Miles Ahead

Don Cheadle's big screen directorial debut... Miles Ahead. Truth is, I love Miles Davis's music but I know precious little about the man himself.  I own copies of Kind of Blue, Birth of Cool, You're Under Arrest, and Bitches Brew.  I don't have the album they refer to most in this movie, so I'm going to have to cop Sketches of Spain.

VITALS
Steven Baigelman (Get on Up) - Co-Writer
Don Cheadle (Talk to Me, Avengers, Devil in a Blue Dress) - Miles Davis
***Cheadle also Co-Writes, Directs, and Produces Miles Ahead

Emayatzi Cornealdi (Addicted, Middle of Nowhere, The Invitation) - Frances Taylor
Ewan MacGregor (Moulin Rouge, Big Fish, Mortdecai) - Dave Brill
Keith Stanfield (Dope, Straight Outta Compton) - 
Michael Stuhlbarg (Steve Jobs, Blue Jasmine) - Harper Hamilton


IF YOU MUST KNOW

This was a movie about Miles Davis, but seems to have avoided being a biopic.  It was more like watching Don Cheadle brilliantly portray someone who has largely been a famous but mysterious musical legend.  Miles Ahead is a snapshot of a glance of the music icon's life.  The good news is that you want to learn more about Miles after watching this movie, but the bad news is you almost need to do it.  You don't get much more than what we already know.  He was as talented as he was brilliant and he was brilliantly flawed.  He walked that fine line between genius and insanity and may have crossed back and forth a few times.  He loved a woman (and then some more of them).  

Cheadle does an incredible job of portraying the enigmatic jazz virtuoso/iconoclast, but as a writer and director, he tells us next to nothing.  In fact, the movie was a little weird.  There were multiple fights, a gun fight or two, and even a car chase with a gun fight - none of which were things that I heard about Miles when my Pops forced me to listen to Jazz 88's Rhythm Revue way back when I was travelling back and forth to the barbershop or during those Saturday early mornings or late evenings for Prep for Prep - I was forced to listen to the Rhythm Revue and eventually developed a love for "old-timey" music.  The drugs, I knew about, but nobody ever mentioned him in a reckless car chase through the city.  I feel like I would have remembered that.  

Like many male driven movies, the highlight is often the female lead.  Sometimes what is supposed to be window dressing can really save a movie (see my comments about Wonder Woman in the Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice).  So, she may have appeared in one of my previous posts... then again, maybe not.  In any event, she would have been my choice for the Nina Simone movie they did with my ex, Zoe Saldana.  


As much as Cornealdi (Taylor) is talented and incredibly beautiful (I would totally karaoke Prince's "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" to her if she were in the vacinity - hell, I'd do it a cappella), she doesn't elevate this movie in the way Gadot/Wonder Woman elevated Dawn of Justice.  She is, obviously easy on the eyes and remarkably talented - every bit Cheadles acting match, but she didn't have a hell of a lot to work with here.  



Nevertheless, this is still a fairly good directorial debut.  The odd matching cuts that Cheadle has throughout the film give it a certain feel - I think he was going for something jazz-y - forced.  I thought it was a pretty good film, but not a good biopic.  There are many facets to Miles that clearly were not explored, but the overall movie came off as a bit of a short story that left you wondering why they picked this particular period in his life rather than do something that was more encompassing and generally more engrossing.  It's Miles FREAKING Davis.  An audience interested enough to see a movie that no one expects to have car chases could totally have sat through a 150-180 minutes of his life story.  

This movie was just not aggressive enough in its breadth or depth for me to recommend going out to see it.  It is worth watching, just not something you need to spend 12-15 bucks on. 

Should be on Amazon or Netflix pretty soon, so feel free to save your dough.  Or, if you're a real Miles aficionado... save your bread.  You'll get nothing out of this flick.  Movie lovers can enjoy the acting talents of Cornealdi and Cheadle (they should totally team up again... they have an interesting on-screen chemistry that should be explored further), but do not expect to feel enlightened or fulfilled on any level when the end credits roll.

IMTHATDUDE gives Miles Ahead: 3, by a hair

RATING SYSTEM:
5 = You should be about halfway to the theatre by now… Well… GET!
4 = Definitely worth the bread. Niiice.
3 = I won’t cuss anybody out and demand my paper back.
2 = Somewhere SOUTH of under-whelmed./I know it has a pulse, but…
1 = Not a good look. They played me AND I played myself.

Straight Outta Compton

As always, I'll be honest.  I didn't think this would be much of a movie, so I put the trip to the theatre on pause.  Sure, there'd be some nice breastage, lots of profanity, and a the possibility of a cinematic circle jerk between the surviving members of NWA bordered the line of more probable than not; while it was pretty much everything I figured it might be, it still managed to be a legit film.  I put the credit on F. Gary Gray, SOC's director.

I admit that aside from F$#@ the Police, I never listened to NWA because I wasn't feeling the shootem up jheri-curl thing.  (NOTE: No offense, but Pop dukes was a firm believer that real men do not have "hair-dos" and they certainly don't use "activator" in it if they did.)

