Andrew Barker-Senior: Celebs Rumors

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Tupac’s Legacy as a Complicated Trailblazer Remembered as the Rapper-Actor Receives Hollywood Walk of Fame Honor

Andrew Barker Senior Features Writer On April 15, 2012, 2Pac made his debut appearance at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival. At this point, it had been 16 years since Tupac Amaru Shakur had been murdered on the streets of Las Vegas at the age of 25. And yet there he was onstage, his holographic likeness projected with uncanny vividness alongside his onetime collaborators and labelmates Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, whom he now appeared to be speaking to and trading bars with in front of an audience of 80,000. As the first performance of its kind, the 2Pac hologram became national news, and sparked worries that a wave of holo-tours, featuring ghostly apparitions of long dead stars, would soon be filling festival grounds and amphitheaters. Aside from a few one-offs, however, this did not come to pass. And yet the 2Pac hologram still felt significant for a different reason. After a decade and a half of vault-clearing posthumous releases, books, documentaries, statues, shout-outs in hundreds of hip-hop songs, and murals in virtually every American city from the Bay Area and back down, Shakur’s iconography had long seemed at risk of swallowing the brilliant, infuriating, inspiring, complicated man himself, leaving only a depthless shadow behind. 
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‘Turning Red’s’ Domee Shi Draws From Her Past
Andrew Barker Senior Features Writer “A Chinese Canadian tween undergoes magical puberty and turns into a giant red panda.” As far as elevator pitches go, it’s not exactly “‘Jaws’ in space” or “snakes on a plane.” But that highly specific logline is the one that Domee Shi used to persuade Pixar to greenlight her feature directorial debut, some half a decade ago when the then-20-something was a budding storyboard artist on the studio’s Emeryville campus. Shi’s film, “Turning Red,” delivers on every bit of that premise, focusing on a confidently nerdy Toronto girl named Mei and her loving yet strict mother, Ming, whose perfectly ordered lives are thrust into chaos by Mei’s sudden transformation. The film was released last spring, and immediately notched a number of milestones for the studio: the first Pixar feature solely directed by a woman, the first Pixar feature with all-female creative leads, and only the second Pixar feature directed by a person of Asian descent. But the particulars of Shi’s identity aside, it also represented the emergence of a singular new voice within the celebrated studio, and everything from its cultural specificity, to its animation style — impressionistic, frantically paced, anime-influenced — to its openness in addressing the messiness of early adolescence (from menstruation and mother issues to the suggestion that a tween girl’s love of a particular boy band might have some extra-musical motivations) felt both of a piece with the Pixar tradition and something invigoratingly new.
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‘On the Come Up’ Review: Sanaa Lathan Shines in Her Directorial Debut
Andrew Barker Senior Features Writer There has been no shortage of hip-hop star-is-born narratives hitting screens in recent years, but much like hip-hop itself for most of its history, there hasn’t always been a whole lot of space for women. Sanaa Lathan’s “On the Come Up,” which tracks a teenage girl’s complicated rise through the battle rap circuit to the even more complicated heights of viral stardom, provides a welcome exception to this rule, but fortunately it has a lot more going for it than just that. As frank and tough-minded and as it is warm and sweet, “On the Come Up” is a hugely promising debut from the actor-turned-director. Sixteen-year-old Bri (Jamila C. Gray) is already a talented rapper when we first meet her in her fictitious neighborhood of Garden Heights, and she’s already been through a whole lifetime’s worth of upheaval. Her father was a legendary local MC named Lawless, who was murdered just as his career was beginning to take off. She spent part of her childhood away from her mother (Lathan) while she battled drug addiction, and though she’s now clean, their mother-daughter bond has yet to fully mend. And what’s more, as part of the small contingent of Black students at her school, she’s forced to deal with unsympathetic administrators and suspicious campus cops, one of whom body-slams her to the ground after he spots her selling Skittles to a classmate.
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