Biopic follows N.W.A straight outta Compton as they take their case to the people
STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON (F. Gary Gray, 2015)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Saturday, August 19, 9:40, and Sunday, August 20, 9:10
Series runs August 11-20
www.straightouttacompton.com
metrograph.com
Born in New York City and raised in South Los Angeles, F. Gary Gray got his start making hip-hop videos for such artists as Outkast, Dr. Dre, TLC, and Ice Cube before directing his first film, the 1995 favorite Friday, starring cowriter Ice Cube, Chris Tucker, and Nia Long. Since then he has nine more films under his belt, focusing on action crime thrillers.
Running at Metrograph August 11-20, “F. Gary Gray in Action” consists of five of his hottest flicks, beginning with 2009’s Law Abiding Citizen, in which an honest man (Gerard Butler) battles a prosecutor (Jamie Foxx) after a home invasion. In 1996’s Set It Off, Jada Pinkett, Vivica A. Fox, Kimberly Elise, and Queen Latifah play friends who decide to rob a bank. In 2005, Gray helmed Be Cool, the sequel to the 1995 smash Get Shorty, both based on Elmore Leonard novels; this follow-up brings back John Travolta as Miami mobster Chili Palmer, who now gets involved in the music industry, joined by Uma Thurman, Vince Vaughn, Cedric the Entertainer, Andre Benjamin, Steven Tyler, Christina Milian, Harvey Keitel, Dwayne Johnson, and Danny DeVito. Gray’s 2003 remake of Peter Collinson’s 1969 heist comedy, The Italian Job, upped the action ante, with Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Edward Norton, Jason Statham, Mos Def, Franky G, and Donald Sutherland.
The ten-day series concludes with 2015’s Straight Outta Compton, which comes barreling out of the gates with all the rage and fury of the 1988 title track that kicks off with Dr. Dre declaring, “You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge.” The energetic film traces the rise and fall, or creation and dissolution, of N.W.A, the seminal south L.A. hip-hop group that changed music forever. In the late 1980s, Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), MC Ren (Aldis Hodge), and DJ Yella (Neil Brown Jr.) formed a rap group that sought to capture the sound and feel of what was happening on the streets of Compton, from drugs and gangs to racist cops and poverty.
They were a smash hit, particularly their controversial song “Fuck Tha Police,” which set up confrontations with authorities as the band hit the road on a nationwide tour. But when Cube and Dre start questioning where all the money is going — Eazy-E and manager Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti) seem to be doing a lot better than the rest of them — everything they have built up threatens to unravel. And once Suge Knight (R. Marcus Taylor) enters the picture, the violence level increases, and things start getting even more out of control.
Life threatens to get outta control for N.W.A in Straight Outta Compton
With Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Tomica Woods-Wright, Eazy-E’s widow, among the producers, Straight Outta Compton doesn’t pussyfoot around as the various characters make their cases for artistic and financial freedom while reinventing the music business. Juilliard graduate Hawkins (BlacKkKlansman, In the Heights) is outstanding as Dre, maintaining a calm demeanor even as all hell breaks loose around him, while Jackson Jr. (Just Mercy, Cocaine Bear) has trouble hitting the high notes portraying his father, Cube, and Mitchell (Detroit, Mudbound) gives Eazy-E an unpredictable nuance. Taylor (Baby Driver) wreaks havoc as Knight, the extremely dangerous cofounder of Death Row Records, who makes sure he gets what he wants, while Oscar nominee and Emmy winner Giamatti (Cinderella Man, Sideways) has a steady disposition as a white man in a black man’s world.
