Ironically, the Wayward Saints inept and dysfunctional amateur commedia dell’arte troupe returns to a church setting once again for its latest revival, but it’s blessedly not being performed somewhere in the outskirts of Cleveland this time.
Tchia casselle professional#
Aptly, there’s no soundtrack music (apart from that heard on boom boxes) until final credit crawl.George Herman’s rusty old warhorse of a farce A Company of Wayward Saints has had ‘em rolling in the aisles since its debut in 1963, presented over the years before thousands of eager summer festival attendees on huge and slickly professional arena stages around the world, yet still trickling down in size and scope to play the tiniest makeshift community theatre spaces in the basements of every local Baptist church on the continent. Lensing is willfully erratic, cuts abrupt, though there’s subtle accommodation to general tastes in editing that’s rough-surfaced but quite brisk and crafty in effect. all lending verite pretense considerable punch. Some viewers may find even the earlier progress too relentless and depressing, though filmmakers do balance that impact with just enough offhand tenderness and humor.įortunately, overall package is too strong to be sunk by last act’s overkill, with improv-based dialogue, excellent perfs and location shooting around Watts and South-Central L.A. While fairly packed with incident, feature maintains its illusion of you-are-there immediacy until the one-hour point, when a horrific home-invasion assault ratchets up the shock quotient a bit too zestfully.įrom then on, violent repercussions arise almost nonstop, ending in a final tragedy that would carry more weight if it didn’t cap an already overloaded closing reel.īy compressing so many worst-scenario incidents in its windup, “Gang Tapes” comes close to deflating a hitherto sound grasp on situational authenticity. We can see Kris is still very much a child, eager to imitate and win approval from whatever adults are available. “Gang Tapes'” strength lies in contrasting gangsta lifestyle segs with others that show the normal life protag unknowingly is leaving behind. Latter chillingly confides his own history of violence, from childhood on, in feature’s longest single take. Later, he gets to shoot a handgun in a male-bonding interlude with Cyril. (Prankishly bypassing an explicit scene, pic finds Kris’ camera blinking “low battery” and going dark just as the bedroom action heats up.) Capping the wild night, he loses his virginity at a party. Initiated into the older men’s gang, Kris first suffers a vigorous beating himself, then is promptly whisked along to witness a drive-by killing. He promptly beats this unlucky passer-by senseless with a crowbar, in broad daylight. They haven’t even driven home yet when the burly, volatile Cyril spies an enemy on the sidewalk. Latter is an upstanding citizen, however, compared to his accomplice Cyril (Darontay McClendon), whom he and Kris pick up from jail. She misses early signs that Kris may have found a bad mentor in Alonzo. Kris has a fairly stable home life, though he’s fatherless, and his mother (nicely played by Sonja Marie) has her hands full. They soon blunder into the wrong neighborhood, however, and become victims of a carjacking at gunpoint - with said camera ending up in the hands of young Kris (15-year-old newcomer Trivell), who is marginally involved in the drug and stolen goods trade of Alonzo (Darris Love). tourist highlights shot by a middle-class white family on vacation from the Heartland. Setting up the premise that what we see is unedited (though, it must be said, damn pacey) real-life vidcam footage, initial sequence consists of banal L.A. Result has the ring of unvarnished truth, even if pic’s last stretch may strike some as overblown. authorities, with much dialogue and character input from a largely nonpro cast. Theatrical roll-out will require careful, community-based outreach, with ancillary exposure somewhat more assured.įirst-time director Adam Ripp (who produced Bryan Singer’s pre- “Usual Suspects” first feature, “Public Access”) and co-scenarist Stephen Wolfson assembled their screenplay after a long process of interviewing gang members, their families and L.A. Nevertheless, “Gang Tapes” packs more than enough nonexploitative punch to merit play beyond the fest circuit. Also problematic is the fact that this grim, often brutal portrait of contempo African-American urban life was directed and penned by Caucasians. Marketing will be a challenge, as raw approach works against the melodramatic satisfactions of most post-“Boyz N the Hood” black actioners.
0 kommentar(er)
