Date:
September 12, 1997
Wanna see two endearing buddies, one black, the other white, and have a good laugh too?
Try Gridlock'd, where Spoon and Stretch, brought to life by Tupac Shakur and Tim Roth, go a long way in a crazy world to get off their heroin addiction.
Their wish to be clean has been sparked by the coma that their girlfriend Cookie had overdosed herself into. She's in hospital during most of the movie.
The movie, filmed in 1996, premiered in The Netherlands three weeks ago and must be on video by now in the United States.
September 13, one year ago, Tupac Shakur was murdered.
Critics about Spoon and Stretch
It is possible to imagine Gridlock'd as a movie of despair and desperation, but that would involve imagining it without Tupac Shakur and Tim Roth, who illuminate it with a gritty, goofy comic spirit. This is grim material, but surprisingly entertaining.
Tim Roth is a natural actor (...) with a kind of quixotic bemusement at life's absurdities. Shakur (...) matches that and adds an earnestness. In their friendship, Spoon is the leader and thinker, and Stretch is the sidekick who will go along with whatever is suggested. It's Spoon who decides to kick.
(...) Spoon, desperate to get into an emergency room and begin detox, persuades Stretch to stab him. (...) the two friends discuss how to do it (and try to remember which side of the body the liver is on).
(...) the real life of the movie: the friendship of the two men and their quest to get into rehab. (Chicago Sun-Times)
The pair's chemistry is so much stronger than the script. (...) (it) is essentially a buddy movie about being stuck in a deadly rut. Roth's frantic energy and Shakur's disturbed cool complement each other.
(...) Roth and Shakur's clowning closeness nearly transcends the subject (...) (San Francisco Examiner)
The three are partners, members of a bohemian trio. They play together, live together, sometimes even sleep together.
The fun of the movie lies in the way that Roth and Shakur manage to seem feverishly alive amid all this manic-depressed running in place.
Roth adores playing scuzz-ball Americans, (...) the hustler who can't focus on anything but what's directly in front of him.
As for Shakur, with his morose elegance and beautiful liquid eyes, (...) lends Spoon a tremor of sorrow (...) along with many other qualities: wit, sexiness, a self-involvement poetic in its intensity. (Entertainment Weekly)
A black and a white man together is a not altogether unimportant subtheme of the movie, and more so, as their roles seem to be the exact opposite of the traditional stereotype. (...) Spoon, the friend with a sense of responsability, a stable person compared to his companion, Stretch, who pulls faces and seems a helpless junkie. (NRC Handelsblad)
[More
pictures of Tupac Shakur]
Pictures on this page taken from Cine en el Cuerpo (the movie poster), Gramercy (Tim Roth), Mark Rogoyski's Tupac Shakur page (Tupac Shakur), Entertainment Weekly (Spoon and Stretch).
Start a Tupac Shakur-discovery tour at Mark
Rogoyski's Tupac Shakur page.
If you wanna see more of Tim Roth, visit Tim
Roth's unofficial webpage.
Official Polygram site: Gridlock'd
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