Notorious

Finally brought myself to watch Notorious the other night and can heartily recommend that you DON'T. It's awful, the only redeeming feature of the film is the fact that it features so many of Biggie's bangers.

The films executive producer is puff daddy, or p diddy or diddy, or whatever the fuck he's called these days. His character (played by a more handsome p-diddy lookalike) is a 'key' figure in the film, who spends the whole time fannying about and saying 'real' shit like "Don't chase the money, chase the dream" and "my music is about the game, but it aint in the game" and other trite soundbites.

The film discards characters with no explanation and re-introduces them later just as abruptly, for a scene, before cutting them again. Notorious has no continuity and appears to be nothing more than a sequence of rose-tinted hi-lights of Biggie's life. Obviously the script was basically written (or heavily edited) by Biggie's moms and piddly diddly and so its one concession to showing his "dark side" is him selling crack to a pregnant woman ("oooohh dark" they obviously haven't seen The Wire or The Corner) and loosing it for about 30 seconds at his wife.

It's a confusing film - with mixed messages about whether Biggie was in the music game for money or for the "dream", it seems like he just used music to get himself out of THE game, and just happened to be really good at it. But who knows, because this the whole thing is such a farce that god knows what has some truth to it in the film...

Jamal Woolard plays Biggie - he's not Biggie. No-one could really pull it off and this actor definitely can't. This is the problem with films about musicians - what do you do, get them to mime to the original track or do you get them to do their own kareoke version? It's impossible to get it completely right, but films like Ray and Walk The Line, show that it is possible with good casting... unfortunately in Notorious they just picked some fat guy who could rhyme a bit. No charisma, no confidence and not biggie. It makes him look like a total chump.
Oh and he doesn't even look like him, he looks like a white guy in a fat suit who's been blacked up.

Do not watch!