap is really incidental. In a different time or a different place it might well have been Country or Rock & Roll or Punk or composing major piano concertos that ignited a man's passions and dreams. But here it's rap. And what bad situations is our would-be-dreamer trying to lift himself out of? For this character, it's poverty, prostitution and drug dealing. In another story it might have been a dying coal or steel town, but here it's seedy small-ticket crime.
I know those basic elements of a pimp trying to make it in the rap game sounds on the surface like something most of you would want to avoid. But this is a very good, very well-made movie, and it is much more interesting and compelling than a two-sentence description or the trailer or poster may let on.
Terence Howard is having a break-out year (hopefully anyway). He's a face that's been around for a while now and a lot of that time it has been in just pure crap, with the Mariah Carey disaster Glitter being the most embarassing point on the resume. But he stood out in last year's Ray and this year has been unforgettable in Paul Haggis' Crash, the HBO movie "Lackawanna Blues" and now most impressively in Hustle & Flow. His character in Hustle is DJay, a low-rent hustler who is barely scratching out a living by dealing a few drugs and most of his income coming from three women who work for him as prostitutes, on the street and in the cheapest of strip clubs. None of this is making him rich. Far from it, he's hardly clearing dime one. DJay and the girls live in the poorest part of Memphis, Tennessee, but the universality of the conditions and characters could just as well have been any economically depressed metro area in 21st century America.
DJay learns from the owner of a local bar, played by Isaac Hayes, that a rap superstar named Skinny Black (Ludacris) who grew up and started his career in Memphis is coming back to the old neighborhood for a Fourth of July celebration, renting out the club for their party. DJay says while they weren't friends, they are the same age and were part of the same scene back in the day, before Skinny hit it big, and that he used to spin a mean record or two in his own right. Next comes a chance meeting with an old High School friend he hasn't seen in years, Key (Anthony Anderson). Key is eeking out a middle-class living with his wife, mostly getting paychecks as a sound engineer and recorder at small gigs like church recitals and graduations. But he has always hungered for more and now, in his mid-thirties with a home and wife, wonders if he'll ever get a real shot at owning his own label, real recording studio and all the other big dreams he had as a teenager.
DJay has been saving up rhymes and beats in his head, at least subconsciously, for years, and after meeting Key again he is inspired to give music a shot. Togther they try and harness their aspirations and desperation into rap music. Key invites Shelby, a skinny white kid (DJ Qualls, best-known from Road Trip) who can play the piano into their operation, and soon they are experimenting with laying down tracks. The ultimate goal is to get a demo tape togther by July, so DJay can get into the party and slip the tape to Skinny Black. Surely fame and fortune will follow.
All this still may sound very formulaic and obvious, but as a warts-and-all character study and a presentation of time and place, it is quite remarkable and always engrossing. And for once even I understood the basic appeal and atristry of Hip-Hop. The music scenes are very well done, relaying how a song is put together techinacally and what kind of personal statement goes into it (or DJay's music, anyway).
The things I usually hate in movies with this kind of setting is not the plot mechanations as much as the phoniness in how the world and characters are presented. They are either over-the-top horrible stereotypes or too-good-to-be-true fantasy cut-outs from too many recycled previous scripts, with zero contact with reality in either case. And everybody is usually too pretty or too bright, and the houses and clubs and neighborhood don't seem credible but like some Hollywood set designers idea of what a "ghetto" is like. In Hustle & Flow the characters and the setting seem faithful and authentic, which brings a true universality to the material. For me, anyway. I find the more honest and the more detailed you can get in film, it can pay huge dividends in making the story relateable for a varying bunch of viewers. You need not have been a graduating 1962 senior who cruised the Northern California strips in shiny hot rods to connect with American Graffiti, or a twenty-something not sure of your future young man hanging out in 1959 Baltimore greasy spoons to understand Diner. Well by the same token you certainly don't have to be a pimp with rap aspirations in downtrodden 2000-something Memphis to really get into Hustle & Flow.
Here the drug-dealing pimp is not a monster nor a saint, the whores are not beautiful movie stars in fishnets, the bad neighborhood is not from "21 Jump Street", and none of what happens is cliched or cookie-cutter- even if the basic plot is as familiar as A Star is Born or The Jazz Singer.
An honest character study, good music, fantastic use of location and a basic but well-realized reworking of the grittier flip-side of the American dream make Hustle & Flow a damn good film, and definitely arthouse fare to seek out in the summer full of mega-budgeted blockbusters.
