50/50 and BlackenedWhite

So I'm not going to talk about thinkpieces on here every day anymore. Writing about writing ain't my thing. So that's that. Moving on...

50/50, dir. Jonathan Levine: I finally saw 50/50 tonight, a solid two months after everyone I know finished raving about it. The terrible quality of the print and the screen at the dollar-saver theater I consumed it at aside, I thought it was...decent. It didn't break into my top ten films of 2011, but it did its job. I choked up at the right times, I felt the way about every character that I was manipulated to feel, and I wasn't disappointed when the credits rolled. But was it a great movie? Absolutely not. I don't mean to sound calloused, but there's nothing unique about Will Reiser's battle with cancer or the way his wacky-but-actually-deeply-thoughtful dudebro Seth Rogen dealt with it.

Cinematography-wise, nothing too interesting is going on here. The principal cast is consistently solid, but again, they're all essentially character types in a melodrama. The film shines when it ventures into comedic territory, and that makes Seth Rogen – a very comfortable funnyman – its best performance. One gets the sense that if Reiser had committed to a mostly funny script (thus foregoing some of the autobiography, but such is Hollywood) the movie would have been a lot better. None of the pathos is overwhelmingly effective; it just drifts through your consciousness with the minimum amount of effort required to feel sorry for Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Reiser surrogate. It's a mostly lazy movie that works well when it goes for comedy but coasts through the rest of its duration.

MellowHype, BlackenedWhite: The rage that Tyler, the Creator's Goblin inspired this year – both because of its sexist, homophobic lyrics and the far worse fact that it was 80 boring minutes long – had a good portion of the critical community done with the non-Frank Ocean factions of Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All once and for all. That caused the reissue of MellowHype's 2010 mixtape BlackenedWhite to go by mostly unnoticed, and while it is a slight album at 11 tracks and barely over 30 minutes, it's an interesting counterpoint to the silky-smoothness of Nostalgia, Ultra and the hateful vitriol of Goblin.

The beats here are great, as all Odd Future recordings with Left Brain's hands on them are, and Hodgy Beats' rapping is far superior to Tyler's. The lyrics here aren't very good, but it's not because Hodgy's a misogynist or a homophobe; it's because he's a kid. Think of the lyrics to Tyler's "Radicals" spread over the length of a whole album and you'll have some idea of the high-school-problems-obsessed nature of BlackenedWhite. Even so, this is a tragically overlooked hip-hop album that is infinitely better than Odd Future's more famous contribution to the genre's canon. With a few more listens, I can see it becoming one of my favorite rap records of the last couple years. Hopefully Wolf next year is even better. I'm not ready to quit on Odd Future just yet.