Hustle & Flow

I hung out and crashed at Heffner’s place last night.  He had rented “Hustle & Flow” and thought I would want to see it so we watched it last night.

It was good/borderline alright.  I liked it but it had all been done before.  It was like John Singleton redoing “8-Mile”.

A Memphis pimp is having a midlife crisis.  He is tired of his scene and wants to get out of the life.  He buys a keyboard off of a crackhead and later bumps into an old friend in a store.  This rekindles his love of music (rapping) and he decides he wants to get out of the life through his music.  His friend lives a very ‘legitimate’ life doing recordings for church choirs and lawyer depositions.  The pimp talks him into trying to make a successful rap tape by pretending to know a big famous rap star from Memphis who is coming back into town in a few weeks.  They go through all of the difficulties and eventually come up with the great track and the pimp goes in to try to get the big rap star to listen to it.  He uses all of his pimp skills and talks his way into the big star’s good graces.  When he finds the big star threw his tape in the toilet, he beats the crap out of him and ends up shooting a few of his entourage.  In jail, the song gets radio airplay because of the determined skill of one of his whores.  Happy ending, pimp is now a star, Ho #1 is his girlfriend and Ho #2 is his business manager.

If this movie doesn’t sound impressive, it really wasn’t.  The movie was kind of a lame duck.  The acting saved it though.  The main character was a pimp but not the 1970′s flashy fur and cane type of pimp.  This guy was low-rent pimp.  He wore shorts and a tank top hustling his wares from the window of a beat up car.  (He called it a Chevy but Heffner and I remember seeing ‘Cutlass’ on the rear.)  His only working ho is a scraggly, skinny white girl that is just butt-ugly.  His other ho is pregnant and he kicks out the third ho half way through the movie.  In the midst of al of this, he proceeds to give a great performance full of quotable lines.  The whole idea is that if he has the skills to pimp these girls, he has the skills to pimp people into giving him the break he needs.  I have to say it was the actor that made this a good movie.  He really made me feel for this lowly character.  The other two guys involved with making the music were funny.  Anthony Anderson is funny in almost everything he does.  Small doses but it appears he knows that because he hasn’t tried to carry any movie that I know about.  The other guy was that skinny white nerd from “Road Trip” that slept with the fat chick and held up these gigantic panties.  I don’t even remember any of his lines in this movie, I just remember him being funny looking and maybe that was enough.  Anyway, if you can suspend disbelief enough to want to see a movie about a street hustler making it big in the rap world, it’s worth seeing.  (You also have to suspend disbelief during a scene where any man, especially a pimp should have slapped the crap right out of one of the hoes.)  If gritty hood films aren’t your thing, you probably won’t see this but you will be missing a great performance by Terrence Howard.