HUSTLE & FLOW

I was so brain dead from exhaustion this weekend that all I was really good for yesterday was sitting around and watching DVDs, even though I had meant to go into the office.  I am really glad I stayed home though, because I managed to catch one of the best movies I have seen in recent years:  Hustle & Flow starring Terrence Howard, Anthony Anderson, Taraji P. Henson, Taryn Manning, DJ Qualls, and Paula Jai Parker. 

My husband and I had passed it over in the past during various trips to Blockbuster because it appeared to us as though it were just going to be a glorified rap video of the bling-and-hos variety.  Oh how wrong and misguided we were. 

Hustle & Flow is the story of Djay, an impoverished two-bit pimp from Memphis whose old dream of become a rapper is rekindled when a famous rapper, Skinny Black, from the neighborhood plans a trip home for the Fourth of July.  Djay is barely staying afloat financially, and he is not really doing anything with his life except chauffering his hos to their jobs (Nola, a prostitute, played by Taryn Manning and Lexus, a stripper played by Paula Jai Parker) and dealing pot.  Djay runs into an old friend from high school, Clyde, (Anthony Anderson) who knows how to record music.  Clyde is living a bourgeois life with a nice house, a steady job, a respectable wife, and membership in a local church, but slowly Djay persuades Clyde to help him record a rap demo to give to Skinny Black.

It all sounds formulaic, but it's not.  First, the movie provides an incredible level of detail about the lifestyle Djay lives and it seems authentic. You find yourself sucked into this alternative world of poverty, prostitution, and drug dealing and, by the end of the movie, you feel as though you know this world and have lived in it yourself.  It does not in any way glorify the thug life, which is portrayed as a dead end way of living which the characters either desperately want to escape or to which they feel resigned because they think they have no choice.  At the same time, while I kept waiting for someone to exhibit really bad or awful or violent behavior, all the characters acted like fundamentally decent people who just happened to be stuck at the bottom of the barrel.  Second, the performances by all the actors I have named are amazing and the  characters all have a great deal of depth.  Although the movie is about Terrence Howard's character Djay, the women characters all have their own struggles and hopes and dreams, even if they have trouble defining what those hopes and dreams might be or how to realize them.  As they watch Djay working his heart out to record this demo, they slowly become infused with their own sense of wanting to do or be something more than what they are.  Third, in terms of plot, the movie did not wind up in quite the direction I expected-- there was neither a feel-good, nor a feel-bad ending.  But in any case, the plot was less important than getting to know the lifestyle and the characters and then watching them change. 

In one of the DVD bonus segments, one of the producers said that this movie is about "the lowest of the low being exalted by creativity."  For that reason, it is a profoundly  moral movie in that it is all about pointing out the humanity -- as expressed in ambition and creativity -- of people that many of us would be all too willing to write off as "trash" good only for a life of petty crime.   

Comments

[Hugo]

We watched the film this weekend too -- and loved it. Agreed with all your points.

[Renee]

I had sworn to never see this film after the "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" performance at the Academy Awards, but you may have changed my mind...

[The Happy Feminist]

The hero of the movie is definitely, as the producer in the DVD bonus materials explained, "an exploiter of women" -- and the lyrics of his song reflect that exploitative mentality. But that's not the whole story of this guy-- and I actually think there is a feminist sensibility in the movie in that the hero's pimping ways are not in any way glorified, and in that the prostitute characters are presented as fully complex human beings in their own right.

[David Thompson]

"I kept waiting for someone to exhibit really bad or awful or violent behavior"

Well, if that's what you want you can always go rent 'Menace II Society' and get a really good movie to boot.

[pinkko]

"You find yourself sucked into this alternative world of poverty, prostitution, and drug dealing and, by the end of the movie, you feel as though you know this world and have lived in it yourself."

Alternative world? Must be nice living in the suburbs. I see all of that shit every fucking day right outside my window.

[The Happy Feminist]

Not suburbs. Idyllic small, rural town.

Maybe you should make a rap demo, pinkko.

[pinkko]

Heh. :-)

Firstly, it's hip hop, not rap that's good. Generally rap is thought of as people like Fifty Cent who get all the top 40 air play and generally suck. Hip hop is made by people like Saul Williams and Immortal Technique, who have talent and generally don't suck. You can download some here: Saul Williams and here: Immortal Technique

Secondly, drum and bass is much cooler than hip hop as you can see by listening to this demo by me: Pinkko - I Have a Dream also, this, not by me: Rene Le Prou - Liquid Gold

Finally, I could be completely out of line here, but it seems a little offensive for someone like you, an idyllic small town dweller with apparently little experience of the ghetto, to refer to the lives of millions of people as "alternative." I'm probably just being a nitpicking asshole, but something about it rubbed me the wrong way.

[The Happy Feminist]

Hey pinkko,

Sorry to offend. I did pause over the word "alternative" and I hoped that people would understand that I mean "alternative" for me or someone like me-- but it is a clumsily written sentence. And I am glad to have a readership that does not consist solely of people who dwell in idyllic small rural towns!

I look forward to hearing the demo, pinkko, although I'll have to wait 'til tonight since I'm at work.

[Ron O.]

OK, it looks like I'm going to be the contrarian at Happy Feminst today.

I hated the character Djay and was disappointed the women didn't leave his sorry pimping ass in the end. I didn't see him as decent at all. I couldn't forgive him to throwing out one of the women and her small boy so calously. That was awful. As for violent the beat-down he gives to skinny black makes the grade for me. He was trying to hustle the guy, pretending to be an old friend, and he didn't pull it off. I have little experience with the ghetto; I only know people who made it out, so I cannot say how accurate it is, but I did find it very disturbing.

[flayma]

das ist der mother fucker lied beat alda geiler song