GRADE: A-
First let me say I don't listen to rap music. I don't like it, I don't get it, it doesn't resonate for me on any level, and I haven't heard any over the years, hardcore or mainstream, that would make me want to seek out more. That having been said, I loved Hustle & Flow, which tells the story of a man who puts his heart into and pins his dreams onto rap music, as a way of expression and maybe a way out of his bad situations. That's really the core of the plot, and that it happens to be rap is really incidental. In a different time or a different place it might well have been Country or Rock & Roll or Punk or composing major piano concertos that ignited a man's passions and dreams. But here it's rap. And what bad situations is our would-be-dreamer trying to lift himself out of? For this character, it's poverty, prostitution and drug dealing. In another story it might have been a dying coal or steel town, but here it's seedy small-ticket crime.
I know those basic elements of a pimp trying to make it in the rap game sounds on the surface like something most of you would want to avoid. But this is a very good, very well-made movie, and it is much more interesting and compelling than a two-sentence description or the trailer or poster may let on.
Terence Howard is having a break-out year (hopefully anyway). He's a face that's been around for a while now and a lot of that time it has been in just pure crap, with the Mariah Carey disaster Glitter being the most embarassing point on the resume. But he stood out in last year's Ray and this year has been unforgettable in Paul Haggis' Crash, the HBO movie "Lackawanna Blues" and now most impressively in Hustle & Flow. His character in Hustle is DJay, a low-rent hustler who is barely scratching out a living by dealing a few drugs and most of his income coming from three women who work for him as prostitutes, on the street and in the cheapest of strip clubs. None of this is making him rich. Far from it, he's hardly clearing dime one. DJay and the girls live in the poorest part of Memphis, Tennessee, but the universality of the conditions and characters could just as well have been any economically depressed metro area in 21st century America.
DJay learns from the owner of a local bar, played by Isaac Hayes, that a rap superstar named Skinny Black (Ludacris) who grew up and started his career in Memphis is coming back to the old neighborhood for a Fourth of July celebration, renting out the club for their party. DJay says while they weren't friends, they are the same age and were part of the same scene back in the day, before Skinny hit it big, and that he used to spin a mean record or two in his own right. Next comes a chance meeting with an old High School friend he hasn't seen in years, Key (Anthony Anderson). Key is eeking out a middle-class living with his wife, mostly getting paychecks as a sound engineer and recorder at small gigs like church recitals and graduations. But he has always hungered for more and now, in his mid-thirties with a home and wife, wonders if he'll ever get a real shot at owning his own label, real recording studio and all the other big dreams he had as a teenager.
DJay has been saving up rhymes and beats in his head, at least subconsciously, for years, and after meeting Key again he is inspired to give music a shot. Togther they try and harness their aspirations and desperation into rap music. Key invites Shelby, a skinny white kid (DJ Qualls, best-known from Road Trip) who can play the piano into their operation, and soon they are experimenting with laying down tracks. The ultimate goal is to get a demo tape togther by July, so DJay can get into the party and slip the tape to Skinny Black. Surely fame and fortune will follow.
All this still may sound very formulaic and obvious, but as a warts-and-all character study and a presentation of time and place, it is quite remarkable and always engrossing. And for once even I understood the basic appeal and atristry of Hip-Hop. The music scenes are very well done, relaying how a song is put together techinacally and what kind of personal statement goes into it (or DJay's music, anyway).
The things I usually hate in movies with this kind of setting is not the plot mechanations as much as the phoniness in how the world and characters are presented. They are either over-the-top horrible stereotypes or too-good-to-be-true fantasy cut-outs from too many recycled previous scripts, with zero contact with reality in either case. And everybody is usually too pretty or too bright, and the houses and clubs and neighborhood don't seem credible but like some Hollywood set designers idea of what a "ghetto" is like. In Hustle & Flow the characters and the setting seem faithful and authentic, which brings a true universality to the material. For me, anyway. I find the more honest and the more detailed you can get in film, it can pay huge dividends in making the story relateable for a varying bunch of viewers. You need not have been a graduating 1962 senior who cruised the Northern California strips in shiny hot rods to connect with American Graffiti, or a twenty-something not sure of your future young man hanging out in 1959 Baltimore greasy spoons to understand Diner. Well by the same token you certainly don't have to be a pimp with rap aspirations in downtrodden 2000-something Memphis to really get into Hustle & Flow.
Here the drug-dealing pimp is not a monster nor a saint, the whores are not beautiful movie stars in fishnets, the bad neighborhood is not from "21 Jump Street", and none of what happens is cliched or cookie-cutter- even if the basic plot is as familiar as A Star is Born or The Jazz Singer.
An honest character study, good music, fantastic use of location and a basic but well-realized reworking of the grittier flip-side of the American dream make Hustle & Flow a damn good film, and definitely arthouse fare to seek out in the summer full of mega-budgeted blockbusters.
GRADE: A-