|
An involving and richly textured account of the efforts of a down-and-nearly-out pimp and drug dealer to claw his way toward something better. Terrence Howard's DJay is the standout, but the entire cast is up to the same level, including Anthony Anderson as the recording technician who lets himself get hussled into helping DJay develop his music. (Between this role and his menacing Antwon on the recently concluded season of The Shield, Anderson too is emerging as a major talent.) I also liked Taryn Manning as Nola, who is apparently DJay's main girl; she says more with a look than most people do with a page of dialogue. And Taraji P. Henson as the former working girl now pregant with DJay's child takes a role that starts off as a cliche and makes it into the heart of the movie.
A cursory viewing might lead one to conclude that the dialogue is primitive and trashy, just as some critics once dismissed David Mamet as a guy whose dialogue is all cursing. But there's a weary poetry to DJay's patter whenever he's trying to get his way, whether with one of the girls who works for him or with a neighbor whose party is interfering with DJay's efforts to record, and Howard registers what's going on in DJay's head with a directness and simplicity that's the hallmark of great acting.
It's not a complicated story, but it pulls you in, because the performances are rich and because writer/director Craig Brewer makes you feel the heat and squalor, so that you have no doubt why the characters yearn for another life. (The search for air conditioning becomes a kind of running joke.) He also shows, better than any other filmmaker I can think of, the labors of creation in a collaborative art form. The sequence where the group laboriously assembles DJay's first single is one of the high points of the film.
I've read criticism of the ending, but I thought it was perfect: true to the world it depicts, hilarious in its final denouement, and ultimately ambiguous in its implications. It's hard to say more without spoilers, so judge for yourself.
M.
"Most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything." -- Chinatown
"What kind of movies would there be if everyone in them had to do what we thought they should do?" -- Roger Ebert
HTF Beginner's Primer and FAQ
|
