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Oh my god, it's a post about 8-Mile on the 8-Mile board. This is what stands as my review of the movie, for better or worse. As such, guess I'll have to go on record saying that I'm sort of ambivalent toward Eminem's music. Dig quite a bit of it, but my hip-hop tastes tend more toward Common and his ilk.

That said, I didn't like 8-Mile. It was just dull. I would say that it was slow, but there was no real plot to develop. 80% of the film was spent in falling action while building up to the final competition and climax...with more falling action to follow. In fact, the only thing that made the flic even remotely enjoyable for me was the soundtrack and the afformentioned climax battle. Also, it has no resolution. Now, I have no problem with movies with loose-end conclusions (The Ring, Ringu, A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, et al) so long as the movie has enough meat to back it up. 8-Mile was devoid of any real content. It just sort of dredged through what felt like 2 hours of greyscale monotony. All in all, not very well done. Haven't actually been that big a fan of Hanson's other films either. LA Confidential was decent, but nothing really standout.

As far as the performances, Em's was extremely lackluster...though he did end up actually blowing Kim Bassenger out of the water by comparison. Had the cast built an ensemble, I think it could've at least placed the film into my "ok" list, but the utter lack of chemistry between any two actors doomed 8-Mile to a life of sharing space in my head with 3 Kings and Beat.

Beat was quite possibly one of the most disappointing ventures I've yet encountered. Seeing it on the shelves at Hollywood Video, I promptly put down my other options and grabbed it up. It's rare that a movie about the Beats comes around, and this dharma bum wasn't about to pass it up...much to my chagrin. The movie first and foremost is just downright boring. (I guess I should take this opportunity now to say that I'm a huge student of the Beat Generation. Burroughs and Kerouac are two of my biggest influences in both poetry and prose.) The acting was lackluster with the exceptions of Kilmer's Burroughs and Livingston's Ginsberg (both were bloody perfect). I can't help but feel that Beat was beaten to death in the editing room. There was potential for a great script here, but it was the creative fecal matter of Gary "The Trouble with Dick" Walkow.

One final complaint that has nothing really to do seriously with the film: Would it be too much to ask for Gary to squeeze in more than 0.1 seconds of Jack?