"Get Rich or Die Tryin'" pulled from Pittsburgh theater after shooting

HOMESTEAD, Pa.

50 Cent said he was saddened by the fatal shooting at a theater where his movie "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" was playing.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

1) Mac and Me
2) Out of Africa
3) MAtrix Reloaded

etc

Get Rich of Die Tryin: Wednesday, November 9, 2005
8 Mile: Friday, November 8, 2002
Menace II Society: Friday, May 28, 1993
South Central: Friday, September 18, 1992
Juice: Friday, January 17, 1992
Boyz in the Hood: Friday, July 12, 1991
New Jack City: Friday, March 8, 1991

Harry Potter, too.

Reknowned urban films, as you can see.

same with LOTR! even our ned attended the tuesday night shotgunning of all three flicks!

Early wednes. . . oh wait.

So basically it might possibly be true that some local theatres are doing this (though on what psychological basis they're doing this on is beyond me) but it's not any known quantity or officially sanctioned thing. Films all open on Friday, with virtually no exception besides holiday weekends.

And people get all upset about the injustice of certain movies opening on Wednesdays.

xpost otm and film threads bring out teh best of 'em.

I wanted to go see 50's movie on wed. but work's been too busy. and I can't go this weekend as I have relatives in town then we have Dave Chapelle tickets on Sunday. Yes, I'm a racist idiot.

Actually, it looks like more a 4 pack there. Is it possible that 50's getting a little bit of a belly?

50's actually really funny and charming in interviews. I'm curious to see how his acting is.

huh, i feel like i've seen huge newspaper ads and billboards all over the place for it.

I still don't believe that head belongs to that body. The neckline is shady!

actually that's really crap PS. it just looks like the tripled his chin and scribbled all over with a sharpie.

TOM PETTY GOT SNIPED BY FIDDY OMG HS!

WHERE'S MAGNET???

But I also loved hustle&flow and 8 Mile so my opinion probably wouldn't pass muster with most of ILx's critics.

Amber Andrews, 13, got to Brookdale Center at 10 a.m. Saturday with one thing on her mind -- seeing the rapidly rising R & B boy band B5 give a free concert. After waiting for more than three hours, Andrews and approximately 2,500 people, mostly girls between 10 and 17, finally got their wish.

But just as B5 finished its first song -- "You Got Me" -- and started the second, an enthusiastic fan jumped on the stage. Within seconds, the crowd surged forward and onto the stage, sparking what one witness called "total chaos."

Witnesses and law enforcement officials said several girls were stepped on, the band was whisked to safety, and the Brooklyn Center mall was cleared and closed for more than two hours.

Four people were taken to North Memorial Medical Center in Robbinsdale where they were treated for minor injuries and released. Five others were treated at the scene.

Brooklyn Center police officials said no one was arrested.

"I was right in front," said Andrews of Minneapolis. "Girls were running on stage, security guards were throwing them off. The girls were tearing off [band members'] clothes."

It got so bad that shopkeepers near the stage area in the mall's Marshall Field's Court pulled young children who had been separated from their parents into the safety of their stores.

"Things were falling off the stage, girls were falling off the stage, girls started fighting. People were falling down and getting hurt," said Theresa Curtis, who works at a store in the mall. "We took a few girls into our store that were missing parents."

Asked if there was enough security at the event, Shelley Klaessy, the mall's marketing director, said more than 20 people were working the concert -- 10 mall security guards and at least 11 Radio Disney personnel.

"I think we pulled together the right amount," Klaessy said.

However, Rosalind Dillard, 27, of Minneapolis, who took her daughter Surae, 10, to the show, said, "I didn't think they had enough [security]. I didn't see a whole lot."

The concert was just the third show of B5's Jingle Jam tour, sponsored by Radio Disney. According to the Atlanta-based group's website, the five brothers who make up B5 have "clean lyrics, age-appropriate content and good, old-fashioned charm." The tour is scheduled to end Dec. 31 in Boston.

"It just seemed like a girl frenzy," said Christopher Taykalo, a spokesman for Radio Disney, 1440 AM in the Twin Cities.

The concert began at 1 p.m., with an opening performance by the group Everlife. The bands started their tour last weekend in Indianapolis.

Sarah Ross, a guitarist with Everlife, said the Indiana show "was pretty tense, but nothing like this. I think the crowd was really excited, and they connected with the guys when they got on stage."

