Straight Outta Compton - The Motion Picture

What can I say? Once that type of thing hits a certain level of clunkiness, I start to find it endearing.

lol at shakey

OTM to everyone who mentioned the hilarious on-the-nose namechecks of their successful songs and projects.

and the "bye felicia" ref in the hotel

I think the grantland comment that the last hour of the movie became a Wikipedia article on screen kinda sums up why that part of the movie lost my interest. It just looked like a re-enactment of various well-known events and not much more, whereas the first 90 dug much deeper.

I was kinda hoping Dre woulda given some alternate reality bullshit answer to Suge's last question:

"What you gonna call that new bullshit label?"

'Dre Butter'

haha

hahaha

Armond: "the year's most mindless movie"

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/422527/straight-outta-compton-review-armond-white

Armond white got Geto Boys praise into the national review (online, at least)

The way that article veers between modern-activist-baiting and big-upping non-west-coast rap really is something

The comment section is a poem.

Houston’s Geto Boys and New York’s Public Enemy were superior groups, but childish hip-hop fans and white-Negro rock critics failed to make the distinction. They preferred N.W.A.’s simplistic adolescent angst and hard rhythm to Geto Boy’s bluesy psychological depth and Public Enemy’s R&B and political sophistication.

^^This is total horseshit.

I first saw Armond's byline in the early '90s reviewing PE, and the guy knew what he was talking about (I won't look up and reread those reviews). I agree PE >>> N.W.A. But as usual with him you can turn his copy into Mad Libs: "They preferred N.W.A.’s simplistic adolescent angst and hard rhythm to Damn Yankee’s bluesy psychological depth and Paula Addul’s R&B and political sophistication."

Haha yeah that isnt accurate at all

Xp

yeah calling PE politically sophisticated is a larf

reading Chuck D's interviews in the 90s was enough to get disillusioned with him despite still loving the records

Geto Boy’s bluesy psychological depth
― Futuristic Bow Wow (thewufs), Sunday, August 30, 2015 1:45 PM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoiN7UueFGE

4th grade 1988 I was 'like strawberry, strawberry is the neighborhood hoe'. This movie is just no. no. aftermath...

Thing is, I basically agree with a lot of the points in White's review - their nihilism was in itself a form of protest, and in their one truly heroic gesture they made a stink about police brutality when no one else would, but presenting the group as just freedom fighters is just one of the ways the movie is fundamentally dishonest. Predictably, though, these points are swamped by OTT pessimism, bad faith and willfully perverse aesthetic misjudgments.

^^Should read "presenting the group as freedom fighters before all else"

i wish the infamous stethoscope had made an appearance (tho much of the rest of the outfit did). the Wrecking Cru segment of the movie seemed like one part they were ok with the audience not fully connecting the dots on

Ha yeah, love how they made like Lonzo was the only one rocking a jheri curl and a sequined suit, lest Dre (and Yella's) manhood be called into question a la "Real Muthaphukkin' G's".

this was lots of fun, esp as an NWA fan, but the second half got cluttered, and also just a bit silly with the telegraphed timelines (the biggest lols were the snoop and tupac recording session scenes). i never knew NWA wanted to reunite (has anyone verified if this was true?), and i never knew cube never got paid by priority either. it was really enjoyable, and strangely pleasing to see, but for the worlds most dangerous group, not very dangerous, and the way it skipped over efil4zaggin and 100 miles and runnin was criminal - i would have liked the film to actually cover the groups breakup properly, not just show how successful they became after the group. after the first hour or so, the film started to seem like a potted history of the members, rather than about the actual group (who are all portrayed incredibly sympathetically, hilariously at times - they werent THAT nice!).

now i want to see a geto boys biopic

http://thequietus.com/articles/18613-nwa-straight-outta-compton-film-review

best review of this ive seen so far

from the quietus article:

