Talk about The tragedy of being bored. Now and then, a movie earns more undeserved praise than it is worth because of an established director securing multiple acting heavyweights. The most recent example I can think of was in 2017 when Steven Spielberg combined with Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks for The Post; the movie was dubbed an Oscar lock, especially after 2015’s fantastic movie Spotlight (also about a newspaper reporting a highly publicized scandal) received six Academy Award nominations, including two wins. Drab, The Post failed to meet expectations, earning just six Academy Award nominations and winning just two.
Category Archives: Corey Hawkins
Straight Outta Compton (2015)
Straight outta Compton and straight into the Oscar buzz. It’s early, and this movie will be forgotten by Halloween (just like most of the great films released in the first eight or nine months of each year). Still, for now, this movie is hot with audiences (over $100 million grossed in its first eight days) and critics (89% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes), like just about any other movie of the year. As I will explain in my review below, Straight Outta Compton didn’t do anything (besides the music itself) that was amazing on its own, but it did do just about everything well. I wouldn’t call it the surprise hit of the year, as many other movies flew further under the radar (Ex Machina and The Gift are the two that come to mind for me). Still, it was a movie that could be very good or very bad, depending on the acting, which parts of the story would be told, and, most importantly, the direction. I’ll talk more about F. Gary Gray (The Negotiator, The Italian Job) later in the review, but long story short, he nailed it. Straight Outta Compton was his most challenging and impressive work to date. While I think it’s an extremely long shot based on the history of the Academy and its voting, his name could still be swirling around as a dark horse for Best Director come December.