A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006)
The premise of the movie is a total slice of life in a changing ethnic neighborhood in Queens, mostly with conflict between Puerto Rican and Italian immigrant families and their kids. It's often raw, violent, sexual, and depraved. It's also laced with beauty, has real family loyalty, and is a picture of survival. It portrays in particular one family and the conflicts in it with particular urgency.
Overall, the movie is highly realistic. It pulls only a couple punches (a little boy gets beaten up on the street and it isn't shown). But all the other violence, the sex, the near rapes (depending on how you look at it), the anger and the misunderstood anger, all of it is wearing. I have to say I didn't enjoy a lot of it just because it was so unpleasant. Even when the light glowed and the train glided overhead on the El and a family was being peaceful and loving, there was an underlying anxiety and ominousness that made watching it an uneasy process.
This might be a sign of a great film, or a good one. I don't want to disagree with those that find this mise-en-scene enough. There is a feeling of meandering plot, or no plot at all, through most of it. If other movies that try to address the problems and reality of the hood are more readable (Spike Lee has a couple, or Larry Clark's Kids, as starters), this one has the benefit of not being pigeon-holed. It's just a ride through the times, a snapshot, sincere and feeling.
Robert Downey Jr. is a small presence, actually, and doesn't always fit in quite right, and in fact the peaceful quality of his portions of the film are easily mistaken for the most boring. Dianne Wiest is a fabulous actress but she seems miscast--though the director ought to know who represented his mother best. The whole movie is based on the real life of the director, Dito Montiel, and it has an authentic feel, though Wikipedia makes clear it's full of mistakes for a movie set in the mid 1980s. Not that it really matters. It's the energy of the youth that gives it its recklessness, which is what its all about. Forget about making sense of it. It's just the real deal on some level, and convincing enough to be artful. The filming, and editing, make up for a lot of the lack of narrative sense. It's not about sense, it's about being there, it's about the experience of traveling through the scenes.
The premise of the movie is a total slice of life in a changing ethnic neighborhood in Queens, mostly with conflict between Puerto Rican and Italian immigrant families and their kids. It's often raw, violent, sexual, and depraved. It's also laced with beauty, has real family loyalty, and is a picture of survival. It portrays in particular one family and the conflicts in it with particular urgency.
Overall, the movie is highly realistic. It pulls only a couple punches (a little boy gets beaten up on the street and it isn't shown). But all the other violence, the sex, the near rapes (depending on how you look at it), the anger and the misunderstood anger, all of it is wearing. I have to say I didn't enjoy a lot of it just because it was so unpleasant. Even when the light glowed and the train glided overhead on the El and a family was being peaceful and loving, there was an underlying anxiety and ominousness that made watching it an uneasy process.
This might be a sign of a great film, or a good one. I don't want to disagree with those that find this mise-en-scene enough. There is a feeling of meandering plot, or no plot at all, through most of it. If other movies that try to address the problems and reality of the hood are more readable (Spike Lee has a couple, or Larry Clark's Kids, as starters), this one has the benefit of not being pigeon-holed. It's just a ride through the times, a snapshot, sincere and feeling.
Robert Downey Jr. is a small presence, actually, and doesn't always fit in quite right, and in fact the peaceful quality of his portions of the film are easily mistaken for the most boring. Dianne Wiest is a fabulous actress but she seems miscast--though the director ought to know who represented his mother best. The whole movie is based on the real life of the director, Dito Montiel, and it has an authentic feel, though Wikipedia makes clear it's full of mistakes for a movie set in the mid 1980s. Not that it really matters. It's the energy of the youth that gives it its recklessness, which is what its all about. Forget about making sense of it. It's just the real deal on some level, and convincing enough to be artful. The filming, and editing, make up for a lot of the lack of narrative sense. It's not about sense, it's about being there, it's about the experience of traveling through the scenes.