B5 hit the stage about 1:30 p.m. The fans hit the stage minutes later.

Cherrelle Green Rivers, 13, of Minneapolis said she saw band members getting stepped on onstage, having their clothes ripped and even their jewelry snatched.

"I was worried about the boys," she said.

Tamy Johnson, who works at Twins Town, a men's clothing store near the stage, said: "A lot of girls rushed the stage and grabbed a boy [in the band]. He ran to the back. Another boy, he just ran. Security escorted some of the boys out the back."

She also saw a girl fall.

"A little girl hit her head on the floor because her foot was stuck between the stage and a speaker," Johnson said.

Police from 23 jurisdictions responded, including units from Brooklyn Center, Brooklyn Park, Blaine, Fridley, Minneapolis, Golden Valley and the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office. Witnesses said some police were wearing helmets, and some had police dogs.

Police immediately started clearing the mall. At about 4:15 p.m., Brookdale stores began reopening.

Precious McKinney, 12, of Minneapolis came to the concert with a friend and her mother. She was left stranded amid the pandemonium.

She said it would be the last concert she would attend.

Unless ...

"If it's Bow Wow," she said about the rapper who toured with B5 this summer. "Then I'll be there."

Where is the outrage?

This is correct.

By Armond White

Get Rich or Die Trying

Directed by Jim Sheridan

Rapper 50 Cent (Curtis Jackson) peddles the by-now boilerplate hip-hop fairy tale—or thug tale—that he once sold drugs, survived several gunshot wounds and then became a rap star. His movie debut, Get Rich or Die Trying (named after his multiplatinum 2003 debut album), adds clarity to his shtick. It certifies that Fitty himself is a drug. His poison is sold by Interscope Records, Paramount Pictures, MTV and corporate umbrella Viacom to hook the culture on the capitalist insensitivity and greed he personifies.

This thug tale is so rote (repeated by countless rap wannabes) that the movie is an almost fascinating demonstration of the way hip-hop's dullest cliches have captivated millions as the new rise-to-riches folklore. Kids obviously want to believe Fitty's self-infatuated fantasy, since it sells them the easy route to accomplishment (easy because it justifies the zero-thought impulses of vengeance and greed, which are distinct from justice and survival). But more shamefully, adults like director Jim Sheridan and screenwriter Terence Winter enjoy Fitty's fabrication and take part in spreading it, because it fulfills their own zero-thought impulses—such as white social guilt and guilty (indefensible) pleasure.

It's instructive to note that Irish native Sheridan has made Fitty's vanity project as a sequel to his 2003 film In America. That story of a young Irish family who illegally immigrate to New York fed off the hardiest bootstrap American legends, not a few of them perpetuated by hip-hop's highly syncopated tales of underdog ambition (Sheridan also featured the willed optimism of The Lovin Spoonful's "Do You Believe in Magic?"). In America, connected to previous Sheridan films such as My Left Foot, The Boxer and In the Name of the Father—tough fairy tales of Irish folk struggling against hardships that were either existential or just plain bigotry, oppression and their own damned melancholy. These were marvelous not simply for their palpable social concerns, but for Sheridan's humane sensitivity. Unfortunately, Get Rich or Die Trying has neither. (Ireland's best filmmaker, Neil Jordan, once told me how much he enjoyed the '90s hip-hop single "Mistadobalina" by Del the Funkee Homosapien. Jordan's totally marvelous and politically complex Breakfast on Pluto makes me wish it was he who scrutinized 50 Cent.)

Sheridan has turned himself into a cultural zombie, operating on hip-hop cliché and knee-jerk liberal indulgence. This movie is haunted by that horrible line from Alan Parker's bothersome hit The Commitments: "The Irish are the niggers of Europe." That's a rank form of political identification, but it's probably infectious for anyone who thinks his people are both unfairly treated and widely exoticized. This sentimentality might explain Sheridan's bad judgment. He probably relates to Fitty playing disadvantaged ghetto rat Marcus Greer as the flip side of Djimon Hounsou's displaced, HIV-positive African painter in In America. Hounsou's deeply humane alien beauty pulled off that film's Spielbergian conceit, but Fitty is too much a creature of hip-hop decadence and recognizable, real-life criminality to win one's assent to his noxious message. Not knowing the difference makes Sheridan seem a fool, or at the very least, a well-meaning racist.

