The Get Down |OT| The boogie down Bronx (Baz Luhrmann - August 12th)

Status
Not open for further replies.
G

GK86

Homeland Security Fail
msZQOyF.jpg

In 1977 New York City, the talented and soulful youth of the South Bronx chase dreams and breakneck beats to transform music history.
Click to expand...

Release date: Part 1 (6 episodes) releases on Netflix August 12th.

Spoilers: Please spoiler tag your spoiler discussion while also labeling your post. (i.e. Episode 3
Did you see the Tupac cameo?
)

Links:


Reviews:

  • NYT: ‘The Get Down’ on Netflix: A Superhero Fable About the Birth of Hip-Hop:

    In actuality, though, “The Get Down” is more like a secret superhero story, one with black and brown teenagers as the heroes. Using extravagant camerawork and technical tricks that present the protagonists as larger than life, “The Get Down” takes a period and place that’s often approached with dutiful naturalism and sobriety about difficult circumstances and infuses it with light touches of magical realism and bursts of palpable otherworldly joy.

    “They actually lived their magical realism,” Baz Luhrmann, the show’s co-creator and an executive producer, said about the youth of the era. “They had a magical reality.”
    Click to expand...
  • Variety:

    “The Get Down” is a beautiful mess, a flawed show interspersed with moments of remarkable brilliance. It was unprecedentedly expensive and time-consuming for parent company Netflix; the result smacks of half-baked creative ambition run amok. There is a deliberately off-putting messiness to its execution, with cartoonishly blended tonal shifts from cheesy caricature to gritty tragedy. Stock footage from the ’70s is knitted together with elaborate production design. Some scenes are filmed like musical numbers on “Glee”; some, like action sequences from Bruce Lee’s kung fu films. It’s easy, and even understandable, to see in this approach nothing but a patchy, inconsistent flight of fancy — maudlin where it ought to be tough, sentimental where it ought to be smart, and undercutting the viewer’s expectations at every turn.

    But “The Get Down,” in its multitudes and sprawl, resembles the Bronx itself; and in refracting the narrative through so many different lenses — Blaxploitation and black family sitcom, musical comedy and gritty prestige drama, campy action and teenage romance — it aims to portray the richness of this neglected borough. The show’s pastiche resolves into a gorgeous, fantastical tapestry of music legend and urban history, a reclamation of, and a love letter to, a marginalized community of a certain era, told through the unreliable tools of romance, intuition, and lived experiences.
    Click to expand...
  • Deadline:

    Launching on August 12 on Netflix, The Get Down is an ambitious, exciting and yet sometimes unwieldy affair. The musical drama created by Baz Luhrmann and Stephen Adly Guirgis and set in 1977 NYC can be fickle in its aesthetics but also a hell of a lot of mash-up fun, with a strapping cultural and personal coming-of-age story at its hip-hop-history core. As I say in my video review above, The Get Down is not just the sum of its much-sampled parts but all about the groove – even if it takes a bit to find it.
    Click to expand...
  • Hollywood Reporter:

    Netflix's new drama The Get Down, chronicling the rise of hip-hop and the downfall of disco in a smoldering, chaotic New York, is a gigantic hot mess from Baz Luhrmann. It suffers from a 90-minute pilot that will be divisive in its aesthetic choices — think West Side Story, not Spike Lee — but rises again in the next two episodes to give all the crazy a chance at becoming something really good.
    Click to expand...

Cast:

xUwpCtG.jpg

Shameik Moore as Shaolin Fantastic, Justice Smith as Ezekiel, Herizen Guardiola as Mylene Cruz

fhR3n4J.jpg

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Cadillac, Skylan Brooks as Ra-Ra, Tremaine Brown Jr. as Boo-Boo

foXQjEu.jpg

Mamoudou Athie as Grandmaster Flash, Jimmy Smits as Francisco Cruz, Giancarlo Esposito as Pastor Ramon Cruz

dcPKvVg.jpg

Stefanée Martin as Yolanda Kipling, Lillias White, Zabryna Guevara as Mrs. Cruz

VWohDLl.jpg

Jaden Smith as Marcus 'Dizzee' Kipling, Michel Gill as Mr. Gunns, Tory Devon Smith as Little Wolf
Click to expand...

Promo photos:
bGLe5xK.jpg

tFSeMhi.jpg

2Y2vJUv.jpg

r4ssh8h.jpg

WukoyF9.jpg

AWNVnWv.jpg
Click to expand...
 
J

Jon Carter

Member
From what I've seen of the season, this will only appeal to a very narrow audience. It's not like Friday Night Lights where there's no need to like football to enjoy the show. If you don't like this style of music, you won't like the show.
 
D

Discotheque

Banned
Jon Carter said:
From what I've seen of the season, this will only appeal to a very narrow audience. It's not like Friday Night Lights where there's no need to like football to enjoy the show. If you don't like this style of music, you won't like the show.
Click to expand...

Hip hop isn't some small niche genre. Its huge on the top 40 charts too.
 
