adam bhala lough Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Heading in to watch The Carter, a new documentary that chronicles the life and times of Dwayne Michael Carter Jr. (aka Lil' Wayne), I thought what more is there to know about the hip, slick, fast-paced rapper lifestyle? Well, surprisingly, director Adam Bhala Lough expertly pieces together not just a movie about another well-to-do rapper, but one about a workaholic, a drug addict, a father, an artist and an icon.

When we first shove our way into Lil' Wayne's life, he's holed up in a hotel room in Amsterdam, smoking mass amounts of marijuana while he religiously stands at a make-shift mic for hours recording songs on the fly thanks to the portable studio he brings with him everywhere. We learn Wayne's new album, The Carter III, is due in stores in nine days -- and even though a million copies have already leaked overseas, Wayne and his manager both feel they'll sell a million copies in the first week. As we jump back and forth between the United States and Europe, we slowly become more intimate with Wayne through his interviews with international reporters, as well as through the unpredictable man himself.

Is there some unwritten rule that every ground-breaking musician must also have a screw loose? I don't mean to assert that Lee "Scratch" Perry is actually mentally deficient, but on the basis of the footage compiled in the documentary The Upsetter: The Life & Music of Lee "Scratch" Perry, it would be easy to conclude that something is not quite right with Mr. Perry.

One of the reasons I wanted to see this particular doc is because I hoped to learn more about Perry, oft described as a legendary musical figure. I first heard about him when he worked with The Clash to produce their version of Junior Marvin's "Police and Thieves" in the late 1970s, but as The Upsetter shows, Perry first rose to fame in the 1960s as the talented producer of dozens of ska records. Perry, who was born in a small town in Jamaica, credits his later success to a stint working on a construction crew building a highway; the rhythmic sound of rocks being smashed against one another made a deep impression on his musical soul. Eventually he got an entry-level job at a recording studio and worked his way up until he became a widely sought after producer.

The documentary is on firm ground as it establishes Perry's reputation, with a remarkable amount of video footage depicting the early days of his career. Perry explains that he wasn't satisfied with his success as a ska record producer, and so returned to his religious roots. Perry's inspired mixing of spirituality with ska led to the birth of reggae in the late 1960s.

In the opening scene of Adam Bhala Lough's bleak and listless Weapons, Nick Cannon gets his head blown off by a shotgun blast while scarfing down a fast food cheeseburger -- and the movie gets even less subtle from that point on. I'd like to say that the film, for all its grunge, grime and bleakness, is a well-intentioned piece, but I never really got that impression from Weapons. It's basically another "teens hate everyone, especially each other" story, not very much unlike River's Edge, Mean Creek or the collected works of Larry Clark -- only not nearly as good. (OK, it's better than most of Larry Clark's stuff.)

Presented in a contorted time frame that serves no real purpose, Weapons follows the activities of a group of hate-filled youths as they spend one day and one night doing simply terrible things to one another. This one's accused of raping that one, which means this other one is all hot for revenge, while these three different ones do some drugs and spit virtual bile at each other. Meanwhile the only halfway sympathetic character in the movie (and I do mean "only") is a rather stupid young woman who harbors a crush for one particularly vile young man ... because in a world filled with anger, abuse and hatred, you gotta take what you can get, right? Jeez.