..Gary
Dretzka
..Noah
Forrest
..Leonard
Klady
..R.J.
Matson
..David
Poland
..Douglas
Pratt
..Ray
Pride
..Michael
Wilmington
..DVD Review ..MCN Review
Hustle & Flow
A wonderful movie about the American Dream, Hustle & Flow, has been released as a Widescreen Edition by Paramount (34565, $30). Oscar nominee Terrence Howard is a smalltime Memphis pimp (he has three girls), who wants to become a rap star. Directed by Craig Brewer, the 2005 film's style is sneaky, giving off the air of a tacked-together low-budget inner city drama, when in reality it has a stealthy, precise rhythm that locks your attention onto the screen and slides you effortlessly from one scene to the next. The characters are as comical as they are realistic, and the natural humor that comes from their aspirations and predicaments prevents the movie from seeming too earnest or self-important, something the otherwise admirable and vaguely similar 8 Mile failed to achieve. And just as the humor begins to subside, it is supplanted by the music, which eventually leads, in a roundabout way, to one of the greatest screen kisses of all time. Needless to say, the performances are outstanding, and as makeshift as the story appears at first, it is actually conceived and delivered with confidence and wit, from the attention-getting philosophical opening monolog to the clever and satisfying final twist.
The letterboxing has an aspect ratio of about 1.78:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. The image is deliberately rough at times, but accurately transferred, with bright hues. The 5.1-channel Dolby Digital sound serves the music well and provides an effective ambiance elsewhere. The 115-minute program has optional English subtitles, an excellent 27-minute production documentary (the editing is superb), a good 15 minute segment on the problems encountered getting the film funded, a 14-minute segment on the music, a 5-minute clip from the film's Memphis premiere and six different trailers with Howard talking directly to the camera.
Brewer provides a very good commentary track, explaining the different influences that led to different aspects of the story, describing his intimate familiarity with the Memphis locations and milieu, sharing in more emotional detail than the featurette the problems he went through to get support for the film, coming up with an amusing anecdote about the extras in a disco scene who rose to attention when an assistant director needing an air conditioning pipe asked aloud for ‘more hose,' and speaking with thoroughness about the technical and emotional challenges of each scene. When he ran out of ideas for staging the third song number, for example, his producer, John Singleton, gave him just the right advice: "As we put the movie together, we realized it was a little boring, so, of course, I got appropriately depressed and I started driving home, and when you've had so many people invest in your dreams, it's a very daunting thing to think that you're letting them down. Well, John called me up and he said, ‘Hey man, did you get the new DVD of Purple Rain?' And I was like, ‘No, no.' And he said, ‘You gotta get the new DVD of Purple Rain.' So I went out and bought it, and it had all this commentary and great behind-the-scenes and everything, but even more importantly, there's something about watching a movie that meant a lot to you after you've made your own. You start seeing things in the way that movie was constructed that was rather revolutionary, and one of the things I noticed was that continuity kind of went out the window in Purple Rain when it came to the musical numbers, like, for instance, "When Doves Cry," there's this moment where you're hearing the song and you're seeing Prince like going through the city on his bike, you know, in that black outfit, and then you're seeing scenes in flashback that you already saw, but then you're seeing scenes in flashback that you hadn't seen, like Apollonia on top of him in the barn, like, ‘When did that happen? That's new.' So then, I watched it and I thought, ‘You know what? we need to get Purple Rain on this moment. We need to have this hip-hop moment where it's like you're seeing'—now, this scene, right here, on the porch, I had to cut this, all this stuff, but now I got to use it all again, because continuity was out the window and I got to hop anywhere I wanted to, and suddenly the scene had this life. And then Purple Rain did one more thing to me, and that was when we come out of the hip-hop moment, man, just stay on Terrence as long as we can, just like they did when Prince is singing Purple Rain at the end of the movie. They're just holding on to him, and I don't care, I'm a kid of the Eighties. So this moment here, I just stay on Terence, because it's his journey.
February 9, 2006
DVD Roundup: This Week's DVD Releases
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