Saw Hustle & Flow

Let’s see. Basically the movie was funny to me.

In short the movie is basically about everyone involved wanting to make it out of their mundane job, life, poverty, street hustle, what have you; not just the pimps and prostitutes. For instance one dude stocks soda machines, and another is a low level recording engineer who’s in his thirties who thought he would have had his own studio and record label by now. So even if one can’t relate to the backdrop of the movie (the pimp game), most of us can relate to the essence of it.

The movie’s set in Memphis, and since I’ve been to Memphis over a dozen times I was hopping to see a lot of landmarks that I’d recognize, but I didn’t. The only one I did see was the Mississippi River, but that was from a different angle then I’d seen it before. And they did reference Germantown, which I’m familiar with – you can’t come into Memphis from the east on 40 without going past Germantown. The movie felt like Memphis, so it did a good job in the authenticity department. They even had Memphis native Issac Hayes in there as a bar owner. He actually owns a restaurant named after him in Memphis down on Beal and Font I think – above the music store, and beside Gillians.

Anyway, I’ll say it’s like this. If you really want to see the movie, or just want to support Black cinema, go head, it’s decently entertaining; if your on the fence about it, you can just make it a rental in a few months because I’ve seen better.

It a good story line, and the actors play their rolls well for the most part, but the movie falters. Mostly the director’s falt I’d say. There were too many slow, drawn out moments, where I’m like “ok, next scene”; and it was overly sentimental or sappy at times to were it was a bit unbelievable and made me roll my eyes.

In the final analysis, I’d say it’s a movie that had a lot of potential to be really good, but didn’t quite get there.