A moviemaker who can detail the conflict of retribution and rebirth that was at the heart of Daniel Day-Lewis and Emily Watson's Irish-troubles love story in The Boxer should have been able to see through Fitty's bluster and question the way hip-hop, post–Dr. Dre (Fitty's sometime producer), has corrupted the African American human-rights struggle. Not doing so leaves Sheridan as unreliable on the American drug scourge as the trashy movies Sugar Hill and New Jack City (from which Winter's script borrows).

It isn't enough to say that Sheridan lacks firsthand knowledge of Fitty's experience; artists can intuit truth. But Sheridan fails because he accepts Fitty's rap legend ("It was time to go into the family business," Marcus defends his drug-dealing) without probing it. Sheridan denies himself the thoughtful ambivalence that complicates such Ernest Dickerson ghetto films as Juice and his fascinatingly lurid diptych Bones and Never Die Alone.

Looking at this film's hyperactive style, Sheridan seems enlivened by America's gangsta movie heritage—James Cagney's urban criminal exploits as interpreted by Fitty. (Cinematographer Declan Quinn's mobile camera pitches itself into Marcus' violent melees. Home-life scenes are packed with desperate faces, a romanticizing of poverty that suggests a hip-hop, poetic-realist version of Angela's Ashes but not Fitty's actual suburban roots.) This misjudgment seems based in Sheridan's empathy for dissatisfied young men like Fitty—yet he's stuck with the mandate to validate a guy who has the most tight-assed charisma of any star in pop.

While Depression audiences thrilled to Cagney's belligerent audacity, 50 Cent's audience responds to a retrograde style of nerve. As Marcus witnesses his drug-dealing mother's demise and suffers the near-hostile tolerance of the distant relatives he lives with, he uses hip-hop to voice his frustration. "Even when you were a little boy, I could never tell what you were thinking," says his grandmother (Viola Davis). And his girlfriend, Charlene (Joy Bryant, who evokes Eva Marie Saint's sweet yet anxious look in On the Waterfront), tells him, "Men hide their emotions; you bury yours." Somehow, hip-hop fans see and hear a provocative persona. Faking privation, Fitty flashes a spoiled child's smile—a sign of arrogant defiance. He's sneaky, perhaps, but he's not untutored, just maltutored, having ingested Tupac's bluster without thinking. He has a soft voice and big toothy grin but it's his lockjawed rapping style that is his signature. His stealthy and underanimated projection recalls Harlem rapper Mase. And though Fitty's narrow-slit eyes are a furtive contrast to his over-pumped body, they can imply a distinct hint of menace.

This tells us a lot about what today's culture likes in public figures—all of it crude. But it's wrong to blame this film's insufficiency on Fitty's lack of emotiveness; that's his trademark. The real problem is that Winter (a Sopranos hack) gives Marcus no emotional context. In the midst of Bill Duke's ludicrous Vito Corleone impersonation and Marcus' sketchy friendships (including another brilliant but delimited star turn by Terence Howard), the taciturn Fitty comes across as soulless, like Madonna.

Hip-hop's greatest rappers (Chuck D, Brad Johnson of the Geto Boys, Biggie, LL Cool J and sometimes Ice Cube) offered more than Fitty's insolent and profane insinuations. Their recordings deconstructed national politics and found new, personal identities through ingenious innovations of American language and rhythm. Fitty can ride a good beat (as "In Da Club" certainly proved), but he's a slug. And this movie romanticizes his nonsense without truthfully accounting for his cultural impact. Sheridan and Winter don't show the interesting part of Fitty's career, the CD-hustling and mixed-tape programming that semi-revolutionized the culture. Instead, they emphasize the gangsta myth as more important than the music.

Sheridan and Winter let Fitty play on trite sympathy for a kid who says, "I was looking for my father all my life. I realized I was lookin' for me." Their indulgence hits bottom in Marcus' post-gunshot recording session, when his girlfriend beams, "Your voice is better. It's got more pain in it." It's clear then that Sheridan can't tell the difference between pain and pathology. Had Sheridan held on to his humanity, artistry and honesty, this film would be retitled Get Rich AND Die Trying.

best sentence ever

Haunted by a line that doesn't exist.