Review: Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

Reviews

ATL

Roll Bounce with grit

By TOM MEEK | April 5, 2006

2.5 Stars

ATL: Boyz N the Hood goes roller-rink in Atlanta.

Rap-video director Chris Robinson revisits Boyz N the Hood, transplanting the parable of African-American youths getting out from LA to hardscrabble Atlanta. Based on a story by Antwone Fisher (yes, him), the film finds Rashad (rapper Tip Harris, a/k/a T.I.) and his younger brother Ant (Evan Ross) living with their deadbeat uncle. Rashad and his posse are Sunday-night dance kings at the local roller rink. (It’s Roll Bounce with grit.) Then he falls for New-New (Lauren London), who’s not all she appears to be, while Ant latches on to a drug dealer (OutKast’s Big Boi) and their posse mate Esquire (Jackie Long) tries to cut connections (playing “Tiger Hood” at the country club) to get into an Ivy. It all hangs on Rashad’s intensity, and even though his emoting is a fixed gear, T.I. holds his own. The whites are all rich and anal, and the concluding revelations feel a bit hatched. But Robinson’s fluid visual style and a bristling soundtrack help atone.

Related: Beyond Graveside, Prodigy, UGK, More

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In the aftermath of the Dorchester shootings, it's even harder to book rap shows in Boston.
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By the time this goes to press, Prodigy will be roughly 10 books and 2000 push-ups deep into the three-and-change prison term he picked up last year for illegal gun possession.
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Underground Kingz is not quite an instant classic, but it would be hard to deny that UGK have reclaimed their throne.
Hip-hoptronic
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Hip-hop has always had a bad rap ( duh-hyuk! ) for misogyny, but when I think back on the long history of articles criticizing the lyrical treatment of women, I have to chuckle.
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Anyone who considers Kanye West a genius for sampling generic Billboard toppers should be enamored of Esoteric’s second solo disc in two years.
T.I.
Atlanta rapper T.I. pushed 500,000 King units the first week, but I don’t think his pro forma rags-or-riches movie debut ATL or America’s boner for all things Southern deserve the credit.
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“The thing that’s most gratifying to me is that the artists themselves like it and respect it, ’cause I’m trying to tell their story,” says Brian Coleman.
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It’s already given critics who don’t usually have much to say about hip-hop license to wax poetic over, you know, the skillz and shit of Brooklyn rapper Tim Fite.
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Topics: Reviews , Entertainment, Hip-Hop and Rap, Music, More

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