Did you see it?
James Brown - Get On Up Movie
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Did you see it?
Good thing you went to see it with an open mind. My take is you wanted to go be entertained but the story came across as fake.
On the other hand, it's Hollywood so what can we really expect? Mick Jagger put his $$ up; only fair being that he tried to jack JBs stage moves and sound.
There is only so much story you can tell in a movie; JB's musical perfection standards would have gone over the heads of the dumb & dumber masses.
All this Black $$ out here - who says we can't do another version - truer to the life of JB?
Even though i'm not from Augusta, it would've been nice if they were able to shoot some of the film here.
True, I agree. It would have been nice, but Chadwick Boseman from SC and I gotta support hometown talent.
Oprah bogus
Yea I don't understand that line of thinking. Its by "cacs". Well if you use that line of thinking all of these films are by cac's. They running out hear to go watch all these comic book movies made by cacs. But when there's one about James Brown and has a black cast its a "cac movie". All these films are cac movies....even Tyler Perry's shit.
If you don't want to see the film because it looks like shit than say that. But using the excuse of it being a "cac movie"? That's ridiculous.
Chadwick done came a LONG way. I never thought he'd be starring in ANYTHING when I seen him on Lincoln Heights. I'm happy for dude.
If dudes see it, they see it, if they don't, they don't. It's their $$$ ta' spend. Ain't no need fa' niggas ta' get tight behind da reasoning of others if they don't. Folks ain't gotta see some shit just b/c da next person feels as though they should be obligated ta' do so.
Well that's my point. If you don't want to see it because you just don't want to see it than that's fine. But coming up with bulllshit reasons not to see it because its a "cac movie"? All this money y'all give cac's all year and NOW you don't want to give them your 10 dollars? Shit sounds silly.
Same dudes talking about they don't want to give their movie to "cac's" standing in like right now to see the Guardians of Galaxy or whatever the fuck its called. Probably will say its not a cac movie because Vin Diesal voice is in it and Zoe Saldana is in it but she's green. 
Saw it....
It was decent but I expected a better movie
Limited character development was weakness
Many scenes reminded me of the movie "Ray"
I thought they should have focused on
his inspiration for writing his songs
HoHo eating Jill Scott was corny
It was decent but I expected a better movie
Limited character development was weakness
Many scenes reminded me of the movie "Ray"
I thought they should have focused on
his inspiration for writing his songs
HoHo eating Jill Scott was corny
SMH at some of the comments in this thread.
Oh well. I want to see it. I thought his work in 42 was great and I'm looking to support this brother's other endeavors.
Not sure I quite understand the racial vitriol.
If hollywood doesn't do movies about black people we get mad and when they do, we criticize and don't support them.
*shrugs*
Hey. Whatever. Let him do a Tyler Perry film for work and we will hear a different type a criticism.
Oh well. I want to see it. I thought his work in 42 was great and I'm looking to support this brother's other endeavors.
Not sure I quite understand the racial vitriol.
If hollywood doesn't do movies about black people we get mad and when they do, we criticize and don't support them.
*shrugs*
Hey. Whatever. Let him do a Tyler Perry film for work and we will hear a different type a criticism.
These clown ass niggas sit here in pages of arguments about cac super hero's with no black people even in the fucking movie. Arguing over the size of batman's muscles. But this is a cac movie with a mostly black cast but they won't support it. Foh
Famo, caught this with my girl this weekend v.i.p. at Atlantic Station.
I don't really care about that, but we caught Lucy last weekend and she said she could never do a regular movie again...
So, small backdrop, my girl's dad was a drummer that played in JB's band from time to time so the movie was very, very, personal and sentimental to her.
My take: it was great! I went in their saying if he can get down the walk and the talk, he did his job and the rest is up to the writers and directors. Jill Scott was a welcome addition. I like the fact that they cast Dan Akroyd for the the authenticity of the story (Blues Brothers), and they allowed a bit more "honky" and "white devil" than I thought and that was welcomed.
