Reasons to watch Straight Outta Compton

There's a sameness, a standard arc, to the many movie biopics about musical artists, and you can see the same contours, for the most part, in the dynamic (up to a point) and too long (unfortunately) F. Gary Gray's Straight Outta Compton: the early struggle, no one can imagine that this poor boy/girl will emerge as a musical power, the struggle through the early years playing crappy clubs and dive bars, surprising discovery and breakout, early relationship w/ agent - usually white, often Jewish - which becomes contentious and often ends in the disposal of agent, the success and big concerts, the inevitable struggles w/ fame and the sybaritic lifestyle that ensues - sex, rx, alcohol, ridiculous expenditure on luxuries - trouble w/ family especially the faithful spouse who'd stood by in the early years and is now shunted to the side, and usually some form of hard-earned self-awareness and settling into late-career success and sainthood - apotheosis - and this pretty much describes SOC, which is the biopic of the hip hop group NWA, with particular emphasis on the late leader of the group, Eric Wright/Easy E, and lesser emphasis on Ice Cube and Dr. Dre and their courtship by and eventually war with West Coast rap leader Suge Knight (w/ Paul Giamatti unconvincingly playing their Jewish manager). A few things do set SOC apart: the first pic of this magnitude I know of to focus on the world of hip hop, which makes it an interesting social document, the great portrayal of the many conflicts w/ the police that formed the psyche and musical mentality of the group members - the Ray Charles biopic took on racism in a different way, but this is the most political of any of the biopics I've seen - terrific drug-bust scene opens the film, the untimely and sad death of Easy E at the end, which breaks the narrative model, the ambivalence we feel about the crudity and danger of some of the songs - especially Fuck the Police - in which we can understand why authorities tried to shut down some of these performances but we also understand the context, we see how NWA were telling a story that, back in the 1990s, few outside the black community had heard or understood. Yes, the movie's too long, and yes it's a little hard to follow as the narrative thread spools around several key characters not one only, but worth a look and a listen, even if hip hop is not your genre, maybe especially if it's not.

Love and Squalor: Rebels of the Neon God

Rebels of the Neon God (1993?) is the just-released in US first film from Tsai Ming-Liang - and should definitely be of interest to those who, like me, were blown away by his most recent film, Stray Dogs. While SD is much more daring in its cinematography - virtually the entire movie consisting of long single takes from a fixed point - Rebels is a pretty astonishing break-out movie and shares the same topography as Stray Dogs. It's a place none of us would want to live or even visit so fair warning this filmis not for everyone: Ming-Liang is interested in the underside of the Asian prosperity, and both movies focus on the outsiders, squatters, petty criminals (at least in Rebels), toughs, and thugs on the margins of Taipei life. Rebels tells of a few days in the life of two teenage petty thieves (who get in a little over their heads when they rip off a video-game parlor), another very lost and disturbed teenage boy whose hatred for his gruff taxi-driver dad eats him alive, and a pretty young woman who works in a roller-rink and hooks up with the boys for no clear reason - we have to believe she's deeply troubled or addicted, though we don't see direct evidence for this in the film (one of its few flaws). As with SD, the scenes create a disturbing picture of the squalor and tawdriness of city life: many scenes of noisy video parlors - the gleaming neon of the title, and the incessant pings of the sound track; a squatter's apartment revolting in its decrepitude, and many night-time rides on the ever-present motorbikes along the crowded neon-lit streets of Formosa, construction going on everywhere - just looks like a city you'd never want to visit, the polar opposite of the many cinematic romances of NYC, Paris, and Rome.

Homeland Season 4 great - for 10 episodes. And then what happened?

