Edge City

Eugene Martin's fine indie film EDGE CITY is based on the real life beating and death of Eddie Polleck, who unfortunately met his fate the same way as one of the this movie's characters. It is a film that has yet to find a national distributor yet has played at film festivals across the country and is now showing at one theater in Philadelphia. It's a good enough film with flaws that probably can't get distributed because of the timeliness of the children and violence theme.

EDGE CITY is an ensemble piece about what happens when a rumor is horribly twisted around. Two Jersey girls have Coke thrown onto them by three Philly kids. As they tell people about it, this minor incident turns into groping, attempted rape, and full-on rape. As the movie builds up, so does the rumor. We see the lives of both the Philly kids and the Jersey kids. The Philly kids we focus on, mainly on the character of James, just go about their business. James and his brother Bobby try to keep their alcoholic father together by working with him at the local supermarket.

Meanwhile, in Jersey, a girl named Cherie, who drinks her way through her father's remarriage, is the girl who has Coke thrown on her. When she tells her friends, it gets around that what was once a mere practical joke has been twisted into a deadly serious topic. Her friends get ready for a rumble that ultimately the innocent James and Bobby become the center of.

EDGE CITY is a nicely made picture but it is not perfect. While it is superior than Larry Clark's horrible KIDS, it tends to lapse into KIDS territory: letting white kids talk like black kids for too long of a time and letting the dialogue get so out of hand that you soon realize that no one talks like that, even when they're joking. Also, the device of the jump cut within scenes is WAY overused in the first half hour of the movie, with the cuts being jarring and misused than artistic and crafty. And the script too often veers into Afterschool Special territory, i.e. rich girl falls in love with poor boy and he can't accept it, snobby girl is really anorexic, drinks too much, and hates her stepmom, etc.).

However, the fine performances from the cast hold down this film. Charlie Hofheimer is excellent as the doomed hero James, giving a quiet, sentimental coolness to his character that few could pull off. Heather Gottlieb transcends the material for her character, giving a usual Afterschool special character an original turn, making us actually care for her. The rest of the cast, full of local Philadelphia kids, work well together and make the story believable, even when it is not.

All in all, a film that needs to be seen, needs a distributor, and needs a national release. Wake up, you ill-minded Hollywood studios, and pick this little gem up. It's not perfect, but it is one of the better indie films of the last few years.

Rating: B

see i think the above person has it 100% wrong. I think they were trying to portray the suburban kids as trying to be what they thought was tough and urban. in the beginning they say something like this is real gangster, suburban gangster, none of that urban bullshit. or something like that. when in fact the real urban kids, the philly kids, were nothing like that. the acting made me feel like the kids were actual people. like it was a documentary and not a superbly acted movie, which actually made it better.

this is a true story. im from philadelphia and we had the father of the child come and speak to our school about violence. i didn't know about this film when that happened i actually just saw it (8/07).

i totally respect your opinion of the movie. but i think that it was an amazing movie, incredibly powerful and told a story that needs to be told. these kids totally pushed each other into thinking they were tough kids, they had to prove themselves but really proved that hurting people isn't the right way to go.

listen, i know i cant write and i know my argument is scattered, but give this movie a chance. i personally think it is amazing. i was having difficulty holding back tears at the end because it seemed like they were real people, not actors, like you and me.

amazing movie, powerful, definitely a must see.

When you read about a senseless brutal crime committed by seemingly normal individuals, it's hard to understand how it could happen. This film makes a plausible case, showing how peer pressure and crowd mentality can make kids evil who are ok as individuals. This is based loosely on a local case in my home town, Philadelphia. The acting is excellent and the director really has a feel for adolescent lifestyle.

It truly captured the 90's yputh social drama. I was smilling the whole time watching this. It felt as if i was looking at the family in my block I grew up around.

I caught this during a brief run in a Philadelphia theater. Despite its local provenance (and its relation to a hometown tragedy, namely the beating death of Eddie Polec in 1994), I really have to come down hard on this movie. The director, for reasons best known to himself, decided to shoot the entire film guerilla-style, with nonstop handheld cameras and rapidfire cuts. Such technique might work for the scenes of jarring violence, but is utterly inappropriate for the rest of the material, which makes up the majority of the film. A stroll down the sidewalk, a brother-to-brother discussion on a sofa, hell, even a kiss on a first-date are all shot cusinart-style, distracting this viewer from ever being able to enter into the drama. Martin also undercuts his narrative by packing in far too many topics: besides the birth of mob violence, we get anorexia, alcoholism, divorce, racism, parental abuse...did I miss anything? No doubt a better cast (and a better-focused direction) would have knit these threads together, as Martin surely intended, to demonstrate how one moral flaw leads into and sustains a host of others...but good intentions do not necessarily a great film make. Just a sprawling mess. Martin, I know you're from my town, and I'm down with you man, I really am...just do a better job next time, like you did in Two Plus One.