When was 8 mile made

I think not. Just like Marshall Mathers, B-Rabbit worked odd jobs in order to pay the bills while he was pursuing his music-making dreams to become a rapper. In 8 Mile, Rabbit works at an automotive factory, which makes complete sense.

At the time, the automotive industry was mostly viable in Detroit. But the real Slim Shady never worked in a factory. Then, Dr. Dre signed Em and got him the heck out of there.

B-Rabbit almost worked as a hotel bellhop before they settled on the factory. But the rapper never worked at a hotel either.

In 8 Mile, he meets his love interest, Alex played by Brittany Murphy , at work. They hook up, he develops feelings for her, and then he walks in on her cheating on him with some dude. However, some of the details are a little iffy. Source: Moviestillsdb. For example, Marshall met Kim back when he was 15, and the two were in a long-term slightly toxic relationship while Em was struggling to make it in the hip hop scene. In the year the movie takes place , the couple had a daughter together.

Their love story is a little bit different than the one depicted on screen. The main storyline in 8 Mile is B-Rabbit struggling to get studio time and put an album out.

All he wants is to make it in the music business, but the only way he achieves real success is through his rap battle performances, at work, and at The Shelter.

Now, Eminem did, in fact, start off doing rap battles, some held at The Shelter a real venue in Detroit. But in , the rapper recorded his first album, Infinite, and released it in His journey to fame was a little different than that of his 8 Mile counterpart, who was far from famous, in Marshall Mathers got his rap moniker in a pretty simple way, from his initials, M. People are naturally inclined to root for the underdog, and things are no different in 8 Mile.

Then, the character spends weeks practicing and preparing for his triumphant return. Eminem makes it look super easy in real life. Spitting out rhymes and such impressive lyrics is definitely not as easy as it looks. Another significant difference between B-Rabbit and Eminem lies in their physical traits.

This may sound confusing, considering they are functionally the same person. Perhaps it was so that audiences could distinguish between Marshall Mathers, the rapper, and the character he is playing.

In 8 Mile, B-Rabbit lives in a run-down trailer home with his mother, who has her own set of issues. She is hooked on drugs, and Jimmy gets in a fight with her live-in boyfriends. All the drama pretty much forced Jimmy into being responsible for raising his younger sibling. One of the most noticeable differences is that in 8 Mile, Rabbit has a little sister named Lily. But in real life, Eminem has a younger brother named Nathan. When it comes to online information, a lot of facts tend to be false.

Then Rabbit throws up. Then he goes onstage, where he has 45 seconds to out-rap his competitor in a showdown. And then he freezes. The seconds creep by in total silence, until Rabbit flees the stage and the Shelter.

We are hardly started in "8 Mile," and already we see that this movie stands aside from routine debut films by pop stars. It stands aside from Britney Spears and the Spice Girls and the other hit machines who have unwisely tried to transfer musical ability into acting careers. Like Prince's "Purple Rain," it is the real thing. Eminem insists on Rabbit's proletarian roots, on his slattern mother, on his lonely progress as a white boy in a black world.

Whether "8 Mile" is close to Eminem's own autobiographical truths, I do not know. It is a faithful reflection of his myth, however, beginning with the title, which refers to the road which separates Detroit from its white suburbs. He lives on the black side of the road, where he has found acceptance and friendship from a posse of homies, and especially from Future Mekhi Phifer , who emcees the contests at the Shelter.

When Rabbit gets into fights with black rivals, and he does, they are motivated not by racism but by more wholesome feelings, like sexual jealousy and professional envy.

The genius of Rabbit is to admit his own weaknesses. This is also the approach of Eminem, who acknowledges in his lyrics that he's a white man playing in a black man's field. In the climactic performance scene in "8 Mile," he not only skewers his opponent but preempts any comeback by trashing himself first, before the other guy can.

At one point, devastatingly, he even calls another rapper "too generic. The movie, directed by Curtis Hanson " Wonder Boys " and written by Scott Silver , is a grungy version of a familiar formula, in which the would-be performer first fails at his art, then succeeds, is unhappy in romance but lucky in his friends, and comes from an unfortunate background.