I am a JB FAN, but I learned a couple of new things things: 1) the ninja was all heart. I knew of his childhood, being from GA, but I mean just ALL heart...stood up for his people non STOP and 2) I believe James Brown just might have been the godfather of a "street team" on that level. he wudn't tryna hear sh!t dan was sayin' about what he couldn't do. He "showed" him the money and that was that.
With that 7th grade education, his musical genius and business marketing acumen are unparalleled in the industry, considering the era he was in, PERIOD!
Last but not least, yeah...yeah...yeah I wanted to see the concert re-enacted about the thrilla in manilla, the white wife at the end, and the crazy ass funeral he had AND they left things out that musicians would love or that music enthusiasts like me would love, but to push to the masses, they chose to tell this story.
Like I always say, if you don't like it...change it, or tell somebody you know who can.
And on a side note, when the f*ck is Little Richard going to get his story told on the big screen. They, black and white, footnote than ninja like a muthaf*cka just because he was a sissy, but that ninja did plenty of firsts in music to have somethin' better than made for TV.
Shout out to WIBB!
I don't really care about that, but we caught Lucy last weekend and she said she could never do a regular movie again...
So, small backdrop, my girl's dad was a drummer that played in JB's band from time to time so the movie was very, very, personal and sentimental to her.
My take: it was great! I went in their saying if he can get down the walk and the talk, he did his job and the rest is up to the writers and directors. Jill Scott was a welcome addition. I like the fact that they cast Dan Akroyd for the the authenticity of the story (Blues Brothers), and they allowed a bit more "honky" and "white devil" than I thought and that was welcomed.
I am a JB FAN, but I learned a couple of new things things: 1) the ninja was all heart. I knew of his childhood, being from GA, but I mean just ALL heart...stood up for his people non STOP and 2) I believe James Brown just might have been the godfather of a "street team" on that level. he wudn't tryna hear sh!t dan was sayin' about what he couldn't do. He "showed" him the money and that was that.
With that 7th grade education, his musical genius and business marketing acumen are unparalleled in the industry, considering the era he was in, PERIOD!
Last but not least, yeah...yeah...yeah I wanted to see the concert re-enacted about the thrilla in manilla, the white wife at the end, and the crazy ass funeral he had AND they left things out that musicians would love or that music enthusiasts like me would love, but to push to the masses, they chose to tell this story.
Like I always say, if you don't like it...change it, or tell somebody you know who can.
And on a side note, when the f*ck is Little Richard going to get his story told on the big screen. They, black and white, footnote than ninja like a muthaf*cka just because he was a sissy, but that ninja did plenty of firsts in music to have somethin' better than made for TV.
Shout out to WIBB!
I saw the movie. I expected to really learn about James Brown and how he was able to write his songs and everything. I got a disjointed movie that jumped from the end, to beginning, to the middle and back every few seconds. He deserves a better movie IMO. I think the problem is he didn't have much family to tell his story the way it should have been told. It was like red tails, you have a great story but focus on stuff that wasn't important or made up instead of the truth which is fascinating all on its own. I still enjoyed the movie due to them playing a lot of James Brown's music. It's worth a watch but I hope it gets remade by someone who can tell the proper story
I don't understand it.
I just don't. And what kills me is they never even like the comic book movies. They determine in advance before they even see it that its gonna be wack....go out and go see it just to complain about the shit.
Without seeing it when I saw the trailer it felt more like a music video. I didn't think they'd really dive too much into his life like other bio movies have done. I was hoping I was wrong about that. From the trailer it seemed the movie was gonna focus on the exterior of James Brown.
Woodchcuk say it again - I don't think they heard ya bro
Also - we complain when we dont see enough black stars get movies but if we dont support them like young brother Chadwick Boseman because some white person made the movie - fuck it we live in America - White people make everything - during the "glorious" blaxploitation era it was all Jews making the movies about "Git Whitey" - they didnt care what went on the screen as long as it made money.
