Christmas

In New York, in a morning close to Christmas, an upper class father and mother go in their BMW to a private school to see the play of their daughter. Then they go shopping and later they return to their fancy apartment in Manhattan. In the night, they move to a simple apartment in a dangerous neighborhood, where they prepare drugs for distribution. On the Christmas Eve, while buying the Christmas gift for their daughter, the father is kidnapped, and his wife desperately tries to raise a high amount of money to pay the requested ransom. "R Xmas" is a deceptive movie of Abel Ferrara. The lead characters do not have names, are anonymous, and maybe his intention is to tell that in the breast of a neighbor family in your building may have drug dealers; or that drug dealers may also have families and may be loving persons; or that there are many dirty cops, probably worse than the criminals; or is it a simple apology to crime? Whatever! However, this humanization of criminals is a horrible message, and I really did not like this movie. In Brazil, for example, many drug dealers and criminals help their communities, due to the absence of the State in poor areas and slums, but this procedure does not make them model citizen. In this movie, we see a loving upper class family in the day, providing drugs as means of living, but the destruction of the members of other families is not shown in the story, and it is impossible to feel sympathy for any characters. In the end, I wished all of them dead. My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): "Gangues do Gueto" ("Gangs of the Ghetto")

An un-named upscale New York couple (BRONX TALE's Lillo Brancato and SOPRANOS regular Drea de Matteo) are loving parents, who by day, go Christmas shopping for their beloved little girl, Lisa (Lisa Valens). At night, they don street clothes, head for the unfriendly reaches of the Bronx to deal in heroine with dangerous co-workers and drug rivals. The wife learns from a kidnapper (Ice-T) that her husband has been taken. The ransom is due within an almost impossible time limit. ‘R XMAS is free of the drug-movie cliches. Gunplay is at a bare minimum (The only bullet recipient in 'R XMAS is a basketball!) There are no expected car chases (When the wife drives across town for ransom money, she isn't running red lights and knocking over fruit stands, like every rescuer in most other genre film) ‘R XMAS is filled with insight, a peek into the inner workings of drug neighborhoods highlighted with wall graffiti.

Ferrara does not know how to make an uninteresting movie. Whatever you think of the content of his films, everything he does is a stylish, riveting exercise in visual story telling. This movie is no exception. There's surprisingly little dialogue, but what there is sings with a sense of modern city life. The aural and visual atmosphere of New York City, both upscale and downscale, is rich and multi-layered, and the characters seem like people you've seen on the street, or in stores, or in clubs, many many times. I don't know how "real" the action of this movie might be, but it seems as real and believable to me as anything I've seen on screen in a good long while. This is the perfect holiday movie for 21st century America, and a near-ideal expression of the meaning of modern Christmas.

(7/10) Abel Ferrara directs a powerful drama where law enforcement and drug dealers come together with emotional force. The central character is an "honest" drug dealer, kind to his family, helping the community out, oblivious to the fact that his decent lifestyle conflicts with the fact that drugs do a lot of damage (to put it mildly). A nice add-on to "Traffic", though even less satisfying as a narrative. Saw it at the Buenos Aires international film festival (2002) and queuing so long for a ticket perhaps made me more inclined to rate it highly as well.

I saw this at the Melbourne Film Festival in 2001, and thought it was cool, funky and sexy. I LOVED Ice-T in his role, and was blown away by the plot, and how the characters slid so smoothly from their supposedly happy domestic family life into a drug-dealing couple once their daughter was put to bed. I hope it gets major release in Australia before too long!