Relationship Goals review – Kelly Rowland and Method Man flirt through breezy romcom

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The Valentine’s Day offerings begin with Amazon’s fast-paced, millennial-coded film that’s a fun enough watch even if its messaging is a little suspect On its face, Relationship Goals is a classic romcom, calibrated for viewers of a certain generation. The perennially resplendent Kelly Rowland is Leah, a boss babe morning TV producer in line to replace her retiring boss (the omnipresent Matt Walsh) as showrunner. Just as she’s poised to break the glass ceiling, the network higher-ups stick her in a bake-off with Jarrett, a ringer from her romantic past played with devil charm by Method Man. The promise of one of Destiny’s Children playing the will they/won’t they game with the hunk of the Wu-Tang Clan could well prove too strong a lure to stop the scores who grew up on their music from clicking on the Prime Video thumbnail just out of nostalgic curiosity. It’s a tractor beam made stronger by director Linda Mendoza’s extraordinarily fast pace. I mean, those 90 minutes just breeze by. ...
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‘It has become a sort of silver bullet’: why are rap lyrics being put on trial?

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In compelling documentary As We Speak, a controversial legal practice that uses rap lyrics to secure convictions is explored

In September 2001, McKinley Phipps Jr, also known as the rapper Mac, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for manslaughter. It had been a year and a half since gunfire erupted outside a club where he was slated to perform in Slidell, Louisiana, resulting in the death of 19-year-old Barron Victor Jr. Phipps, then 22, maintained his innocence, and the case against him was weak – there was no gun linking him to the crime, several witnesses recanted their testimony and another person confessed to pulling the trigger. And yet, prosecutors had their trump card: Mac, a former New Orleans rap prodigy who began releasing music at the age of 13, had rapped about murder.

“Murder, murder, kill, kill”, Phipps recites in As We Speak: Rap Music on Trial, a new documentary on the criminalization of rap lyrics. Prosecutors spliced that line with one from a different song – “Pull the trigger, put a bullet in your head” – to create the portrait of a killer; Mac’s art was the evidence that DNA, solid confessions, or a missing weapon couldn’t provide. An all-white jury bought it. Phipps served over 21 years in prison before being granted clemency in 2021.

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