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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

8 Mile

22:16 / 31.10.02

Saw this last night at a review screening. Think "Eminem stars in Breakin' 3!" and you've got the idea. Not a whole lot going on, and Curtis Hanson makes us wait waaaay to fucking long for the rhymes to fly. Kim Basinger ain't so hot as the mom, but Brittany Murphy isn't too bad. Neither is Eminem, come to think of it. But man, the last MC battle is pretty hot -- Marshall didn't have to work at all to make it look like he was in total control.

What I want to know is: who are they aiming for with this? It's really sanitized: no Kim, no kid, no real fights with Mom, etc. It's Eminem History Lite, and I can't figure out if it's a retroactive apology or some sort of justification of the guy for the conservative set.

Think about it this way: if it was anyone other than Eminem, playing himself, in this film it would be laughed off the screen. No one would ever let a film get made about a white kid in the black ghetto getting out by trumping everyone with the mic. And yet it happened, so here's the film. A weird set of circumstances.

Matthew Fluxington

01:03 / 10.11.02

I just saw it - I thought it was pretty good, really. I can understand why it has such an incredibly high Metacritic rating, and I can see why a lot of people are calling this the hip hop Rocky.

I can't think of much to complain about - yeah, I would have liked to see more rhyming, but I was very pleased with all the details of the character's lives, I thought it was very convincing for the most part. I thought Hanson did a great job directing it, and it looked great the whole way through. Detroit's never looked as miserable as it does in this film. Eminem's acting never made me cringe, except for maybe the scenes with him consoling his little sister; those scenes seemed a little too selfconcious, like a politician kissing a baby for the cameras.

I think it's up to debate how much of this film is intended to be about Eminem and how much it is about "Jimmy" or "Bunny Rabbit". Obviously, it's Eminem's story, no one else's life is remotely like this. But it is intentionally fictionalized, so I can forgive a lot of Eminem's less sympathetic life details being airbrushed out of the Hollywood picture. After all, we're supposed to sympathize and/or identify with Jimmy, and the film wouldn't work so well if a Kim figure was there to complicate matters or make us think that he's a misogynistic asshole.

I think if you try to think of this as being just a movie, it stands up really well. It's solid entertainment, and I don't think it panders to the audience. It's uplifting without being sappy, and I appreciate that the victories are very small, the lives of Jimmy and his mother are only marginally better off than they were at the start of the film. The scale is kept small and down-to-earth, which I wasn't expecting. The movie is a pleasant surprise, it could have easily failed miserably.

Great soundtrack, by the way. They kept it very true to the period - Biggie, Wu-Tang, Tupac, nonstop. Nice.

02:11 / 10.11.02

It's Eminem's Purple Rain.

Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero

15:26 / 11.11.02

Detroit's never looked as miserable as it does in this film.

I haven't seen the film yet, but let me tell you buddy, if there's anything Detroit is good at, it's looking miserable all the time.

I do want to see this, though. A few months ago me and some friends were going down eight mile road, doing what everyone does on eight mile road, wondering if we'd see anything we recognize in the movie.

15:39 / 11.11.02

But it is intentionally fictionalized, so I can forgive a lot of Eminem's less sympathetic life details being airbrushed out of the Hollywood picture. After all, we're supposed to sympathize and/or identify with Jimmy, and the film wouldn't work so well if a Kim figure was there to complicate matters or make us think that he's a misogynistic asshole.

This is what makes me very supicious of this film. To me, the facts of Em's life are so public that they can't be ignored or placed out of the context of the film. I can't buy the fairy-tale presentation of Em we see in the film because it's completely at odds with what he's worked so hard to make us believe about him up til now.

Part of my reaction ahs to do with the way the film is sold; the trailer shows scenes with Em and a little girl that they know we'll assume is his daughter. But she's not. She's just another tool to show off the responsible side of Em without acknowledging the irresponsible side.

To me it seems like the final step in full mainstream legitimization through bait-and-switch. "Here, see Eminem in dirty Detroit, fighting the battle he's told you about for years." And then the film takes a very sypathetic and likeable performance by Em and uses it to get audiences to buy this revision of Marshall history. It's ludicrously manipulative and I don't buy it. This is the final step in the selling of Em, a clean, easy to take version for the 40-something suits out there who still haven't bought his records. The fact that Em is not talking to a great percentage of the press about this makes me even more suspicious.

Regrettable Juvenilia

13:19 / 19.01.03

LE SPOILERS from this point in, natch.

I dunno, having seen the film I don't quite understand how anyone can call it "fairy-tale" or claim that it doesn't acknowledge the main character's irresponsible side. As Flux says, one of the impressive things about the film is that the victories are small - and the nature of those victories as well, like the fact that as much as Jimmy winning the battle that night is a victory, another way in which his luck has started to change is that his boss has acknowledged his hard work and offered him extra shifts. The film doesn't end with him becoming a star, or signing a record contract, or even being brought to the attention of a talent scout: it ends with him going back to work that nightshift, after achieving a victory which is, essentially, creative rather than commercial (he may have gained local respect and fame from battling, but there's no money in it for him, at least not yet or in the immediate future). And the fact that he does go back to work rather than off partying with his friends again implies, I think, that he's gained a certain maturity - not giving up on the music, but doing it for its own sake rather than dreaming of using it as a literal means of escape from his life. That's putting a positive spin on the concept of "stop living up here, and start living down here", which in the way it's originally presented is a rather heart-breaking, discouraging idea (snap back to reality and resign yourself to a life of dead-end jobs, poverty and misery).

And that's why I think it's a mistake to let the idea that this is in anyway a biopic of Marshall Mathers cloud an assessment of its merits. Okay, so it's impossible to completely forget the connection, but I think it's a good idea to try.

Loads to say about this film: the depiction of Jimmy's relationships with women and men, the battles, the way it relates to hip-hop as a whole... Will come back.