Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2010 by Roger Ebert

Author:Roger Ebert
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Film
ISBN: 9780740792182
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing LLC
Published: 2010-10-29T04:00:00+00:00

Notorious ½

R, 122 m., 2009

Jamal “Gravy” Woolard (Notorious B.I.G.), Angela Bassett (Voletta Wallace), Derek Luke (Sean Combs), Anthony Mackie (Tupac Shakur), Antonique Smith (Faith Evans), Naturi Naughton (Lil’ Kim). Directed by George Tillman Jr. and produced by Voletta Wallace, Wayne Barrow, Mark Pitts, Robert Teitel, and Trish Hofmann. Screenplay by Reggie Rock Bythewood and Cheo Hodari Coker.

He was known as Notorious B.I.G., a man-mountain of rap, but behind the image was Christopher Wallace, an overgrown kid who was trying to grow up and do the right thing. The image we know about. The film Notorious is more interested in the kid. He was born in Brooklyn, loved his mother—a teacher who was studying for a master’s degree—got into street-corner drug dealing because he liked the money, performed rap on the street, and at twenty was signed by record producer Sean “Puffy” Combs. Four years later, he was dead.

Documentaries about B.I.G. have focused on the final years of his life. Notorious tells us of a bright kid who was abandoned by his father, raised by a mother from Jamaica who laid down the rules, and told the kids on the playground he would be famous someday. “You too fat, too black, and too ugly,” a girl tells him. He just looks at her. He is sweet-tempered, even after being seduced into the street-corner crack business, but he sounds tough in his rap songs—he is tough, introspective, autobiographical, and a gifted writer.

His demo tape is heard by Sean Combs (Derek Luke), who is seen in the film as a good influence, in part perhaps because he’s the executive producer. Combs draws a line between the street as a market and a place where he wants his artists to be seen. B.I.G. leaves the drug business and almost overnight becomes a huge star, an East Coast rapper to match the West Coast artists such as Tupac Shakur.

Tupac was shot dead not long before B.I.G. was murdered, and the word was they died because of a feud between the East and West Coast dynasties and onetime friends B.I.G. and Tupac (Anthony Mackie). Another version, in Nick Broomfield’s 2002 documentary Biggie and Tupac, is that both shootings were ordered by rap tycoon Suge Knight and carried out by off-duty LAPD officers in his hire. Broomfield produces an eyewitness and a bag man who says on camera that he delivered the money. The film, perhaps wisely, sidesteps this possibility.

Notorious is a good film in many ways, but its best achievement is the casting of Jamal Woolard, a rapper named Gravy, in the title role. He looks uncannily like the original, and Antonique Smith is a ringer for B.I.G.’s wife, Faith Evans. Woolard already knew how to perform but took voice lessons for six months at Juilliard to master B.I.G.’s sound. He performs a lot of music in the film, all of it plot-driven, sure to become a best-selling sound track. As an actor, he conveys the singer’s complex personality: a mother’s boy, a womanizer, an artist who accepts career guidance from his managers, a sentimentalist, an ominous presence.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.