R

RatskyWatsky

Hunky Nostradamus
Sepinwall - Review: Netflix's 'The Get Down' a big swing at hip-hop's origins. B-

The Get Down is a mess. At times, it's a thrilling mess, at other times a boring one, and there's just barely enough energy in the parts that work to power through the many parts that don't. But given its prolonged, expensive, troubled gestation (thoroughly chronicled by Variety's Cynthia Littleton), it's not surprising that the series is less coherent than it could be.
Click to expand...

The series is a collection of get downs, sometimes simply shifting between two different songs (usually one rap, one disco) in two different locales, sometimes trying to skip between multiple genres — musical one moment, soap opera the next, martial arts epic (no, seriously) the one after that — from scene to scene or even moment to moment.

Grandmaster Flash is treated as a martial arts sensei, and the music and editing choices in their scenes often owe more to the Shaw Brothers than to the dawn of hip-hop.

Suffice it to say, The Get Down is trying to do a lot of things at the same time, and the pieces rarely fit comfortably together. Yet the first episode — the only one of the six directed by Luhrmann — is so crazy, so stylized in its look (it wouldn't be a surprise if Captain Kirk chased a lizard monster through one of the burnt-out, rubble-strewn Bronx vacant lots) and sound (mixing period songs with original compositions that you'd need Shazam to identify as fugazi) and tone that the mismatched, exaggerated quality of it all almost works. And every time things start to drag, we'll get a dance-off at a disco club, or Shaolin doing parkour to escape the cops while keeping his red Puma sneakers perfectly clean, and the energy of it all forgives many sins.
Click to expand...

Sounds absolutely insane (and uneven), which is exactly what I expect from Luhrmann. :)
 
B

BanShunsaku

Member
Oh my, the actress playing Mylene. I think I'm in love.

Edit: Finished the first episode and yeh, it's fantastic. I can understand why some would hate it but I'm firmly on the other side of the fence.
 
D

duckroll

Member
Watched the first 90 minute episode. Reviews indicated that it was really divisive and I can see why, but GODDAMN I loved it. It's everything I love about Baz Luhrmann musicals. This isn't a realistic drama or a specific genre piece. It's a magical fantastical period fable about music, love, ambition and a specific time and place which meant something to some people.

I think he fucked nailed it. There's the sense of fun, adolescence, danger, disappointment, and transcendence associated with the birth of a new musical era born out of poverty and crime, but expressed in a mythical way with great sounds and visuals. The dialogue banter is super artificial but I wouldn't have it any other way. Arguments are like rap battles, there's poetry in every other sentence, and at times it feels like Monkey Island battles. Fuck I love Baz Luhrmann.
 
B

bobbychalkers

Member
Just watched the first episode and it was nothing like what I was expecting going off the trailers I saw but I loved it. Not a dull moment
 
G

GK86

Homeland Security Fail
Glad to read the positive impressions thus far. I can't wait to dive into this this weekend.
 
A

addik

Member
Yeah, I thought reading the reviews, that I'll be mixed about the pilot but be generally warm to the next two episodes.

It's really the reverse.

The pilot is amazing with how over the top and mystical it portrays the Bronx. It just the good right amount of grit and glamour just to make it all work. Never a dull moment either, and I just loved the aesthetic and the energy the pilot emits. It's really something else, there's quite nothing like it.

The next two episodes? Yeah it's still okay, but it drags sometimes and it just doesn't feel the same without Baz Luhrmann directing it. It's still worth the watch though because I just like the main characters (Ezekiel, Shaolin, and Mylene), and the song numbers are pretty great, but I do miss the pilot and how energetic it all was.

That said, (episode 3 spoilers)
that Up the Ladder to the Roof scene was fantastic. The pilot only needed an intimate moment like that to be absolutely perfect.
 
J

jmood88

Member
I saw some reviewer compare it to Vinyl and it killed my excitement for the show but I may watch it sometime in the future.
 
obin_gam

obin_gam

Member
Half an hour in - this is schizophrenic and unfocused and melodramatic and terrible.

The visual style is cool, but then the editing comes in a ruins it.
 
B

bob_arctor

Tough_Smooth
I pretty much have to see this, growing up in the heart of the South Bronx in the 70's. Hope it's good/not too insulting but I'm going in with measured expectations.
 
D

duckroll

Member
Watched the second episode. It's much slower as expected since the series is falling into place after the kinetic opener, but there are some pretty great scenes. The birds, Cadillac dancing, and the ending piece (which was totally spoiled by the trailers boo). I didn't care too much about the drama instigated between Shaolin and Zek though. But I'm sure that won't last for too long.

panama chief said:
Is this more disco, hiphop, bboy, or just the full gamut of black culture in the 80's?
Click to expand...

It's about the fall of disco, the rise of hiphop, and the state of the Bronx in the late 70s, which happens to be the melting pot of black culture in NYC. There's crime, there's teenage angst, there's opportunistic politics, there's corruption, and everything is tied together through the an undercurrent of music.
 
T

tomtom94

Member
Primus said:
So we're only getting half the series, then? When does the second half drop?
Click to expand...

Some time next year. Not sure if the split is due to Netflix experimenting with new content release models or the troubled production (a la Doctor Who series 6) or both.
 
