Director: George Tillman Jr.
Starring: Jamal Woolard, Mohamed Dione, Derek Luke
On DVD: TBA
“It was all a dream, I used to read Word Up magazine, Salt’n’Pepa and Heavy D up in the limousine.”
Cryptic? Maybe. But for rap fans, this is the sweet opening line of a Notorious B.I.G song featured in the recent biopic, Notorious.
The film regales the story of Christopher Wallace, a crack dealer-cum-rapper whose meteoric rise to rap fame peaked at the time of (or perhaps shortly after) his assassination in 1997.
The Notorious B.I.G, aka Biggie Smalls, aka Big Poppa, was entrenched in the East Coast vs West Coast rap feud that became centred on his infamous falling out with Tupac ‘2pac’ Shakur.
Notorious takes us through the paces of Wallace’s early life, from his determination to skip school and make money through drugs, his decision to overcome his apparent nerdiness by adopting a tough-guy image, and his realisation that he can string a rhyme together.
In the last third of the film the focus shifts to the stress associated with being part of a media-bolstered rap feud, and a real effort to show what went on ‘behind the scenes’ in the B.I.G camp is evident.
The certainty with which the film gives its side of the story could have something to do with the fact that Notorious B.I.G’s former producer, Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs, was involved in producingNotorious, as was Biggie’s former manager, Wayne Barrow.
The film keeps an even tempo, walking steadily through the events of Wallace’s life and trying (pretty successfully) to show the tension between glitz and glamour of being a rap star and the realities of relationships, kids, drugs and record contracts.
