It’s weird to walk into a movie knowing how it’s going to end.

In general, I avoid the biopic because mid-movie I will inevitably start thinking about which scenes actually happened and which ones were manufactured to move the silver screen version of things along. Occasionally, I see a What’s Love Got to Do With It, where the acting is so good it actually doesn’t matter which parts of the story are true.

Fall 1993. Howard University Homecoming. In the dorm room of a friend of my friend C. I first heard Biggie Smalls’ “Party and Bullshit.”

Who. Is. That?

None of us knew then that B.I.G. would become Notorious, but I did leave DC with a tape of “P&B” on repeat.

So with early nineties nostalgia all over it, I facebooked my old-school, college crew (yes, Carman 7!) and planned a field trip to a Saturday night showing of Notorious.

If you were in New York in the nineties, listening to Hot 97 and reading your monthly subscription to Vibe, then not much new information is presented in the film. Still I left the theater with the following:

1. Empathy for Lil’ Kim. (*insert much larger discussion here*).
2. The realization that I am now seven years older than Biggie was at the time of his death.
3. A renewed love of the underdog.

The makers of Notorious want you to know that Biggie was changing. In the third act (of the film and his life), he wants to be a better man and a better father. He wants to rhyme about more than guns and girls. He never gets the chance. He was twenty-five years old when he died. What were you doing when you were twenty-five?

My old roommate used to say, “Watch it like a movie.” In regard, to her own life. If your life was a movie, who would play you? What would be the plot? Biggest obstacle? How do you want it to end?