Laws of Gravity

One of the things that bugs me about indie film-making is that the wrong people make it to step two. Nick Gomez surely should have been able to do more work than "Illtown" and "New Jersey Drive" after finishing this well-crafted, if choppy, urban tale. I liked "New Jersey Drive" a lot, so I guess Nick's getting his recognition through "The Sopranos" at the moment. And why is Mr. Green still only playing psychos and tiny little bit parts, apart from his brilliant work in "Clean Shaven"? At least Adam Trese went on to "Palookaville"!

Ok, so that's more of a rant than a review, and I'll cut to the chase:

If you liked "Bottle Rocket", "Palookaville", or "A Bronx Tale", see this film.

It's an old story, but I'll tell it again:

Guys from bad neighborhoods, against whom the deck is pretty well stacked, get some better-than-usual goods to sell. And sell them they must, under less than ideal circumstances, leading to all sorts of fun and frolic, in a very non-comedic sense. Greene, Trese, Falco, and Schulze stand out. Saul Stein is quite creepy as the face of the "new mob".

This sort of film appeals to me more in its American genre than the current British versions of this story ("London Kills Me", "Lock, Stock", "Twin Town", and "Trainspotting") as the Scots/Welsh/Home Counties vision of petty crime has a heavily injected fantasy slant absent in four American flix cited in my discussion.

Also, these petty-street-crime films are probably (with the exception of John Sayles) one of the few windows into American poverty available in US film right now. The scene in "Laws of Gravity" between minor criminal Frankie and Greene's screen spouse Denise (Edie Falco) on the nature of life and work is brilliant.

lordwhorfin says, go ye forth and rent.

It's not a Means Streets rip-off. It's a decent, low budget movie with some fine acting, and some realistic dialogue. These characters are not brain surgeons, they are rough, inarticulate people who live a hard life. Any predictability comes from the fact that only the inevitable can happen to people such as these. The film captures the feel of a Brooklyn neighborhood well. What appears to be Williamsburg before it became trendy. This movie made me feel I was watching what happens when a bunch of good, no-frills actors spend time together producing a very realistic and gritty ensemble piece. Check it out for yourselves.

If you like "Laws of Gravity" you will definitely like "A year in the life of crime (1989)" from HBO. It followed a group of real losers around Jersey City for a year. A must see One of the best documentaries I've ever seen.

I would love to see a follow up to the original HBO version of this movie. It's been about 16 years and I would love to see if any of the original guys from the documentary are alive.

HBO needs to re-release "A year in the life of crime" or do the follow up. I'm sure this has been mentioned a million times in relation to this film so I will end my post here...

Brett

I've heard this compared to Scorsese's "Mean Streets", but the crime and situations depicted are much more low-key than that film. This is really unique. A couple of incredibly minor Brooklyn thieves, one's wife, the other's girlfriend, and their local bottom-feeder milieu, futzing around interacting with the locals and just squeaking by. That's about the whole film, give or take a subplot about a stash of guns that our 'heroes' come into and try to sell. But it's not about plot so much, it's a character study, and the performances are incredible, so the characters stick. The two leads are both great, although Adam Trese has the gift of a part as the young psychotic/Jerry Lewis type. Edie Falco (Tony Soprano's wife in "The Sopranos") has an unusually great role as written, in the sense that they don't write too many parts as varied and interesting as this for women to play, particularly in crime-related movies. But what she does with it is pretty astonishing. It's a great performance. That director has one unusual eye for picturesque composition of unlikely subject material too. "Laws of Gravity" is an uncommonly good movie. Its dialogue-ear for humour in banal minutiae has a smell of the Tarantinos, but this pre-dated "Reservoir Dogs".

You can't tell where the film crew is or their equipment, because the whole thing is so close to reality that you can't even call this a real movie. Its more than a movie, its like you're there. You're hanging out with these egregious people, on the street, in their apartments, in the bars they hang out in..its really amazing.

Not one of the actors makes one false move and you can't say that about very many movies. But like I said, they didn't appear to even BE actors in the first place. I wonder if there was a lot of improv between the actors, everything they said was so real.

You can't say a lot really happens, either, but that's exactly like real life, too!

From what I just read, this was made for the amount of money Julia Roberts makes for filming one or two scenes. Whoever said life was fair?