The music scenes are spectacular, especially a Detroit concert that turned into a showdown between the cops and N.W.A, and it’s cool to see Snoop Dogg (Keith Stanfield), Chuck D (Rogelio Douglas Jr.), and Tupac Shakur (Marcc Rose). The film wavers a bit when it tries to get overly sentimental or inject too many side stories; it’s best when it just forges ahead with the frenzy and furor that was N.W.A, taking on exasperating social conditions the only way they knew how. Straight Outta Compton also features several scenes in which primarily white cops harass black men and women that evoke what is still going on today around the country. Gray (Men in Black: International, A Man Apart) even throws in a fun reference to Friday when the band throws a naked woman out of a hotel party, telling her, “Bye, Felicia.” (If you don’t get the reference, look it up.) At the end of the song “Straight Outta Compton,” N.W.A concludes, “Damn, that shit was dope.” The same can be said of Gray’s dynamic film. Up next for Gray is the January 2024 Netflix heist thriller Lift, starring Kevin Hart.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Alan Arkin’s directorial debut is a hysterically absurdist foray into the urban paranoia that haunted a lawless New York City in the late 1960s and 1970s. Based on Jules Feiffer’s first play, which was a Broadway flop in 1969 but became a hit in London and off Broadway, Little Murders centers on the offbeat relationship between the determined and domineering Patsy Newquist (Marcia Rodd) and the calm, easygoing Alfred Chamberlain (Elliott Gould). They first meet when Patsy tries to save him from getting beaten up yet again by a group of thugs, but he doesn’t want any help; he never fights back, instead letting them tire themselves out. A former successful commercial photographer, Alfred now spends his time taking artistic pictures of feces he finds on the filthy streets. He and Patsy sort of start dating, but Alfred, who regularly says, “I don’t know what love is,” is too passive for Patsy, who makes it her project to mold him into a stronger man, as if he were one of her interior design projects. The black comedy reaches new heights when Alfred meets Patsy’s rather eccentric family, played by the three actors who originated the roles on the stage. Vincent Gardenia is her high-strung father who laments what has become of the city, Elizabeth Wilson is her prim and proper mother who only sees what she wants to see, and Jon Korkes is deliciously funny as her crazy brother, who finds humor in just about everything. Meanwhile, wherever Patsy goes, a heavy-breathing phone caller follows.
The Quad invites film lovers into the very strange cinematic world of eighty-nine-year-old British writer, director, and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg in the one-week series “Look Now: The Universe According to Nicolas Roeg,” beginning September 1. The eleven works in the series celebrate Roeg’s spectacular visual sense as well as his love of celebrity, the supernatural, and pop culture. The centerpiece of the Quad presentation is Roeg’s 1973 masterpiece, the haunting and harrowing psychological horror tale Don’t Look Now. Written by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant and based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier, the film is an extraordinarily rich and detailed study of a family trying to regain itself following the tragic loss of a young daughter. “Nothing is what it seems,” John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) says, alerting the viewer early on. In the opening, scene, Christine (Sharon Williams) and her brother, Johnny (Nicholas Salter), are playing outside, he in a blue jacket, riding his red bike over the green grass and through trees, she playing with a talking doll and red-striped white ball while wearing a red raincoat even though the sun is shining bright on a nearly cloudless day. Over Pino Donaggio’s gentle piano score, Anthony B. Richmond’s camera zeroes in on a puddle next to a pond, then editor Graeme Clifford cuts to a fire raging in a fireplace in front of which the children’s mother, Laura (Julie Christie), is reading about Lake Ontario and their father, John (Donald Sutherland), is looking at glass slides of a church in Venice he has been asked to restore. In one image of a stained-glass window, Christ, in a red robe, is cradling the lamb symbolizing sinners, while a figure in a red hood sits in a front pew, gazing up at it. The scene then shifts back to Christine in her red mac, seen reflected upside down in the pond. Johnny rides over a pane of glass, breaking it and falling to the ground. John looks up, sensing something. Laura reads aloud from her book. She innocently puts her hand to her mouth. Christine puts her hand to her mouth. John smiles at Laura. Johnny tries to fix one of the wheels on his bicycle. Christine throws the ball in the air. John tosses a pack of cigarettes to Laura. The ball splashes in the pond. John knocks over a glass. The ball swirls in the water. Red liquid oozes from the figure in the church slide. John feels something is wrong and heads outside. Johnny runs toward him. Christine, lying on her back, slowly submerges under the water. John rushes into the pond. Laura looks at the bloody slide. With a gasp, John dives under the water. Laura tosses the slide onto her book, Beyond the Fragile Geometry of Space. The blood spreads further across the slide as Donaggio’s music turns ominous. John lifts the lifeless body of his daughter out of the pond, letting out a heartbreaking howl. John is too late to save Christine. Laura sees what is happening and screams. Roeg cuts to a power drill marked with a red panel drilling into the wall of the church in Venice that John is renovating. It’s a spectacular scene, every second critical to the rest of the film and how it’s photographed and edited, dominated by the color red (along with sharp blues and greens), shattering glass, people falling, and water representing death as John and Laura try to put together the pieces of their devastatingly fractured life.
