D-Nice (@djdnice) might be the true Hip Hop renaissance man. He went from beatbox to rapper to producer to web designer to photographer to DJ. Now add filmmaker to the mix. A few months back he started releasing shorts of his convos with some of Hip Hop’s great. Simple conversations about music that allowed you to get closer to the subjects in a way that few other have. Now he is talking to soul singers. Starting with Bilal, this series seems like its off to an incredible start. Hopefully we can see this as a full DVD in the future. Cross your fingers that I get a chance to talk to him about his own journey someday.
This is the film that has been under wraps for quite sometime directed by Ben Affleck that features boston hip-hop personalities Slaine & A.Garcia
Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck) is an unrepentant criminal, the de facto leader of a group of ruthless bank robbers who pride themselves in stealing what they want and getting out clean. With no real attachments, Doug never has to fear losing anyone close to him. But that all changed on the gang’s latest job, when they briefly took a hostage–bank manager, Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall). Though they let her go unharmed, Claire is nervously aware that the robbers know her name… and where she lives. But she lets her guard down when she meets an unassuming and rather charming man named Doug…not realizing that he is the same man who only days earlier had terrorized her. The instant attraction between them gradually turns into a passionate romance that threatens to take them both down a dangerous, and potentially deadly, path.
This mini-documentary on Drake actually turned out to be pretty damn interesting, nothing you didn’t know, but kind of interesting to see the other side of the story.
“Inspired by comedian Darryl Littletons book, producer and writer Quincy Newell and director Robert Townsend have crafted a no-holds-barred documentary that is both an insiders take and a critical examination of the cultural influence of black comedy. Why We Laugh is a hilarious and spectacularly archived film enriched by including interviews with prominent scholars, politicians, cultural critics, and a host of notable comics, including Dick Gregory, Bill Cosby, Chris Rock, Keenan Ivory Wayans, Katt Williams, D.L. Hughley, Steve Harvey and Sommore. “
Boston Beats & Rhymes is a documentary from 2004 by Film Maker Scott Limanek that I remember hearing a lot about and seeing a few clips from, and I thought the movie never saw the light of day and was (like a lot of other great documentary’s) left only with a rough cut or two floating around in the producers inner circle; luckily, I was wrong. I stumbled onto this clip while I was doing some research for another piece and realized that the producer had uploaded the entire documentary on YouTube.
While there will always be issues with historical texts, historical texts regarding the arts is especially hard given the formation of art and the subjective views regarding what contributions to what art scene where more relevent than others, and which microcosm of the specific scene would be covered. This represents itself more often than not within the realm of music and hip-hop in particular as historical texts being usually biased towards one subset of a scene over another; within the context of this movie and the coverage of Boston hip-hop my initial curiousty with the film was to see how well it juggled what is dubbed in large part as the white, college, “back-packer” scene of Boston Hip-Hop that formed largely within the College and more relatively suburban areas of the Boston area, and that of the “street” scene which is code for nearly anything produced out of Dorchester, Mattapan, Jamaca Plain, Hyde Park, Roxbury, etc… and I must give the producer a lot of credit for balancing these two scenes that are very often insulated from each other; especially when paying tribute to what was really the foundation of the hip-hop scene in Boston sans college transplants…
I posted a trailer to this, and CarvePR just hit me up and told me it’s finally available…
Well, West Coast Theory , is now live and available for purchase and download.
The film features Segal, FredWreck, DJ Battlecat, DJ Khalil, Snoop, Xzibit, B-Real, Too $hort among many others, it’s available for download only online at http://www.westcoasttheory.com for $3.75
The harsh reality of prison rape is examined in this shocking and sobering documentary from filmmaker Jonathan Schwartz. Inside Alabama’s Limestone Correctional Facility, five inmates talk candidly about sexual abuse as a part of life on the inside. The long-term causes and conditions that perpetuate prison rape are examined, as well as the use of sex as a commodity, for comfort and for protection from the feared and brutal prison culture
Already borrowing the video from JumpTheTurnstyle, but I had to take the blurb on it too; Farone did it better than I could…
I’m sure that I don’t have to say much in order to rile JTTS readers about this one. Personally, I’m not sure how I feel about the repeated efforts to academically negotiate white participation in hip-hop, but my guess is that everyone else around here has a heated opinion.
Either way – this new film, Blacking Up, is sure to serve as a great conversation piece for lots of college kids who have no clue about rap culture. Also; it will likely provide more than a few laughs for irony-mongering Vanilla Ice fans and those of us who love watching skinny white dudes in giant tees make complete fools out of themselves. The following is from the press release:
Blacking Up explores tensions surrounding white participation in hip-hop. Popularly referred to by derogatory terms such as “wannabe” or “wigger,” the figure of the white person who identifies with hip-hop often invokes heated responses. For some, it is an example of cultural progress – a movement toward a color-blind America. For others, it is just another case of cultural theft and mockery – a repetition of a racist past.
HIP-HOP: BEYOND BEATS AND RHYMES is a riveting documentary that examines representations of gender roles in hip-hop and rap music through the lens of filmmaker Byron Hurt, a former college quarterback turned activist. Conceived as a “loving critique” from a self-proclaimed “hip-hop head,” Hurt examines issues of masculinity, sexism, violence and homophobia in today’s hip-hop culture.