VITALS

Whoever did this graphic, did my job for me - but poorly...  As usual one of the most critical components to any movie-making process was excluded from the above graphic.  THE WRITERS!!! My favorite part of any decent film is the writing.  So, the forgotten vitals are -

F Gay Gray (Friday, Law Abiding Citizen, Italian Job) - Director
Jonathan Herman (well, from what I can tell, he's a rookie, so...) & Andrea Berloff (World Trade Center) - Writers
**Okay, fine.  I see why they didn't mention the writers filmography, but still... they're important.
Also not included in the graphic are Paul Giamatti as Jerry Heller (pretty pivotal figure in the whole NWA saga), Lisa Renee Pitts as Verna/ Dre's Mom Dukes, and Marlon Yates, Jr. as D.O.C.

IF YOU MUST KNOW

Dre (Hawkins) was a a DJ with a love for hip-hop, but a passion for the intricate details musical details that make songs, Cube (Jackson, Jr) was high-schooler and wannabe rapper hopping the school bus back and forth from the hood, and Eazy-E (Mitchell) was a dope dealer of some sort with gang affiliations and some bread, but they were all from or living in Compton in the 80s.  For the youngins reading this (all 10 of ya), the 1980s was a terrible decade: it was the height of two of the greatest plagues in US history - the crack epidemic & the AIDs epidemic, both of which feature in the makings of the groundbreaking group N.W.A.  (If my name was Quentin Tarantino, I'd say the full name 150 times in this review for the sake of "reality" and call it art, but I'm not, so I wont.)  Also, prominently-featured in this film are also other images that I remember vividly from my own youth - police brutality, racial and social inequalities manifesting in judicial injustices (oh wait, that could easily be snatched from the recent news headlines).


Here's the story... Dre, Eazy, Cube, along with MC Ren and DJ Yella combine forces and funds to create NWA.  They are the West Coast's version of irreverence hip-hop (a less activist, more gutter version of PE, some might say... hell, I DO say) and they end up fighting battles against everyone from themselves, to their management, to the Po'lice and even the federal government.  While it should have been hard for any brown person in this country who had a microphone and a voice to not have spoken up in the midst of the Rodney King incident, Eleanor Bumpurs, Yusef Hawkins (the list goes on...), not every rapper, writer, movie star, or singer had the intestinal fortitude to so speak.  If for no other reason than, FTP - I give Ice Cube (the primary writer for most of the music I know from them) and NWA a ton of credit for vocalizing that frustration felt by so many.  (NOTE 2: I have several friends and family in law enforcement, I love them... I hate badge wielding, gun-toting, chumps with a god-complex who justify their violence by pointing at their shield.  See... talking all this NWA and Public Enemy stuff got me tapping into my Huey Newton/Freeman side.)

Back to the flick - it was surprisingly well cast.  Cube's real life son played Cube to near perfection, but one would assume that's an easy task.  The Dre character, I couldn't speak much on aside from the fact that the character establishing scene in the beginning of the film made me feel like that is what Dre's process MUST look like - listen to all kinds of music, surrounded in a sea of rich tones, and air-tickling the keys as you let the soul of the sound wash over you.  I knew I wasn't the only one to do that. (NOTE 3: I prefer a DJ who carries wax LPs to one who mixes MP3s - if  I had to choose; just like I prefer paper books to e-books.)  Aldis Hodge did a pretty convincing Ren, from what I know about him.  But the movie really centered on the degradation of the relationship between Eazy and the rest of NWA and the cause for the splintering of the group.  It only sniffs at the introduction of Tupac, Snoop D O double- G, and the affiliation, then swift dissociation with Suge Knight.  Not essential to the story being told, but some fun stuff that could be a movie of its own.

As Jerry Heller, Giamatti is an appreciably pathetic semi-villain in the best way possible (unfortunately, his voice kills me), Mitchell puts in a performance that makes you reconsider what you thought you knew about the man, and still... when it is all said and done, I still will not buy an album or the soundtrack to the music that is essentially the precursor to all that I hate about today's i'gnant hip-hop (I'm looking at you, Fetty Wap, Bobby Shmurda, and all your cohorts). No, you don't really learn anything from this movie.  Yes, I was right about what I thought would be in this movie (breastage, prolific profanity, and circle-jerk included - can't help but notice the absence of Doc Dre's allegations of domestic abuse). No, the writing was nothing to... well, write home about... hmmm, I can do better than that, but not tonight.  And, yes, it was still a good movie.  I might even watch it again - not pay for it, but if it comes on HBO... I'll give it a look.  It's kicking butt in the theatre, so that's awesome. It's not better than DOPE, but it wasn't too shabby at all.

IMTHATDUDE gives Straight Outta Compton: 4

RATING SYSTEM:

5 = You should be about halfway to the theatre by now… Well… GET!
4 = Definitely worth the bread. Niiice.
3 = I won’t cuss anybody out and demand my paper back.
2 = Somewhere SOUTH of under-whelmed./I know it has a pulse, but…
1 = Not a good look. They played me AND I played myself.