Believe it or not, two of Hollywood's most renowned filmmakers wanted a crack at directing Eminem's motion picture and both of them came extremely close to doing so. In Boyle's case, he even came on and met with Eminem and the other producers before ultimately deciding that their creative differences wouldn't allow him to direct the film the way he wanted too. Quentin Tarantino wasn't as close as Boyle was to getting the job, but it's rumored that he genuinely wanted it but would've had to back out of making Kill Bill which just wasn't an option.

Could you imagine an 8 Mile directed by Quentin Tarantino? Cheddar-Bob shooting himself would've been a much different scene. It's ironic how well-known this cult-classic film is maybe not ironic since Eminem is one of the top-selling artists of all time but certainly surprising that it picked up such a loyal fan-base so quickly because the film was sent out to movie theaters under the pseudonym of "The Mars Project" to shroud the project in secrecy before release.

Along with that, the title for the feature wasn't decided until filming was almost finished with the project being worked on under the name "Untitled Detroit Project". Neither of those are as catchy as 8 Mile so we think they made the right call. The man who is about to take up the mantle of Captain America in cinema's most historically successful film franchise faced his greatest enemy back in - and it was his first movie ever. That's right, Papa Doc himself, the man who was supposed to be the top-dog of Free World and dethrone Eminem as the greatest freestyle rapper was Anthony Mackie's 1st film role.

Talk about intimidating. Even if the film in question isn't already a vanity project about the musician's life Glitter, Purple Rain, Moonwalker and so on , there's a tendency for singers to either play themselves or needlessly draw attention to their presence. Sometimes this can work to the film's advantage - for instance, David Byrne in True Stories - but for every figure like David Bowie who can serve a role, there are a dozen singers who simply can't fit in.

Sometimes you get even both phenomena in the same film, as was the case in Ken Russell's Tommy: Tina Turner excels as the Acid Queen, while Eric Clapton with both a real and a fake beard is barely credible. On the back of The Marshall Mathers LP and The Eminem Show, which brought him both hit singles and critical praise, it would have been extremely easy for him to coast on a project like this.

Instead, we get a very fine performance in a film which avoids some but not all of the cliche-ridden pitfalls of the rags-to-riches story. While not perfect, or Curtis Hanson's finest film, it is a gritty and absorbing project which still holds up very well after 15 years.

One of the first challenges that any film about music has to do is to explain the appeal of the music and its surrounding culture to an audience that may have no familiarity with it. Because of the prevalence of rap and hip-hop in mainstream culture, it would be easy to assume that the paying public would go along with every aspect of the world that is put in front of them.

But because this is a period piece, which takes place in a very specific context within the history of American music, that simply isn't an option. This is the mistake made by Notorious no, not the Hitchcock film , which assumed that its audience would already be experts on Notorious B. Even if you're not a fan of rap music and I include myself in this category , the film gives us a sufficient grounding in the world of mids Detroit to understand why this music has a pull on young men, and why Rabbit would feel the need to prove himself in this way.

Just as the mod movement in London in the s provided an outlet for young men who laboured away in factories by day "the dirty jobs" of Quadrophenia , so the rap battles provide an outlet for the all the frustrations, ego and anxiety experienced by these young men. By focussing on the plight of disenfranchised, alienated young men in an unforgiving landscape, the film merits close comparison with La Haine, and by extension Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. While there are some clear narrative similarities - the protagonists are all three young men, who undertake some form of manual labour to get by and feed their respective vices - there is a big difference in emphasis.

Both Mathieu Kassovitz and Karel Reisz are interested in the social conditions which could have produced their leading men, whether it's the banlieues of Paris or the post-war streets of Nottingham. Hanson, by contrast, keeps Eminem and his character's journey front and centre, with the setting increasingly fading into the background. That's not to say, of course, that Hanson's rendering of s Detroit is completely unremarkable or inconsequential.

