Get the skinny on ‘Straight Outta Compton’!

I don’t like rap. I can tolerate some of it.

Whenever the music played the audio quality of the film suddenly turned the movie theater into a packed stadium with booming speakers. So if you do enjoy NWA, Dre, or Ice Cube, at the minimum you will enjoy those scenes.

I can’t really say if I liked this movie or not. It was hard for a person such as myself to relate.
So instead of trying to relate, I came along for the ride.

What a ride it was too.
We start out where it started for the NWA. Compton. Gangs, drugs, and guns. A lifestyle that I could never even begin to understand. Then we shoot into a lifestyle that I could have even less ability to understand. Fame, money, touring, women, parties and more.

There was a constant feeling of danger wherever the NWA were.
Whether the threat was in their own neighborhood, from gangs, from the police, from the FBI, to the rival studios.

They did not sugar coat anything, which is good.
They did not pretend that they were upstanding citizens either. The money and fame did not change much of the way they lived. There was always that hardness lurking. This was especially present in a hotel scene where the lot of them strap up and head into the hallway fully armed to chase off a rather large angry boyfriend who pulls out a pistol.

The portrayal of Suge Knight was not a positive one. Suge was money hungry, and dangerous.
Jerry was just money hungry. He was able to fool Eazy E right up until the end.

There were scenes with TuPac and Snoop Dogg that made little sense. It was a little shoehorned to see them. The scene with TuPac was a turning point for Dre, but instead of being about Tupac, it was more about Dre and Suge. It just felt odd.

What the movie did was focus on the lives of the group, mainly Dre and Eazy, There were scenes with the others but not nearly as much screen time as those two. Ice Cube was featured a lot also.

I think the film did capture how the different companies Ruthless, Priority and DeathRow all were from more mainstream companies.
Many of the studio scenes seemed like they were shot in a basement studio. Which I think kept the feeling you first get when Dre is in his house messing with records. His style of production seemed consistent throughout.

The film touches on the focal points of these talents’ careers. It uses real news footage. On point of interest to me was how much the Rodney King incident affected these people.
We all watched those events too but it was interesting to see how it affected them and was so important a time in history, uniting that community for a short time.

It is clear that the group felt something was wrong with the way Jerry and Eazy E were handling the business end. Ice Cube left first, then Dre, it was also clear that Eric had bonded with Jerry and he was blinded to how cheated he had been until it was too late and his AIDS manifested itself. His decadent life choices, made possible by Jerry, caught up to him. It was too late at that point to resurrect the NWA.

Straight Outta Compton was a story that I really had no interest in while it was happening. In fact I was probably more put off by F Tha Police when it came out. I can see now how some of the fans of that music could relate to it. Today though I saw a well portrayed slice of a way of living that may be foreign to a lot of people and all too familiar to others.

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