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January 22-28, 2009
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 A notorious H.I.T.
by Betsy Sharkey
Last chance Hoffson
by Michael Phillips
A notorious H.I.T.
by Betsy Sharkey
There are many things that can be said about the rapper known as The Notorious B.I.G., who was gunned down on Wilshire Boulevard in 1997 when he was just 24. But “flow” may be the one that sits best on his massive frame.
Flow was there in his rhymes, a hypnotic seduction of words weaving and teasing like the perpetual haze of his blunts. It was there in the deep rumble of his voice, in the slow, liquid roll of his body as he moved. And it is there in Jamal Woolard, the young rapper who plays him in Notorious, in a performance that goes a long way toward saving a movie that has fallen obsessively in love with its subject.
In the hands of director George Tillman Jr. and screenwriters Reggie Rock Bythewood and Cheo Hodari Coker, the sheer weight of all the bits and pieces of Biggie’s journey — from his Bed-Stuy boyhood to artistic rap powerhouse and finally to the deadly streets of his newly minted manhood — threatens at times to drown the film. But then Woolard’s chocolate-pudding cheeks — he added 30 pounds to his already sizable frame to play Biggie — break into a smile that makes you want to stay a little longer.
Notorious begins at the end. Biggie has come to Los Angeles six months after another rap legend, 25-year-old Tupac Shakur, had been shot in Las Vegas, one of many casualties of the East Coast-West Coast rap war. Death threats choked Biggie’s cell phone as he left the Vibe magazine party after the Soul Train Music Awards that night.
A passing car, a gun and Biggie’s gone — a scene that propels us back to the Brooklyn walk-up where it all began for Christopher Wallace, a bright, chubby boy deemed by a classmate as “too fat, too black and too ugly” to amount to anything. In the hands of producer Sean “Puffy” Combs (played by Derek Luke), that chubby kid would sell millions of records, many of them after his death, and help take rap from the mix-tape black market of the urban streets into the mainstream.
Angela Bassett plays Wallace’s iron-willed but loving single mother, Voletta. In a scene that tells you all you need to know about their relationship, Voletta discovers her now-towering teenage son dealing drugs and orders him out of the house with a look and a tone that deflates his swaggering machismo.
For those familiar with the characters who populated Biggie’s life and the rap world, some of the casting will seem inspired — not for who they are, since many of the actors are largely unknown, but for the uncanny way they mirror the real deal. Antonique Smith, who plays Faith Evans, the R&B chanteuse who would become Biggie’s wife and the mother of his son, is delicious in the role. Naturi Naughton gives rapper Lil’ Kim, Biggie’s longtime lover, a raw, raging edge that scalds everything around her. Outside of Biggie, the toughest essence to bottle is Combs, and Luke tries but can’t match the man.
Notorious is helped and hurt by its visual narrative. Transitions in Biggie’s life are captured in a shutter-speed collage of images feeding off the energy of the music. Other moments are derailed by split-screen conversations that feel as if they were patched in at the last minute.
Through it all are the rhymes and the music, hugely enjoyable in their own right, and the large shadow of Biggie. The camera is most powerful when it lingers on Woolard’s face and lets him use his bulk to absorb scenes, making this very long film about the rapper’s very short life worth the effort.
—MCT
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 Last chance Hoffson
by Michael Phillips
There’s not a believable minute in the 92 minutes of Last Chance Harvey, but Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson smooth over most of the problems just by showing up and doing what they do for a living.
To invest fully in this agreeable piffle, you’d have to accept that the middle-age lonely hearts frump played by the luminous Thompson cannot get a date. You’d have to buy that the composer-for-hire played by Hoffman, whose New York job is on the ropes and whose trip to London, for his daughter’s wedding, sets the narrative in motion, is charming as written. He is not. He’s charming as played by Hoffman, once the character gets out from under all the humiliation heaped upon him by writer-director Joel Hopkins.
But as written, he’s a borderline stalker. Instead of four weddings and a funeral, this is one wedding and a stalking.
What saves Hopkins’ sophomore feature effort (his first was Jump Tomorrow eight years ago) is the occasional humanizing surprise amid the romantic comedy machinery. Last Chance Harvey introduces Harvey and Kate in their separate orbits and in short order humiliates them, for the purposes of Getting Us On Their Side. Kate’s ignored by a blind date in a pub; Harvey arrives in London only to learn his daughter plans to have her stepfather, played by James Brolin, give her away. Things like that.
Once we’re on their side, though, Thompson delivers especially crafty work. They meet at the airport, where Kate’s working as a poll-taker for the Office of National Statistics. Chance meeting leads to conversational thaw, and one thing leads to another, and Harvey asks Kate to be his date at the wedding.
The trick with romantic comedy isn’t being surprised. The trick is being not surprised, in the right way. These characters barely exist as written. Yet you warm to Thompson and Hoffman. They don’t force anything; their antennae are telling them not to, because Hopkins is doing enough on that score already. They find their points of contact as they stroll around London and share a bit of themselves, Before Sunrise style.
The film leads up to one bit owing more to An Affair to Remember than any film should owe (though this affair has a much happier ending — whoops, sorry, “spoiler”), and I wish Eileen Atkins (as Kate’s meddlesome mum) had more than one running gag, the one about her mysterious, possibly homicidal Polish neighbor. Last Chance Harvey is what it is: a pleasant put-up job, held up by world-class pros.
—MCT
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