The history of film is of course littered with bad decisions and silly ideas, but an astonishing percentage of those seem to be borne from a desire to bring a fad, fashion or flavour-of-the-month through from the rock and pop world into the movie business. That in itself has produced some memorable clunkers over the past few decades, but it's when the pop stars decide they wanna act that things can get seriously awful. Damn them, comes the plaintive cry from the music world on a regular basis. Damn those film and television actors who want to get their heads on MTV - how dare they! Russell Crowe, Gwyneth Paltrow, Keanu Reeves, all of them should just stick with what they're good at and leave the music-making to the experts.
Needless to say, the music industry never practices what it preaches, and so over the years we've been blessed with bad acting by everyone from Elvis to the Village People to Peter Frampton and The Bee Gees to Mariah Carey. "I create," inevitably says the pop star, "and therefore I can act." Trouble is, they often can't.
The world of rap music has managed to produce a handful of fairly decent actors, though - probably because rap is one of the more thespian-minded areas of music in the first place. Ice T and LL Cool J have carved out respectable acting careers to the point where no-one really gives a toss about their records any longer, but for every one of those there's another ten who seem to think that bringing their pouting, posing and on-stage posturing to the movie set will catapult them onto Hollywood's a-list. It usually has the opposite effect.
Blame the movie studios. Hey, the guy from Arrested Development wants to be an actor? Cool! Let's set him up with a script where he can play… a rapper! It'll be just like REAL LIFE, y'know!
The studio thinks for 30 seconds.
Let's do a story about… a rap musician whose childhood best friend is a streetwise thug who leads our good rapper astray all the time and then steals a big wad of cash to finance his debut album and nearly gets them both killed 'cos life's not only tough in the streets but also in the recording studio! Yeah! And hey, we can tie it all in with a record label and do a killer soundtrack!
Turn It Up is the resulting movie. And what a misfire it is - riddled with clichés and bad dialogue, it's almost a parody of the genre it so desperately wants to be a part of. A balding white crime boss who appears to be meant to be South African but comes across like Bob Hoskins (Jason Statham) is the unlikely "bad guy" in this street-crime-meets-music flick, while bland and personality-free would-be rap star Diamond (Pras) and stereotypical pissed-off-bad-boy Gage (Ja Rule) are apparently the "good guys". Trouble is, the good guys are too dumb to be interesting, while the bad guy is too hilariously over the top to be taken seriously. When it all reaches a climax with - get this - a gun battle over a master tape (!), you can't help but wish everybody would shoot everybody so we could go watch something that doesn't feel like two consecutive screenings of Titanic even though it's only 83 minutes long.
That is assuming, of course, that anyone is still around after Diamond's automotively-named girlfriend Kia delivers the film's biggest clunker. "You want me to show you the stick I peed on?" she cries. "I'm pregnant!"
"I don't wanna be no father," replies Diamond, who's too busy bonding with his estranged father (who convinces him that samplers are bad and "real" instruments are good by pretending to play the piano but actually miming to a backing tape) and making his debut album with a budget of US$100,000. Let's put that last one in perspective, by the way. One hundred thousand dollars. In a studio that costs $150 an hour to hire. That means that even if Diamond stayed in the studio 12 hours a day (and he obviously doesn't, as he's too busy going off doing heists and bonding with dad - who's played, by the way, by Vondie Curtis-Hall in one of the film's few believable performances, piano playing notwithstanding) he would have been recording for nearly two months without a single day off. However, in the movie the album seems to finish itself in mere days rather than weeks, and so we presume the single half-hour reel of two inch analogue tape that is portrayed as the master recording in the film must have been very, very expensive. It was probably the spiffy red reel that cost the extra cash. That, and the Ritchie Family sample he'd undoubtedly have to pay a clearance fee on - a sample from a song co-written by Henri Belolo and Jacques Morali, the songwriters behind the Village People!
But we digress. If you're still around when the film approaches its climax (which also features Diamond imploring Gage not to shoot a helpless, innocent and pleading-for-her-life woman in the head "because she's pregnant" (and these guys are supposed to be our heroes?) you'll wonder what all this noise and gunfire and bad rap was ultimately all for. At least on DVD you have an option you wouldn't have had with this film in the cinema.
You can stop the music.
Presented at an aspect ratio just slightly opened up from its original 1.85:1 cinema ratio, Turn It Up on DVD looks as good as you'd expect from the ever-winning combination of Roadshow and New Line. The crisp but not over-sharpened image shows off the movie's often very dark visuals well, and crucially (much of the film is set at night or in dimly-lit studios) shadow detail and black levels are good throughout.
There are a few unexpected but minor "jumps" in the image on occasion that on closer inspection seem to have been caused by the MPEG encoding; there's also a barely-noticeable duplicated frame around the 25 minute mark that is noticeable mainly because it happens right in the middle of a smooth dolly shot.
The movie, with its extremely short running time, is stored on a single-layered DVD but is still encoded at a surprisingly low bitrate - there's about a gigabyte of unused space on the disc!
The sole audio track here is the theatrical Dolby Digital 5.1 mix, and on a movie largely concerned with rap music and that genre's customary Big Drum Loops you'd expect this to be an audio knock-out. It's not, though it's still a perfectly serviceable soundtrack; the main problem is the tendency of the sound mixers to fire delayed stereo audio through the rear channels whenever a rap song is playing to presumably simulate room acoustics; it ultimately just sounds muddy and takes the focus off the songs' rhythmic bite. The subwoofer is actually not always called into use for the music, either - many of the studio sequences don't use the LFE track at all for their bass, assigning it to the main front channels instead.
During the non-music sections the soundtrack is front-focussed but with continual subtle ambience in the surrounds; it's generally well-mixed in this department, even if the surrounds are used a little bit too extravagantly during the gun battles (they've got five full-range channels and you can bet they're gonna make sure you notice they've used 'em all!)
Dialogue is reasonably well-recorded, but you can't do a great deal about actors that are too busy pouting and posing to open their mouths enough to be legible. You'll be grateful for the subtitle stream (which is of the usual Roadshow high quality, by the way).
If you're after a fast paced drama centred around the world of rap, we're sorry to say that this ain't it. If you're easily satisfied, though - or get a kick out of bad dialogue - then Turn It Up might be what you're after. Those most likely to enjoy it all, though, are fans of its stars' music careers.
Roadshow's DVD of the film offers reasonably good video and audio quality for this modestly budgeted film, though it's not perfect.