A British gangster on the run hides out with a psychedelic rock star in this strangely enticing film from writer-director Donald Cammell (The Demon Seed) and Nicolas Roeg (making his big-screen directorial debut as well as serving as cinematographer). James Fox didn’t know what he was getting into when he signed on to play Chas, a mobster who finds sanctuary with mushroom-popping rock-diva has-been Turner, played with panache by Mick Jagger. Throw in Anita Pallenberg, a fab drug trip, and the great “Memo to Turner” scene and you have a film that some consider the real precursor to MTV, some think a work of pure demented genius, and others find to be one of the most pretentious and awful pieces of claptrap ever committed to celluloid.
Nicolas Roeg’s adaptation of Walter Nevis’s 1963 science-fiction novel, The Man Who Fell to Earth, is a nearly unwatchable unmitigated mess, with gorgeous visuals and beautiful individual scenes getting lost in a narrative nightmare. Written by Paul Mayersberg, the 1976 film served as a vehicle for androgynous pop star David Bowie, in his movie debut, playing television-addicted Thomas Jerome Newton, a soft-spoken alien who has come to Earth to figure out a way to save his water-starved planet. He enlists the aid of attorney Oliver V. Farnsworth (Buck Henry, in hysterically thick bottle glasses) and college professor and scientist Dr. Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn) as he builds up his World Enterprises Corporation and develops an awkward, volatile relationship with hotel employee Mary-Lou (Candy Clark). Editor Graeme Clifford can’t assemble the many hackneyed scenes into any kind of intelligible narrative; even the numerous sex scenes, in which we get to see various naked women as well as Torn’s schvantz and Bowie’s thin white duke, get confusing fast. Shortly before his death in January 2016 at the age of sixty-nine, Bowie participated in a musical adaptation of the film and novel, 
Bujold comfortably settles into the background in her second film with Rudolph, 1988’s The Moderns, a wickedly sly riff on the Lost Generation in post-WWI Paris. Bujold is gallery owner Libby Valentin, the guiding conscience among the self-important literati, including Ernest Hemingway (Kevin J. O’Connor), who speaks in hysterical quotations that would wind up in The Sun Also Rises and other books; Gertrude Stein (Elsa Raven), and Alice B. Toklas (Ali Giron), who host high-falutin’ salon gatherings; gossip columnist Oiseau (Wallace Shawn), who never a met a story he couldn’t make up; wealthy art collector Nathalie de Ville (Geraldine Chaplin), who has more up her sleeves than she initially lets on; powerful, jealous businessman Bertram Stone (John Lone) and his wife, the sexy, troublesome Rachel (Linda Fiorentino); and expatriate painter Nick Hart (Keith Carradine), who has little time for nonsense as he homes in on Rachel. The beginning of the film is annoying, pretentious, and self-indulgent, but once it kicks into high gear, it wonderfully pokes fun at itself, especially via Oiseau, played to a comic T by Shawn — who likes to hang out at Bar Sélavy, owned by Rose (Marthe Turgeon), in a sweet homage to Marcel Duchamp. Cinematographer Toyomichi Kurita slowly switches from black-and-white to color as scenes change and the backstabbing heats up. The plot centers around forgeries, referencing the phoniness that resides within every character. The only one who remains steady throughout is Libby, who is played with just the right touch of mystery by Bujold. The Moderns is screening at the Quad on August 10 at 6:45.
