bsshuman

You won't see many movies teaming with this much humanity, much less one that spends most of its time in the housing projects of East New York, Brooklyn. Filmmaker Rich Devaney isn't condescending or sentimental but even the most minor characters in his film are fleshed into real human beings. That's Devaney's first achievement in this movie. The second is that he tells the story of a conflicted criminal trafficking in some mean streets and he does it without ripping off Scorsese for one second. Devaney gets great performances from his cast, he tells a powerful story without showing off the superb technique he clearly has and he gives you memorable images without a huge art department framing them and lighting them and stuffing them into your skull. Brooklyn Bound is evidence of that rarest quality in a filmmaker- talent to spare, minus the ego. And the movie shines brighter for it.

Brooklyn Bound is an excellent movie. One should not mistake its decidedly unflashy tone for any shortcoming in technique. Its writer/director Rich Devaney knows what he is doing. No knock on The Man but it is incredibly refreshing to see a movie about a conflicted criminal that doesn't rip off Scorsese. Shot in East New York projects, pre-hipster Williamsburg dive bars, tenements and one luxury high rise that seems just as squalid, Brooklyn Bound teams with life own, full of vivid, human characters, humor and menace. You don't have to be a fan of Fresh or Superfly (though both are good movies) to enjoy this movie. It's real, it's compelling and I'll be thinking about it for a long time.

I'm a movie snob. And I'm really looking forward to whatever Mr. Devaney does next. He really knows how to tell a story with a camera. He gets great performances out of his mostly non-actor cast and he doesn't coopt one frame of his story to show of any of the superb filmmaking technique that he surely possesses. The events of the movie are tinged with a senselessness in the best sense, a film with a big heart that gets broken.

Ghost Dog is beautiful, desolate and hilarious. Even though I think it's sort of pointless to compare Ghost Dog to Night on Earth or something else just because they have the same writer and director, I couldn't help but notice how much easier it was to appreciate the quirks in Ghost Dog. It's a movie as deep as some French art flick and as quotable as Johnny Dangerously. Forrest Whitaker is awesome. Definitely worth multiple viewings. I've noticed the setting described as New York. Not only does it not look like New York, but I think people say it is because of the characters, which is an extremely naive assumption.