According to the film, Dre apparently improvises his line in the first verse of '...'G' Thang' first take, slinging it in alongside Snoop's similarly off-the-top-of-the-head yet word-perfect lines as the two are carried away by the magnificence of the beat Dre has just thrown together in the living room of his opulent mansion. The only surprise is that Cliff Richard doesn't knock on the door and suggest that the guys do the show right here. (And, yes, I know it's trainspottery nitpicking, but the same scene wants to make us believe that Dre wrote the keyboard line on that song - we're shown him trying, failing and retrying different ideas over the top of the beat before hitting the one we recognise from the record just as Snoop ambles in to shot and kicks off his verse. Yet that line is included in the same Leon Hayward record that the rest of the track is sampled from - OK, on the Hayward track it's played by strings, not an analogue synth: but to try to suggest Dre wrote it is ridiculous. And if that's not what the scene is trying to say, then it's suggesting he's a far poorer musician than legend generally claims - so poor that he can't remember a melody from a record he already knows well enough to reconstruct from samples, even while it's playing on a loop. Whichever way you look at it, this scene is among the most laughably trite in the entire history of music-on-film, biopics or indeed, quite possibly of cinema itself.)

this really bugged me about this scene too!

i mean i obviously know why they did that, but a less lazy writer could have instead quickly sketched the process of dre breaking down this classic soul song and interpolating it back into g-funk. taking a bunch of songs that he loved growing up and synthesizing them into a new hybrid thing to accommodate a new generation of stories and voices was dre's main achievement and legacy imo.

that's why the scene with dre and eazy in the studio making "Boyz in the hood" works so well, because they show the halting, painful process of getting a whole rap song out of a non-musician (they even acknowledge that it relied heavily on punch-ins and was basically stitched together line by line) and it's really interesting and makes them seem like actual artists, trying to make something that people hadn't heard before.

i enjoyed the scene with nwa and jerry heller sitting down together to check out 'no vaseline' because that's always how i imagined them hearing the song for the first time. although in my head they were all a lot more upset than that. it needed a scene of dre excusing himself to the bathroom, locking the door and sliding down it, hands shrouding his face. eazy spitting out a whole mouthful of milkshake at "eazy-e's dick is smellin like mc ren's shit", etc.

well this was just like 99% of music biopics i.e. terrible. Apart from a handful of scenes (primarily feat Eazy and/or Heller) this was like ticking off a bunch of boxes from the group's wikipedia entry, completely flat and lifeless. Even the stuff I didn't know about beforehand - like Dre's brother - was telegraphed in the clumsiest way imaginable, he may as well have been introduced buying a boat called the "Live Forever!"

Eazy trying to rap on beat on Boyz in the Hood still the best scene

I've finally watched this and really liked it (for a biopic).
Maybe because I didn't know much about their story so it didn't feel like the usual "and this is how this historical moment happened".
About the reunion part, there's a moment where Dre says he already has some great tracks for the album and I wonder if that's pure invention or based on anything real ?
Cos if he had these tracks circa Eazy's death some might have been used on 2PAc's album, the Aftermath album or others (someone mentioned "batural born killaz" upthread)...

It would be incredible if the closing credits of this movie rolled to “Straight Outta Compton” by Nina Gordon.

Cos if he had these tracks circa Eazy's death some might have been used on 2PAc's album

Dre was working on an album with Ice Cube and Suge yanked some of the beats (including "California Love") for Tupac

An album full of "Natural Born Killaz" type tracks would have ruled.

I also love that Dre reused yet another interpolation of "Not Just Knee Deep"'s bassline on "Can't C Me"

Dre was working on an album with Ice Cube and Suge yanked some of the beats (including "California Love") for Tupac

Suge yanked it from being a Dre solo single with three Dre verses. The Dre & Cube album Heltah Skeltah had been abandoned about 18 months earlier, with the only completed track going onto Murder Was The Case instead.

(You Can’t See Me’s beat was apparently written for Heltah Skeltah but not recorded by Cube; Dre gave it to The Dogg Pound in 1995, but Suge blocked any Dre productions from the album, so Dre gave it to Tupac to redo as You Can’t C Me.)

can I just say "fuck suge knight" rn?

Here's Dre in late '93 saying "You Don't Wanna See Me" was the only track worked on for Heltah Skeltah so far. Guessing that Cube got the George Clinton vocals hooked up around then (contemporaneous with Bop Gun), even if he didn't put his own down.

I feel weird every time I see the dude who played Dre in other shit

"Hey Dre, why are we calling this album Efil4zaggin?"
"Did you try....reading it backwards?"
"Oh, word"