Quick Movie Reviews
Rating of
2.5/4
Filmhog - wrote on 01/17/2010
I started watching this film expecting to cringe. I mean, a hip-hop adaptation of "The Great Gatsby"? Come on. But overall I was very pleasantly surprised at how well the director and screenwriters pulled it off (though the party scenes should have been more spectacular). Unfortunately, they completely changed the novel's ending. I'm not one of those people who feels that literary adaptations need to be slavishly faithful to their sources, but in this case I think it really was a liability. I would have given this a solid 3 stars, but because of the ending I am giving it 2.5.
Rating of
0.5/4
Snake Sugarbaker - wrote on 12/15/2009
Having the best film title around is about all G has going for it. Richard T. Jones, a hiphop record producer, and Blair Underwood fight over the laughably emotive (and, frankly, not pretty) Chenoa Maxwell. Considering the genre (pseudo-gangsta love drama), I can forgive a lot. My biggest complaint is not that the editing is slipshod, nor that Maxwell is truly awful, nor that Underwood (quite possibly the most attractive man on earth) looks like R Kelly here (and that's not good). It's supposed to be a movie about hiphop – with practically NO HIPHOP! Oh – one of the most memorable unmemorable quotes in cinema this year comes from G: "Happiness is God's orgasm."
