What does it cost us to get into her problems, laid out, of course, with Hollywood straightforwardness? Let’s go and pay and advise all of us, so that we don’t feel so bad about losing our own money. We’ll sing about how we’ve been dragged. Oh, how we’ve been dragged…
Why? Because as soon as Eminem got busted for robbery, he improvised from behind bars that he was going to get his memoirs adapted, which he hadn’t started writing yet, but which were all over the papers? Or how did they dazzle when the Oscar-winning Curtis Hanson was suddenly seduced by the unkillable Lermontov memoirs of 27 years? Or because what a stroke of genius on Hanson’s part was to offer the role of the protagonist in the film to the protagonist himself? Imagine the lengths he went to to get Eminem to take it. Awesome. The heavy Oscar-winning artillery from his L.A. Secrets (Kim Basinger), the light artillery in the hypersexual guise of Brittany Murphy (The Newlyweds). If the newspapers had known in advance that this very Murphy would be given to Eminem to fuck right on camera, and with his oil pants pressed against the metal cutting machine, the film would not have grossed so much money.
Too early to shush, though, not all advertising is as it seems. In “8 Mile” is really not ashamed of the correct, for example, dubbing: only the dialogues are translated, the songs come with subtitles. Hip-hop fans enjoy “marathons” in the original. Adults don’t mind a sexually addicted mom, let it just be the same thing Robin Wright Penn did in “White Oleander.” In general, “Mile 8” doesn’t offend the ear or the eye with some total crap.
Of course, America has finally, 35 years after Martin Luther King, seen a lot of bad black people on the screen for the first time. For her, sincere joy is acceptable in this case. And where there are blacks, there is poverty, hard labor, squabbling, fighting, filth. That’s the hard truth of life. But what difference does it make to us what color they are, if the plot of “8 Mile” is like “The Woman Who Sings”, only instead of the big redheaded Pugacheva – a little white rapper? The setting of this case is also like some “Height” or “Working Settlement”, only instead of barracks – trailers, and instead of their own two – a rusty “Dodge” with a coughing engine. Yeah, our “The Burglar” and “The Needle” were somehow cooler in the last generation. They weren’t masterpieces either, but at least they had some variety, and clearly articulated.
Eminem didn’t bother to come up with anything but a coherently detailed account of his utterly stereotypical youth. Not a single violation of chronology with iconography, let alone a sense of rhythm. The white freak from the factory was used to being a poor genius in his own hangout, in someone else’s hangout he immediately stiffened, but traveled to the factory, took the bus, and in someone else’s hangout he too hung out like a genius. The bad ones all smoke.
