Good Times Never Seemed so Good

Film: Song Sung Blue
Format: Streaming video from Peacock on Fire!

I’m extremely white. A few years ago, when it was the thing to do, I had my DNA run on 23 and Me and the results were than 99.9% of my DNA is from the British Isles, northern Europe, and Scandanavia. A substantial amount of my ancestry could chuck a rock into the Arctic Circle. What this means is that there are a few things I can count myself an expert in. One of those is white people music. The whitest music ever made isn’t country or bluegrass or polka. It’s Neil Diamond. That being the case, it was only a matter of time before we got a movie that featured Diamond’s music, and thus we have Song Sung Blue.

Song Sung Blue is a biopic, but it’s not a biopic of Neil Diamond himself. Instead, it’s about Mike Sardina (Hugh Jackman) and his wife Claire (Kate Hudson, who was Oscar-nominated for this role). The two made a living in part as tribute musicians, with Claire specializing as Patsy Cline. They realize that Mike, who calls himself “Lightning,” could probably pull off a Neil Diamond tribute band (what he styles instead as a Neil Diamond experience).

It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp

Film: Hustle & Flow
Format: DVD from NetFlix on The New Portable.

As I get nearer and nearer to the end of my Oscar lists, it seems to get harder and harder to get a movie watched. I still watch half a dozen or so movies every week; it just seems like a struggle to cross movies off the diminishing list. With Hustle & Flow, the reason is simple: I don’t like rap, so a movie about someone trying to break into the rap game doesn’t interest me that much. Honestly, it’s the same issue I had with Altman’s Nashville when I was finishing the 1001 Movies list: I don’t like country music, so a movie about the industry really didn’t interest me.

Hustle & Flow concerns DJay (Terrence Howard), a pimp, trying to survive the mean streets of Memphis. This is not a case where he’s a pimp in the sense that he’s trying to hook up. He’s an actual pimp with a stable of three women. Those women are Shug (Taraji P. Henson), who is pregnant; Lexus (Paula Jai Parker), who works a strip club; and Nola (Taryn Manning), his white hooker who he has working the street. DJay also deals weed, often in a club run by Arnel (Isaac Hayes). Arnel tells him that former Memphis rapper Skinny Black (Lucacris) is coming back to town for the Fourth of July, and DJay needs to bring his best product to the party. Around the same time, DJay accepts an old Casio keyboard from a junkie in exchange for some drugs.