Season 4 of Homeland was absolutely terrific, exciting, engaging, sometimes surprising, propelled by the always fantastic acting of Clair Danes with strong support from the grumpy Mandy Patinkin and just great action directing, art direction (how do they so effectively create an embassy under siege in what purports to be Pakistan), and the music - most of the time you don't notice it but it always adds to the mood and aura, esp in the cool opening credits montage. Unfortunately, they should have stopped at episode 10, the attack on the US Embassy by the the ISI (obviously modeled on ISIS, and the attack roughly modeled on Bengazi). The final two episodes of the season were a let down - all the drama had taken place and we're just tying some loose ends - Carrie/Danes trying to find Peter Quinn and get him out of Pakistan (a drama largely played out off screen), and finally Carrie at home bonding with her baby, visiting her estranged mother, squabbling w/ sister - it felt much more like a soap, and a bad one at that, as lots of time wasted in resolving a relationship (Carrie and Mom) that was never even established in the first place. Too bad because otherwise I'd give this season a rave. Will watch Season 5 anyway, but hope it doesn't pick up where this season left off.

Uneasy Lies the Head: The future King Charles III

Saw and totally enjoyed the completely engaging and provocative drama King Charles III: A Future History Play (by Mike Bartlett, director Rupert Goold), which brings us to an indeterminate time in the future, opening with a spooky vision of Queen Elizabeth's funeral and then segueing into the first weeks of the reign of KCIII. The drama entails Charles's attempts to assert regal authority: In his first meeting with the PM, who expects KCIII to routinely sign every piece of legislation, as his mother had done, Charles refuses to sign a bill and cannot support - which leads to a crisis of governments: the PM tries to push through Parliament a bill that would make bills into law w/out the King's assent. Although this dispute may sound a little abstract or abstruse, the many angles are quite fascinating, even to an American audience: Our sympathies would on the surface be w/ elected officials rather than inherited monarchy ("all [people] are created ="), but Charles is trying to block a bill that would all much greater press censorship - the UK has no constitution and certainly no bill of rights, so in this way we are on Charles's side - except that the rights he's protecting are pretty much the rights of thugs like Murdoch to print sensational and sometimes libelous material, so maybe he's int he wrong? In any event, the controversy becomes national, putting the whole royal household into jeopardy. What's really cool about this "future history" play is that, in homage to Shakespeare, it's in somewhat loose blank verse, with occasional rhymed couplets at the conclusion of key scenes (I hope someday to read the script to see how Bartlett managed contemporary speech in blank verse). Though there are no direct allusions to or quotations from Sh, at least none I picked up, there are many evocations of Shakesparean themes, most notably the woman driving the man to seize power, the ungrateful offspring, the monarch mixing with the "commoners" to see what life outside of the royal bubble (thinking of M4M here), the revival of the soliloquy (so rarely used in contemp drama), the hapless monarch (RII), the scheming monarch (RIII), and the dissolute son (HIV) - and probably more. Tim Pigott-Smith is terrific in the lead and the supporting cast is great, with a special nod to my good friend Margot Leicester who kills as Camilla. Though there are many laugh lines, and play is not a comedy, as some have asked me - it's a real drama, and KCIII is a flawed hero of near tragic proportions. I can't say this play is of Shakespearen proportions - what would be? - but it draws on all that's best of British theater past and present: great acting, subtle and imaginative stage direction, smart visuals, stirring but never distracting music, great show.

In defense of Homeland Season 4

I don't get what the Homeland nay-sayers want out of a series. I understand that maybe nothing can rise to the level of Season 1 when we were constantly in doubt about whether Brodie was a terrorist agent or a traumatized soldier, and we first understood and recognized the complexity of Carry's character - and how her illness was a tremendous burden, making it all too easy to dismiss her unconventional ideas as delusions or worse. But Season 4 - 8 episodes in now - is as exciting a spy thriller as you'll find in any movie, w/ episodes 7 and 8 being two of the strongest and strangest - esp the terrific cinematic presentation of Carry's drug-induced breakdown and in episode 8 Saul's escape from captivity and the incredibly tense struggle to bring him to safety and the toll that takes on everyone at the CIA/Embassy. The characters may not be as multi-layered in this season as in some of the earlier, especially the bad guys and the heavies - is "Duck" now typecast for life? - and we do miss Brodie (who makes a cameo in 7), but the plotting is tight as a drum, the pacing is fast, and all the technical details - the art direction, the score, even the credits - meet the really high standards that used to belong to HBO alone but now SHO giving them a run. If this season doesn't hold her interest and at times keep you on the proverbial edge of your seat, what will?