Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop

2000 came and went and the best movie of the year was never publicly released. The best performance by an actor in a drama/comedy/documentary remains unseen to too many. Amazing cinematography and post-production lies waiting to be seen and heard by audiences everywhere. The movie is Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop and the man behind it all is Danny Hoch. The movie is based on his New York stage monologue by the same name. In both, Danny portrays several different characters (from around the world) who live in the incredibly different but connected worlds of jails, hospitals, and the hip-hop lifestyle. Each character, SO different from the one before it, is played so vividly by Danny that you quickly forget that he is the man inside them all. Stand out performances and production with subjects relevant and important to the world around us make this a movie a flagstone film of the late 20th century. I feel incredibly lucky to have caught the few festival screenings of this movie. It is definitely at the top of my list for 2000. Once released, I'm sure it will be the same for thousands of others.

Jails, Hospitals & Hip Hop is fantastic, and under-rated. Self-distributed the film didn't get the limited regional release it deserves, instead was thrown up on a porly venued screen on the top floor of the East Village 7. This is a great movie, well made, and very funny. It has a lot to say about the impact of hip hop on all sorts of culture and does it extremly well. Danny Hoch is a genus, can't wait to see his next move in movie career.