This weekend your dear and faithful film critic experienced something extremely unfortunate, inconvenient, and frustrating. After all the hype it’s been getting, having been at the top of the box office for three weekends in a row now, I decided to go see F. Gary Gray’s Straight Outta Compton this past Saturday. Until about one hour into the film, I was loving it.

Then I experienced what they call in the rap industry a P.W.A., a projector with attitude. In other words, the projector broke… No this is not a joke. I was in the middle of a movie and the projector decided to just go ahead and break and not be revived. So I can only review the first hour or so of the film.

With that said, I loved the first hour of Straight Outta Compton. It was entertaining, genuine, relevant and educational. The film tells the story of how Andre Romelle Young, better known as Dr. Dre (you know, that guy who makes your headphones) assembled the trailblazing rap group N.W.A., which stands for [That word I can’t say that starts with an n] with attitude. The ensemble also included the likes of young Eric Lynn Wright (aka Eazy-E) and O’Shea Jackson (Ice Cube).

The film, which starts in 1986, showcases police partiality and brutality, drawing a blurred line between then and now. In context, it makes sense that police would still be racists in the ‘80s, just two decades after the civil rights movement. I can’t say the same for 2015, and it’s starting to feel like that movement didn’t end in the 60s, we just forgot about it.

What I loved the most about the first hour of the movie was how real it felt. Gray does a great job telling the story in a non-romanticised and authentic way. My favorite scene was probably the birth of the iconic song “Boyz In The Hood.” Dre had originally reached out to Eazy-E asking him to be an investor in Dre’s new ventures as a music producer, but after somehow being peer-pressured into the recording studio by his buddies, E self-consciously and uncomfortably tries over and over again to properly nail just one line, “Cruising down the street in my 6-4.” Is it amusing to see the proclaimed Godfather of Gangsta Rap awkwardly choking on a lyric over and over again? Yes. Yes it is.

Of course, I’m not done with Straight Outta Compton. I’ve only seen not even half of the film, and was very much enjoying it at the time. Hopefully I’ll go see it this weekend. What I can promise is that I’ll try to see at least one movie in theaters a week this year, and will write you plenty of reviews… that is, assuming the projectors are working.

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If you’ve seen Straight Outta Compton in its entirety, feel free to comment a 1-5 star rating in the comments section below and tell us what you thought of the film as a whole.