Hollywood view its stars by how they open a movie and if the movie doesn't make money you wont see that type of movie anymore
so stop talking about white people making movies and support black performers and you will see more and more black movies.
this is BGOL home of the make believe radicals.
we make excuses for every black person that gets hemmed up rightfully or wrongfully
we won't watch a movie because a cac tells a story that blacks haven't.
because its better to not hear the story than to have THEM tell it.
and then we can't wait to no pull out a white girl that gets posted while we always have some reason to negate a black woman.
we won't be satisfied until Spike tells the story of some crakka in history when we won't even tell the story of black people in history.
yeah welcome to bizzaro world
I stole it from a gif collection. I forgot the name.
you want to learn watch a documentary or read the book by his son
but in 2014 why don't you already know about James Brown ?
Chad is from my hometown. I plan on checking it out.
I don't understand it.
And what kills me is they never even like the comic book movies. They determine in advance before they even see it that its gonna be wack....go out and go see it just to complain about the shit.
Without seeing it when I saw the trailer it felt more like a music video. I didn't think they'd really dive too much into his life like other bio movies have done. I was hoping I was wrong about that. From the trailer it seemed the movie was gonna focus on the exterior of James Brown.
I just saw it, my personal opinion its really to soon to do a film on James Brown. He was such an iconic figure that anyone who portrays him will look like he's doing a cheap imitation.
peace
The Soul Composer/Conductor Original Extraordinaire
Spitting freestyle to the Apollo crowd
PreFunk
EverGivingSoulMusic Godfather of the Raw
This shit is stupid
Ressurected
again
& so on...
Anybody know of another older English based documentary of him where dude talks about how the music changed in '63 towards more driving rhythms & how all the instruments in the band were played like drums?
On that J Period mixtape on Superbad, he blended those vocals over the track.
The Soul Composer/Conductor Original Extraordinaire
Spitting freestyle to the Apollo crowd
PreFunk
EverGivingSoulMusic Godfather of the Raw
This shit is stupid
Ressurected
again
& so on...
Anybody know of another older English based documentary of him where dude talks about how the music changed in '63 towards more driving rhythms & how all the instruments in the band were played like drums?
On that J Period mixtape on Superbad, he blended those vocals over the track.
We don't support shit or hold anyone accountable. And these fake radicals and fake black elitists......they support cacs and don't even know it. From that cable bill, to that hi speed internet, to the clothes on their back.....shit is ridiculous.
We should support our own when we bring out a quality product. I agree with that notion. But we also have to remember to support our brotha's and sista's even if they're in white productions.
Harry Belafonte wasn't doing black films his whole career.
Truth spoken.
Extract the universally uncontroversial genius of James Brown's talent and music, then consider how the film portrayed James Brown the man. The film portrayed him and as a short-term thinking, poorly educated, non-critical thinking, uncouth clown and buffoon; just another "tragic" negro entertainer. That's the lasting image that people who don't know the real James Brown story will leave the theater with. The filmmakers accomplished their mission.
I Guess no mention in the file about how he molested and beat the shit out of Tammi Terrell
I Guess no mention in the file about how he molested and beat the shit out of Tammi Terrell
Thought that shit was David Ruffin?
The Whitewashing of James Brown
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gregory-allen-howard/whitewashing-of-james-brown_b_5638130.html
There were several meetings. Eight white men and two white women. Was this a meeting of the Mormon Glee Club? The New White Citizens Council? Perhaps a Klan meeting? No. That meeting was the creative team for the new James Brown movie, "Get On Up."
Welcome to post-racial Hollywood where if you host a fundraiser for Barack Obama, you're freed of the burden of hiring black writers. And where a rich white producer can jokingly declare, "I'm black."
Indeed, all the producers, writers, and the director of the James Brown movie are white. No black people were hired until a few weeks before the cameras started rolling, the actors. In fact, several of the people involved in this whitewash are British. The Brits have a fetish for black projects.
This is the Donald Sterling message: don't bring them to the game. There are over fifty black iconic biopics and black-themed movies in development in Hollywood, including multiple Richard Pryor projects, five Martin Luther King projects, multiple Marvin Gaye projects, and civil rights projects, and only one or two have an African American writer. Our entire history has been given over to white writers.
