Documentaries and Blockbusters
July 6, 2004
This documentary about freestyle rap is raw and unfinished (it barely clocks an hour), but what’s there is great fun. The movie spins its wheels when MCs talk but it comes to life when they suit up and do battle. The confrontations with Supernatural, Craig G and Juice are all worth the price of admission and director Kevin Fitzgerald scores gold with an old clip of a babyfaced 17 year old Notorious BIG on a street corner taking it to some kid so hard that the kid walks away in disgust, not even taking his turn. It’s not as polished as its hip-hop DJ counterpart Scratch, but hopefully it will get there. The only really bad part was after the movie I had to listen to my friends bust the absolute worst freestyles in the history of man.
Ehn. I’ve followed the news enough that I didn’t really learn anything, and Moore’s bias is still a bit off-putting. It also suffers from some poor narrative flaws, heavy handed narration and some wild shifts in tone. That said, the info’s good and it’s important that it gets widely seen, if only to keep the channels of discourse open. I just wish it were better, I wish it were more deftly handled. I WISH IT HAD INTERROTRON.
It’s better than the first one, but in reverse. The saccharine tone worked for me the first time, but it felt a bit cloying this time. On the other hand, Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus is perfect in every way. The physicality of the character is terrifying and brutal, and the design and choreography of his confrontations with Spidey are dead-on. The King Kong imagery of Ock climbing towers with Mary Jane in tow was probably my favorite part.
Posted in Moving Pictures
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July 11th, 2004 at 4:51 pm
I think that B.I.G. clip, though I haven’t seen the film, might have been in Nick Broomfield’s Biggie & Tupac, which is the best part of that sad mess of misspent Broomfieldia.