LIGHT TRAFFIC

Just came back from seeing the new Biggie movie, Notorious. Despite the fact everybody looks way better than their regular selves, and that Biggie’s mom (Volette Wallace, who’s also a co-producer of the film) ensured her character looks flawlessly hot from beginning to end – even the time she’s just come back from surgery – the movie was quite enjoyable. I even cried a little at the funeral. Part of the entertainment, however, was definitely courtesy of the audience. The crowd, mainly young, and hugely receptive, sang along to every song (to both BIG and Tupac, no hate), clacked their fingers at punch lines and howled with laughter every time scriptwriters hoped they would.

David Denby reviews the film in this week’s New Yorker magazine. He makes, as always, some solid – and humorous – observations. He wonders, among other things, if the filmmakers, presenting Biggie Smalls as a 24-year old who got shot when he was about to turn his life around, aren’t “attempting to clean him up for posterity.”

“Whether this is true or not,” Denby writes, “I’m pretty sure that it’s not a good idea for an artist’s mother to control any part of his biography.”

And then comes the killer:

“No doubt Mme. Rimbaud, given the chance, would have preferred to have her disreputable Arthur come out looking like a precocious Catholic schoolboy who only briefly dabbled in absinthe.”

Booyah! One day I will write like that.