Straight outta Compton

[chuckc]

is this movie any good??

[ger stokes]

Re: Straight outta Compton

Excellent. Saw it twice.
The guy who plays Eazy E deserves an Oscar.

[floridaorange]

Re: Straight outta Compton

It's a good film. See it.

[el presidente Highsteppa]

Re: Straight outta Compton

It's a decent film that kind of plays a bit fast and loose with the history of N.W.A., and airbrushes some of the more sordid periods of the lives of the members. But given that this is a biopic that is largely being told by the members, and in order to get the co-operation of the estate of Eazy E, the cleaning up or their image and retelling events of their lives is somewhat to be expected, both for vanity purposes and to get the audience to sympathize with what's going on onscreen. It's a good story, but by no means an accurate telling of how they came up, what they did during their rise to fame and the inspiration they had to write some of their music (Fuck the Police in particular is completely retold in a way that isn't even remotely connected with how the song came around). Still, it's told well enough, and people unfamiliar with the group's history won't notice anything amiss.

Decent enough film, the Blu Ray has a "director's cut" which adds about 20 minutes to the movie (bringing the run time to nearly 2 hours and 45 minutes).

Great concert footage and the soundtrack is great.

[floridaorange]

Re: Straight outta Compton

And the acting is pretty good too I thought, better than I expected anyway.

[chuckc]

Re: Straight outta Compton

It's a decent film that kind of plays a bit fast and loose with the history of N.W.A., and airbrushes some of the more sordid periods of the lives of the members. But given that this is a biopic that is largely being told by the members, and in order to get the co-operation of the estate of Eazy E, the cleaning up or their image and retelling events of their lives is somewhat to be expected, both for vanity purposes and to get the audience to sympathize with what's going on onscreen. It's a good story, but by no means an accurate telling of how they came up, what they did during their rise to fame and the inspiration they had to write some of their music (Fuck the Police in particular is completely retold in a way that isn't even remotely connected with how the song came around). Still, it's told well enough, and people unfamiliar with the group's history won't notice anything amiss.

Decent enough film, the Blu Ray has a "director's cut" which adds about 20 minutes to the movie (bringing the run time to nearly 2 hours and 45 minutes).

Great concert footage and the soundtrack is great.

^^Great Assessment!, although now I am super curious to hear some of the real inside story. Can you fill us in with a few details?

[el presidente Highsteppa]

Re: Straight outta Compton

^^Great Assessment!, although now I am super curious to hear some of the real inside story. Can you fill us in with a few details?

They leave out completely
- Dr. Dre's assault on a woman that wrote for Vibe magazine (guy literally mounted her and was bashing her head into the ground, followed by kicking her repeatedly while she was lying on the ground) for asking a question that he didn't like
- Eazy E is depicted as being someone that went along with the manager Jerry Heller's schemes to rip off the other members of the group (Eazy E was equally bent on keeping a lion's share of the profits).
- "Fuck tha Police" is depicted in the movie as being created as a result of the group being harassed outside the studio while recording their first album, when really it was written because several members had gone out with a paintball gun and were going around shooting at homeless people and innocent bystanders waiting at bus stops and their being caught by the police.
- Dr. Dre's leaving of Death Row records is depicted as him taking a moral stand against Suge Knight and standing up to him - yeah, right.
- Eazy E's last statement that "he wanted to bring something positive" out of his having caught AIDS was issued after his death, probably by his publicist. His original statement before he died was far more vitriolic - it was more about adamantly denying that he wasn't gay and how much he hated the woman that gave this to him in the first place. Dr. Dre and Ice Cube claim to had patched things up with Eazy E before his death, but I don't think that really happened. They really, really hated each other up until his death and a lot of bad blood was still in place right up to his death (including Ice Cube having rumored to have responded with: "Good" when he found out of Eazy E's passing).
- Some dispute over who's idea it was to leak the FBI letter to the press (I believe it was actually Jerry Heller or someone else at Ruthless Records who came up with the idea, not Eazy E)

That's just some of the stuff. Again, it's the surviving members telling their own story, and if this stuff was included in the movie, I doubt it would have been as much of a success, much less audiences would sympathize with the characters through the arc of the story. Also, they had to make Eazy E look like a better person than he actually was, conveniently blaming Jerry Heller (who's no saint - the guy was a royal dick and got the shitty contracts that ripped off the band members drafted) for a lot of the strife that broke them up, in order to ensure participation from his estate - which held up the making of the movie in the first place.