He's assisted ably in this regard by Rodrigo Prieto, who was Oscar-nominated for his work on Silence and Brokeback Mountain. More pertinently to this film, he shot Amores Perros, and the film benefits from his gritty use of handheld cameras and claustrophobic lighting choices. While the rendering of the landscape is not the most groundbreaking for its subject matter, it is effective in getting across what might be called the prison of familiarity: the main characters are desperate to get out of their situation in some way, but always end up staying because this world is the only one they know.

In the traditional rags-to-riches model, the protagonist goes through the many trials of the story to emerge intact, leave the confines of the society in which they found themselves at the start, and go off to achieve their dream and enjoy success. Ebert wrote: "[8 Mile] "avoids the rags-to-riches route and shows Rabbit moving from rags to slightly better rags I would love to see a sequel in which Rabbit makes millions and becomes world famous, and we learn at last if it is possible for him to be happy.

But in the case of 8 Mile, it's a narrative decision which pays off, because it compliments the gritty feel for which Hanson is striving. Situating fairy tales in a gritty environment can work brilliantly well - Hard Candy and Heartless being great examples - but you have to establish the rules of engagement very early on.

Introducing a fairy tale ending to a gritty, realistic story can regularly prove jarring, turning an earthly drama into a cheap and frothy melodrama. With 8 Mile, there is a conscious effort from Hanson and Eminem to hammer home the disjunct between the emotional feeling of success and the practical benefits that it brings. Rabbit rises in status by the end of the film, earning respect after his initial failure, but in the end he is still living in a trailer park with his family, working a boring, unrewarding job and just about staying on the right side of the law.

The downside to this approach is that the film occasionally feels repetitive or drags; we know that some kind of uplift is coming, because the story is well-worn, and there are times of wishing that it would just cut to the chase. But the film deserves credit for not taking the Hollywood route at the ending; it may not be making any kind of profound political point in this decision, but it is the right way of doing it.

All of which brings us on to Eminem's performance. Rappers have in the past been particularly guilty of just playing themselves in films; Ice Cube has carved an entire film career out of shouting and chewing the scenery Boys n the Hood notwithstanding.

But even though Rabbit's story is a partial reflection of Eminem's own life, there is nothing either self-conscious or narcissistic about his performance. There's a vulnerability to him which isn't always present in his music, and he commits to the character, fighting any urge to showboat or break the fourth wall.

It's a very fine performance, culminating in the excellent final rap battle and his Oscar-winning rendition of 'Lose Yourself'. Outside of Eminem, the supporting cast of 8 Mile do a very good job.

Casting Kim Basinger as Rabbit's mother was a sore point for many critics, who felt that she was too glamorous to pull off the part. But Basinger, who worked with Hanson previously on L. Confidential, acquits herself perfectly well, consciously and deliberately downplaying even her most emotional scene so that Rabbit's story and experience is always in the foreground.

Britanny Murphy, who was great in Girl, Interrupted, adds a real spark as Rabbit's love interest, adding it to her impressive roster of compellingly fractured supporting characters. Jackson and fellow rapper and Pimp My Ride host Xzibit. There are a couple of issues with 8 Mile which prevent it from being a masterpiece. For all its attempted departures from convention in the final half hour, it's still a deeply generic beast which makes too little of its opportunities to depart from the Rocky formula.

And despite us knowing for the most part where the story will go, the film is still very loosely edited; it doesn't have the raw, breakneck intensity that made La Haine so good, and there's only so much we can look at a run-down street before we start to lose interest. While it's hardly the most original story ever told, and some of its execution could have been tightened up in the editing suite, there is enough in both the narrative and the performances to carry us through and keep us interested.

If nothing else, it's a good reminder that singers can occasionally hold their own in cinema, and while it isn't Hanson's greatest film, it is still a worthwhile watch.

Daniel M Super Reviewer. Jun 20, In the movie industry today, it's not uncommon to see a musical artist make his or her attempt at being a part of a film in some way or another. However, it's uncommon to see those films be worthwhile. With 8 Mile, however, we are treated to an emotional, uplifting, and well-acted story that follows a character that parallels Eminem, played by Eminem, and his everyday struggles in the slums of Detroit.