When the late David Wolper was producing "Roots" thirty-something years ago, he hired no black writers. When asked why, he was quoted as saying: "They're too close to the material." I guess we're still too close.
This Hollywood apartheid against the African American writer could be understood if the writers being hired were of such quality as to be beyond reproach artistically. With rare exception, that is not the case. Sift through the morass, and you'll find a group of hacks, insiders, and drinking buddies. The executives are trading our icons around like baseball cards.
How do these insiders, pals of the executives, become experts on black culture overnight? Wikipedia. In case you didn't know, the entire black experience is on Wikipedia. Here is a typical day in Hollywood. Agent calls a writer, tells him he got him an interview for "this black guy who was really important." The writer says cool, goes to the wiki pages, memorizes them, takes the meeting and wings his "knowledge" of the black icon. That's it. He gets the job.
You see, the first thing people do in this town before hiring someone is look in the mirror. What I see in front of me is beauty, brains, and competence, Oh, and hipness. Yep, that's who I'm gonna hire: me!
If ever a project required black creative involvement, it was this one. James Brown was the blackest entertainer in the history of America. The blackest. There was nothing integrationist about his art, at all. He never tried to crossover. You had to come to him. He was iconic and not just musically.
And yet, where did producer Brian Grazer hire to embody this blackest of black men? Three white writers, two of them from England. Then more producers were added, all white, and a white director, who has said that he sees this as a movie about singing and dancing. Bingo. Now we're ready to make a black movie. It doesn't matter a bit that one of the producers is a famous rock star who played with Brown a few times and lifted some of his moves. James Brown belongs to us, the black masses, and for us to be excluded from the creative team that made this movie is an obscenity. I'm aware that Spike Lee was involved briefly, but the finished product looks like a Mitt Romney family reunion.
Let me tell you who James Brown was, really, not the Wikipedia James Brown.
He was a civil rights icon. Put James in the pantheon of the most impactful black men of the 20th century, and he would not be out of place. How can I make such an assertion? One song: "I'm Black and I'm Proud."
Before that song, if you wanted to start a fight with a man of color, all one had to do was call him black. Up until the mid-sixties, we were trying define ourselves: not colored anymore, now Negro. But black was not something we called ourselves. And along comes this little man and proudly states, "I'm black and I'm proud!" He took the thing that the oppressor used to bludgeon us and made it a weapon of pride for us.
That song caught on like wildfire. One day, our heads were down, the next day, our heads were held high, proud of who we were. We had all these groups, civil rights groups, Muslims, Panthers, but it was JB who gave us our swagger. That song lifted up an entire race! He put us on his back and carried us. Dr. King gave us our rights. JB gave us our dignity. Civil rights icon? You better believe it.
When that song came on the radio, cars stopped in the street. People turned up their radios, came out of their houses, and sang along with it; radio stations put it in a loop and played it for hours. The next day people greeted each other with "Hello, black man!" "My black brother." JB made black beautiful overnight.
But the focus of this movie is singing and dancing. When we are kept out of the room, that is what you end up with, a pale Wikified imitation of what a great man was.
And yet, if someone decided to do the Gloria Steinem story, you better believe women would be involved; they'd have to be. Can you fathom ten men sitting in a room, male writers, directors, and producers all staring at their navels grunting: "I am woman, hear me roar"? But that won't happen because people in this town respect women.
It's too late to save JB, but maybe there's hope to save the other icons from the Wiki-fueled humiliation of having their stories told by people who have no organic connection to us or our struggle.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gregory-allen-howard/whitewashing-of-james-brown_b_5638130.html
There were several meetings. Eight white men and two white women. Was this a meeting of the Mormon Glee Club? The New White Citizens Council? Perhaps a Klan meeting? No. That meeting was the creative team for the new James Brown movie, "Get On Up."
Welcome to post-racial Hollywood where if you host a fundraiser for Barack Obama, you're freed of the burden of hiring black writers. And where a rich white producer can jokingly declare, "I'm black."