Bujold made three films with her husband, Paul Almond, during their six-year marriage. In between 1968’s Isabel and 1972’s Journey is the very strange, ultimately unsatisfying The Act of the Heart, which earned Bujold a Canadian Film Award for Best Actress. The low-budget 1970 film hints at being a horror movie, which would have been much better than the rather drab drama it turns out to be, save for a bizarre finale. Bujold is Martha, a shy, devout young woman who has arrived in a small town on the North Shore of Quebec to be a nanny to Russell (Bill Mitchell), a boy being raised by his widowed mother, Johane (Monique Leyrac). Martha auditions for the church choir, which is conducted by Augustinian monk Father Ferrier (Donald Sutherland). As she becomes deeply involved in Billy’s life, which includes his getting seriously injured in a hockey game, she and Father Ferrier take a liking to each other, severely testing their faith. Bujold excels as Martha, as she grows from a church mouse to a woman filled with desire, but Sutherland sleepwalks through the first half of the film, and the subplot with Russell and Johane turns soapy. Still, watching Bujold work her magic is always worth it. Winner of six Canadian Film Awards (Best Director, Best Actress, Best Art Direction, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound, and Best Musical Score), The Act of the Heart is screening August 12 at 5:45 at the Quad. “The Beguiling Bujold” also boasts such other diverse Bujold films as the Michael Crichton medical thriller Coma with Michael Douglas, the Brian De Palma Hitchcock homage Obsession with Cliff Robertson, David Cronenberg’s creepy Dead Ringers with Jeremy Irons, Michael Cacoyannis’s Euripides adaptation The Trojan Women with Katharine Hepburn and Vanessa Redgrave, and Alain Resnais’s The War Is Over with Yves Montand. And as a bonus, the Quad is showing Mark Robson’s Earthquake, starring Bujold with Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, George Kennedy, Lorne Greene, Richard Roundtree, Walter Matthau, Victoria Principal, et al., on August 20 and 21 in the upcoming 
Ostensibly set during the Korean War but actually about the controversial battle that was raging in Vietnam, Robert Altman’s MASH is one of the most subversive, and funniest, antiwar films ever to come from a Hollywood studio. Adapted by Hollywood Ten blacklisted writer Ring Lardner Jr. from Richard Hooker’s bookMASH: A Novel about Three Army Doctors, the film focuses on a different kind of hero: the doctors and nurses at a Mobile Surgical Army Hospital not far from the front lines. These brave men and women don’t go around with guns, grenades, and helmets; instead, they equip themselves with surgical masks, clamps, and scalpels, fighting to save the lives of those who risked theirs on the battlefield. Instead of celebrating killing, they celebrate survival, and celebrate they do, led by Capts. Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and John Francis Xavier “Trapper John” McIntyre (Elliott Gould), who have their own way with wine, women, and song. Joined by Capt. Augustus Bedford “Duke” Forrest (Tom Skerritt), they ridicule Majs. Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan (Sally Kellerman) and Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), regularly embarrass Father John Patrick “Dago Red” Mulcahy (René Auberjonois), flirt endlessly with Lt. Maria “Dish” Schneider (Jo Ann Pflug) and her nursing staff, and generally wreak havoc that their commanding officer, Lt. Col. Henry Blake (Roger Bowen), will usually let them get away with, as long as they don’t interrupt his fishing outings. Hawkeye, Duke, and Trapper drink from a homemade still, take bets on whether Hot Lips’ carpet matches the drapes, play golf, and make fun of the military and religion every chance they get, especially during a mock funeral for Capt. Walter Koskiusko Waldowski (John Schuck), the dentist known as “Painless,” who has decided to commit suicide. The wacky cast of characters also includes Gary Burghoff as Cpl. Radar O’Reilly, Altman regular Michael Murphy as Capt. Ezekiel Bradbury “Me Lay” Marston IV, Bud Cort as Pvt. Lorenzo Boone, G. Wood as Brig. Gen. Charlie Hammond, and Kim Atwood as Ho-Jon. But Hawkeye and Trapper also happen to be outstanding doctors who take their oath very seriously, even when operating on an injured enemy. Their brazen disregard for authority of all kinds and the rule of military law is a knowing slap in the face to governments around the world, who so often send their young men and women off to war for highly questionable reasons.