Urchin

I saw a work-in-progress version of this movie at the Hackers On Planet Earth conference earlier this year.

It was a wonderfully strange story with cool effects and locations. Basically, it's about a homeless boy who does petty crimes for a living, and lives underground with an old 'Fagan' type character, who is called "The Old Man" in the cast list, although no one says his name in the movie. The Old Man is trying to lead them to "Paradise", as he keeps saying, which is somewhere deeper in the tunnels than where they live.

The bad guy is a dirty little man who coughs up blood and cuts peoples heads off, and he is trying to get to paradise before them.

It's hard to describe the rest of it without giving too much away, but there's a normal family that the homeless boy finds as he's doing a drug deal, and he has a little sister to protect, and he fights everyone with an electric fork that shocks people to death and lots of people die.

It reminded me of The City Of Lost Children but with more action, but it still had that contemplative feel that that film had. It was a complicated story too. I feel like there's more too it that I missed.

The director talked for a bit first, and the fact that they shot in the underground tunnels and in the subway without permission added to it for me. I also was very surprised by how good the acting was, even by the hackers Phiber Optik and Emmanuel Goldstein who played weirdly formal gangsters.

I want to see it again, especially if many things have changes. The film looked done to me, but the director said he had a few months of work left.

Anyone know when it is coming out?

So I was doing the Saturday crossword puzzle in the NY Times. Another boring day, then I saw this little review on the top of the page. The reviewer Neil Genslinger spoke poorly of a movie that he said was shot illegally in the subways and sewers of New York. He said the film was unnecessary -- I was sold. I went online and bought out tickets and we found ourselves at the world premiere of this fantastic little gem, at a small little Lower East Side theater rubbing elbows with a couple of reviewer, some cast and crew, and other neighborhood denizens. It was at times creepy, frightening, funny, and moving. Everyone, but an older British gentleman left with a big smile on their face.

The above reviewer did a good job of summarizing the plot. But spoke nothing of the cool and unexpected effects, art direction, stirring performances, and rich soundtrack. Not to mention a gritty back alley tour of my New York. There was also a old school cartoon credit sequence that my girlfriend didn't have to hide her eyes from, not like the scary bits.

We look forward to adding this film to our collection.

The mainstream movie critics are, in my opinion, well off the mark. This is a brilliant theater of the absurd and it involves brilliant performances by Larry Swansen as the Old Man (the melodic tone of his voice is quite something) and Rick Poli as Goliath (with the lyricism of a highly limited vocabulary), as well as the unassuming Sebastian Montoya as The Kid. The other actors are great, too. They are aided, in no small part, by a thoughtful and poetic screenplay.

Some of the effects, as well, are well-thought out despite the clandestine appearance and feel of the movie, one which initially resembled the type I usually find too sophomoric and tiresome here, somehow, works so well.

As an aside, the whole illegal subway filming, that struck me an hyperbole and initially turned me off of the film (I viewed it as a gimmick); so, if you are like myself in that regard, just ignore that aspect (it plays no role in the movie itself, that I could see, a least).

Highly recommended without reservations as an original, and often, outright masterful.