This week’s tale of abject incompetence by the UGC Shaftesbury Avenue comes courtesy of their 2:15 showing of Tupac: Resurrection on Saturday the 8th July. They got three of the reels in the wrong order. No-one else in the cinema seemed to notice. They probably thought it was part of that new fangled non-chronological storytelling made popular by that nice Mr Tarantino. It did seem odd to jump from Tupac’s starring role in Poetic Justice to him goes to jail, then getting out of jail and releasing Thug Life. It got all the more confusing when you remember that two years before his death he had already been shot. Luckily this version got the two shootings in the right order, though it was not initially clear since voice-over about the first non-fatal shooting is also used over the second.
It is an interesting portrait that has been produced. Using solely interviews from his life, Tupac narrates his own story from beyond the grave. This probably means very judicious editing, requiring an authorial voice that is never fore-grounded. This is Tupac’s story, we are told, though he had no say in how his words were used. If Tupac were alive, would he have included Wuthering Heights and Vincent on the soundtrack? But if he were alive, this film would not exist. A strangely duplicitous film which is madly watchable when the film-makers are not showing footage of little fluffy clouds to suggest that Shakur is on of God’s little angels now. Would have been better in the right order though.