I also saw it on opening night here in Portland. Only one screen downtown, one at the Lloyd Center, and about six in the suburbs, so you can see where the marketing is oriented :)
It was about 80% full at 10 pm at the downtown show, and the crowd was pretty quiet, typical for Portland. A *lot* of laughs for the "Sweet Home Alabama" scene though. I was almost certainly the oldest viewer in the audience. Mostly it's really good, although I wouldn't say it's a great movie. The one scene that seemed contrived was the fight in the JLB studio. I'm not a fan of Eminem at all, but he showed me something in this movie. And so did the writer and director and cinematographer. This is a movie about Detroit, and it is a movie about *black* Detroit, but I didn't feel any of the distancing and caricature that a mass-market movie would be expected to take. This Detroit feels real, and the suburbs are just a presence offstage, and the class complexities are constantly present. My favorite scene -- it's contrived too but it really works -- is the impromptu three-way a capella battle outside the stamping plant. I don't think this story could have been made in LA or on the east coast -- too many preconceptions about "gangstas" and what hip hop supposedly is about. Detroit is a blank canvas to the rest of the country, and now the rest of the country will see, at least one bit of, what has happened to Detroit and implicitly how we all let that happen. That comes down in one key scene that I'll leave out because it would be a spoiler. This is a movie where even the bad guys are allowed to have some depth, and in the end they really aren't so different from the good guys. Which kind of makes sense. And while Eminem is the leading focus of the movie, and it's true a white guy like that is the only one who could get this kind of media buildup (there's even a line in the script that says that right up front), that seemed OK. But I'm waiting for the movie that tells the story of how, say, Kevin Saunderson made his way up from the anonymous suburbs to rock the world. But for now, on 8 Mile, my verdict is: respect. Worth the time and the dime even if you don't like Eminem's previous work, which generally I don't. Fred
