Actual autobiography of Eminem.
English description:
Here he is on the big screen, the notorious white rapper whose celebrity is treated with such deference here by modish liberal opinion - deference which has, I always think, a touch of Neville Chamberlain about it. Maybe in response to this, or probably out of a cynical need to plane down his rough edges for a movie career, Eminem has adjusted his attitude. Gays bad, guns good? Now it's the other way around.
Eminem really has cleaned up his act; the provocative gay-baiting has gone, and in one of the improvised rap contests springing up spontaneously at the lunch-truck where he works shifts at a metal plant, Eminem actually reproves someone for his homophobic rhyming. Quite a turnaround. Even his Aryan blondness has been allowed to grow out and get replaced with his natural brown hair, though usually covered by hoods and woolly hats. As for race, Eminem's character Jimmy "Rabbit" Smith is not the only white man around, though he's the only white rapper; the movie's not about to flush his USP down the toilet. A dopey guy in his crew called Cheddar Bob is white; the other three are black - a DJ who hosts regular rap battles and who's always got Jimmy's back, a big fat guy made to look even bigger with a puffa jacket and another who's the radical political conscience. But something in Eminem's pale, even somehow delicate features makes him whiter than white: Persil white trash - though his friends unhesitatingly extend to him the honorific of "nigga" or "negro" in conversation. "Elvis" is what the crowds at the rap contests jeeringly call him, and in the final showdown Eminem defiantly says that he's poor white trash and proud of it. It's the ultimate suburban boy's fantasy: a crowd of cool black people cheering him on, and he even gets to look like the underdog.
So has the music and culture of the streets abolished racial difference? Difficult to tell. One night in the trailer where Jimmy lives with his mom and baby sister, they watch Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life on TV: a scene in which the teacher of a little girl, Sarah-Jane, can't conceal her polite astonishment that Sarah-Jane's mother is black. So Hanson seems slyly to be proposing a melting pot of some sort bubbling away in counterpoint to what they're watching.
There are no guns to speak of: Jimmy's buddies cruise around firing a paintball at various shopfronts and a police car, but almost wet themselves with fear when they hear a siren behind them. When one of them pulls out a real piece in the middle of a ferocious argument with a rival gang, everyone on both sides is deeply pained by this error of taste. The guy with the gun winds up shooting himself in the leg, poetic justice for behaving like an asshole. Jimmy gets a real gun in his face in the course of getting beaten up by six guys, but Gandhi-like, refuses to respond with fists, never mind guns. It never crosses his mind to get some weaponry for the tragic revenge-climax that would finish another sort of drama. For all the whiff of street danger, this is a notably wussy, non-violent picture.
The problem is Eminem himself, who has clearly been drilled by the director to play to what will have to pass as strengths: stillness, cool, control. He fixes people with that stone gaze which promises neither passion nor violence. On screen, he has the opposite of presence: a weird, enigmatic absence. He talks and argues with his friends with an unsettling lack of affect, occasionally apologising with a self-deprecatory "my bad". He is supposed to have just broken up with his girlfriend and then hooks up with an aspiring model played by Brittany Murphy, whose infidelities drive him to his one and only display of violent emotion, but he always looks too blank for this to have plausibly affected him in any way. I'll give him this, though: Eminem's relationship with his mother is a richly comic and Freudian part of the film, and one time when the impassive look plays well as deadpan humour. "My boyfriend won't go down on me," she confesses to her son. "Aw, mom, I don't need to know that," grimaces Jimmy.
When the movie comes alive is in the rapping scenes, the one-on-one gladiatorial contests of insult rhyming for which Jimmy prepares like a boxer. They're moments of exhilarating and distinctive literary invention. How brilliant would the film be if it were all like this: an improvised rap musical. But sadly it isn't, and when the rapping stops, the interest flags. Rappers have in the past, with the arguable exception of Ice Cube, made awful actors. Eminem isn't bad exactly. But in non-rapping scenes everything about him suggests he's in neutral: an off-duty actor, or a standup comic between sets, unwilling or unable to waste energy and material on anything that isn't his act. If this is Eminem's only film, then it's a reasonable effort and an interesting footnote to that lively discography. But if he's thinking of making a career of it, then some hard work needs to be done.
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- [ ] Here has been mentioned all the actual information âš from the Rabbits đ life that he was living thought when he was 20 years old, maybe little bit older.
- [ ] The information has been collected from trustable sources. Source: https://amp.theguardian.com/culture/2003/jan/17/artsfeatures.eminem