Indeed, all the producers, writers, and the director of the James Brown movie are white. No black people were hired until a few weeks before the cameras started rolling, the actors. In fact, several of the people involved in this whitewash are British. The Brits have a fetish for black projects.
This is the Donald Sterling message: don't bring them to the game. There are over fifty black iconic biopics and black-themed movies in development in Hollywood, including multiple Richard Pryor projects, five Martin Luther King projects, multiple Marvin Gaye projects, and civil rights projects, and only one or two have an African American writer. Our entire history has been given over to white writers.
When the late David Wolper was producing "Roots" thirty-something years ago, he hired no black writers. When asked why, he was quoted as saying: "They're too close to the material." I guess we're still too close.
This Hollywood apartheid against the African American writer could be understood if the writers being hired were of such quality as to be beyond reproach artistically. With rare exception, that is not the case. Sift through the morass, and you'll find a group of hacks, insiders, and drinking buddies. The executives are trading our icons around like baseball cards.
How do these insiders, pals of the executives, become experts on black culture overnight? Wikipedia. In case you didn't know, the entire black experience is on Wikipedia. Here is a typical day in Hollywood. Agent calls a writer, tells him he got him an interview for "this black guy who was really important." The writer says cool, goes to the wiki pages, memorizes them, takes the meeting and wings his "knowledge" of the black icon. That's it. He gets the job.
You see, the first thing people do in this town before hiring someone is look in the mirror. What I see in front of me is beauty, brains, and competence, Oh, and hipness. Yep, that's who I'm gonna hire: me!
If ever a project required black creative involvement, it was this one. James Brown was the blackest entertainer in the history of America. The blackest. There was nothing integrationist about his art, at all. He never tried to crossover. You had to come to him. He was iconic and not just musically.
And yet, where did producer Brian Grazer hire to embody this blackest of black men? Three white writers, two of them from England. Then more producers were added, all white, and a white director, who has said that he sees this as a movie about singing and dancing. Bingo. Now we're ready to make a black movie. It doesn't matter a bit that one of the producers is a famous rock star who played with Brown a few times and lifted some of his moves. James Brown belongs to us, the black masses, and for us to be excluded from the creative team that made this movie is an obscenity. I'm aware that Spike Lee was involved briefly, but the finished product looks like a Mitt Romney family reunion.
Let me tell you who James Brown was, really, not the Wikipedia James Brown.
He was a civil rights icon. Put James in the pantheon of the most impactful black men of the 20th century, and he would not be out of place. How can I make such an assertion? One song: "I'm Black and I'm Proud."
Before that song, if you wanted to start a fight with a man of color, all one had to do was call him black. Up until the mid-sixties, we were trying define ourselves: not colored anymore, now Negro. But black was not something we called ourselves. And along comes this little man and proudly states, "I'm black and I'm proud!" He took the thing that the oppressor used to bludgeon us and made it a weapon of pride for us.
That song caught on like wildfire. One day, our heads were down, the next day, our heads were held high, proud of who we were. We had all these groups, civil rights groups, Muslims, Panthers, but it was JB who gave us our swagger. That song lifted up an entire race! He put us on his back and carried us. Dr. King gave us our rights. JB gave us our dignity. Civil rights icon? You better believe it.
When that song came on the radio, cars stopped in the street. People turned up their radios, came out of their houses, and sang along with it; radio stations put it in a loop and played it for hours. The next day people greeted each other with "Hello, black man!" "My black brother." JB made black beautiful overnight.
But the focus of this movie is singing and dancing. When we are kept out of the room, that is what you end up with, a pale Wikified imitation of what a great man was.
And yet, if someone decided to do the Gloria Steinem story, you better believe women would be involved; they'd have to be. Can you fathom ten men sitting in a room, male writers, directors, and producers all staring at their navels grunting: "I am woman, hear me roar"? But that won't happen because people in this town respect women.
It's too late to save JB, but maybe there's hope to save the other icons from the Wiki-fueled humiliation of having their stories told by people who have no organic connection to us or our struggle.
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