A

addik

Member
So, with bad weather pretty much cancelling everything I had to do tomorrow (and traffic being so bad I had no choice but to stay home), I managed to binge-watch through the first part.

As I said, I loved how energetic the pilot was. Episodes 2 and 3 were a slog to go through, but things pick up again in the 4th episode, and the last two episodes were amazing. The show's not a straight-out musical, but I was disappointed with how little music were in Episodes 2 and 3, so I was delighted to see how much there were in the last 3 episodes.

I can definitely see why critics would find this boring. I feel that the most poignant aspect of the story (and I'd say even its core), which is Books' and Mylene's coming-of-age story and their journey to reach their dreams, gets muddled by all these others issues/points that the story wants to raise. I'd say outside of Books' and Mylene's respective stories, every other plot point is hit-or-miss.
I guess this is why I found Episodes 2 and 3 a slog, as they try to set up the other characters too and leave Books and Mylene out of the show for way too long.

I did not expect Jayden Smith to play such a big role here though. Speaking of, I wonder if we'll get to see more of the Vogueing world and if we get to see how punk fits in, considering that punk was invoked by the daughter of Ezekiel's internship boss.

By the way, I think I read somewhere that Part 1 ends abruptly. I cannot disagree any more. The series was perfectly cut in two. (spoilers just in case)
Lots of storylines got somewhat of a resolution, save a few. But you can definitely see that there is more to tell, but it doesn't feel like a cliffhanger at all.
In fact, the ending makes me thing that they deliberately wrote the series to have a midseason break, and that the break was planned.

All in all, I like it. If you enjoyed the pilot, just slog through Episodes 2 and 3 and you'll enjoy the rest. Heck, even those episodes had some bright spots.

I still hate the editing though, but I enjoyed the show. Can't wait for Part 2.
 
T

TerminalDogma

Member
So far I've only watched the first episode, going in without knowing basically anything about this show, and for a good amount of it I was CONFUSED. A lot of the reviews in the OP kinda nail it, where it's just such a hodgepodge of different things (all from that era, though) that I didn't know whether to love it or hate it. There were a few points where I thought about turning it off, or at the very least I was sure I wasn't going to watch any more episodes. By the middle of it though I started to get used to the tonal shifts, and the characters started growing on me. Within the last 20 or so minutes I was hooked. I'm about to go ahead and watch the next episode now.
 
N

number11

Member
As others have said, this show is a mess... but at the same time it's definitely fun to watch.

I love how Jayden Smith is pretty much playing his weird self.
 
H

HIGH DEF JEFF

Banned
That first episode's tone and style is what Ive always been looking for in these period piece semi historical shows and films. It has a real fairy tale/ fable feel and it makes it so much easier to not pull out the "thats not how it happened" finger wag.

In that scene towards the end when Flash was playing in the alleyway and Zeke starts rapping in a way that just wasnt created at the time feels okay because everything leading up to that was zip zop flash and style. And then I think about that scene in Straight Outta Compton when Snoop walks in a room and suddenly Nothin But a G Thang exists and the arms fold because that movie is taking itself so serious.

Too bad Vinyl wasnt an idea till after Get Down was released. That show needed some excitement.

The idea of looking back at these recent time periods and tell a story the way any normal person would with exaggeration, fondness, nostalgia and rose tinted glasses seems more believable than when they go half way with historical accuracy and stone faced seriousness.
 
L

LilWayneSuckz

Member
I loved the first episode. I know the rest of the series won't be so grandiose but i loved what I saw in the first episode. Also Shameik Moore is bae.
 
H

HIGH DEF JEFF

Banned
Started to see cracks in the quality and enjoyment of the show in episode 2. Episode 4 is the total nose dive. Became such a TV-y TV show..bunch of dumb, uninteresting subplots. Might not even finish this shit.
 
G

ghostofsparta

Member
I just started watching this. I'm so happy there are black people speaking Spanish. If you live on the west coast you really don't see that often.
 
T

TerminalDogma

Member
Just finished the last episode. It kept my interest, with some annoying storylines along the way, but it definitely lost the crazy tonal shifts of the first episode. I'm not sure if that is a good or a bad thing, to be honest. The tonal whiplash was pretty jarring, but once I got used to it I was into it. After the first episode everything gets toned down a bit. In the end, I wouldn't call this one of my favorite Netflix shows, but it isn't bad and I'll definitely be checking out part 2 next year.
 
A

awilliams213

Member
First episode done loved the take on the time period, it's nice to see early hip-hop represented. My friends and I had tag notebooks in the early 90's so yeah I am kind of impartial to it all.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

50 Cent & Live Nation Announce "The Final Lap" Global Tour To Celebrate Get Rich Or Die Tryin's 20th Anniversary (90 Concerts)
News
3
2K
N0S replied
RIP Netflix's The Get Down - Show got canned
2
91
14K
Apt101 replied
  • Locked
Netflix's 'The Get Down' Reviews
2
50
10K
Ran rp replied
  • Locked
The Get Down - Main Trailer - Netflix
9
2K
Mattlikewhoa replied
  • Locked
The Get Down Part II |OT| Same story, second verse - Netflix 4/7
2 3
144
20K
mm04 replied
Top Bottom