Tupac Resurrection:

The advent of mass-public-accessible documentaries has arrived. Move over Bowling for Columbine. Move over Hoop Dreams. Welcome Tupac Resurrection.

This is a must-see, period. Done in virtually the same style as Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, Tupac Resurrection is a posthumous quasi-auto-biographical telltale legend story about the controversy of Tupac Shakur - it is, in his words, "my life story about love, violence, betrayal, redemption, and passion." Thankfully shying away from East-West bullshit drama, the film conveys with literally no outside-perspective (it's done in 100% first person) the intelligence, politics, drama, and controversy of Tupac, showing the viewer the passion and redemption of perhaps the greatest and most notorious rapper in history.

"Tupac: Resurrection is about rap music, the forces that created it, and the world it then created. Shakur talks about the experiences and politics that went into his own music, in a way that casts more light on rap than anything else I've come across in a movie. Although rap is not music in the sense that you come out humming the melody, it's as genuine an American idiom as jazz or the blues, and it is primarily a medium of words, of ideology; a marriage of turntables, poetry slams, autobiography and righteous anger." (Ebert)

The hard part of making a Tupac film: Tupac is a California legend; our 90's version of a hip-hopesque John Lennon and virtually a national hero - he is an undisputed media icon, and a political and poetic thug-figure to all upcoming hip-hop artists. How do you show something in the film that we don't already know?

"Tupac had such vitality" - Yes, we know all of that, but never has a film made it so incredibly and articulately materialized. We don't need to be told anymore that Tupac had an incredible charisma and vitality; in this film, we are shown.

"Tupac was a thug" - Yes, we can see that by his tattoo on his abs. But contrary to popular opinion, Tupac was not born a thug, and he was not raised a thug. What the film paints of Tupac is a much more introspective picture of an extroverted person, a contemporary political poet caught in the anger of white-american racism who is painfully trying to act 10 times more 'thug' than he is, or ever was, or ever could be. In his own words, "I didn't have a record, until I had a record."

"Tupac was intelligent" - Yes, we know that as well - you can see that by his reading his lyrics. But I for one, didn't know the extent of Tupac's intelligence until this movie.

Please watch this movie. If you don't like Tupac or you're not a rap-fan, please find it in yourself to open your mind, expand your horizons, and indulge.

"As you listen to his uncanny narration of Tupac: Resurrection, which is stitched together from interviews, you realize you're not listening to the usual self-important vacancies from celebrity Q&As, but to spoken prose of a high order, in which analysis, memory and poetry come together seamlessly in sentences and paragraphs that sound as if they were written. Let's assume you are a person who never intends to see a doc about rap music, but might have it in you to see one. This is the one." (Ebert)