Sorry, this movie sucks

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

A New Jersey city in which all loyalties are mixed up -- ethnic, racial, personal, family. Some people turn one way or another reflexively. Others feel as if each limb has been tied to a different horse and their slowly being pulled apart. Vincent Spano gets the main credit here but it really belongs to John Sayles who wrote and directed this tale of a near hopeless urban condition. Some guys are obviously "bad" -- the phony Italian mayor. But most of the people we see are just trying to please the people they owe something to, while making a buck on the side if it's possible. Even the cops are given more than one dimension.I don't want to get snobbish but the philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote a lot about moral acts. He divided them into two kinds. "Hypothetical imperatives" were acts that came from thinking, "What's in it for me?" And "categorical imperatives" led to different acts that came from thinking, "What if everybody did this?"Only one character is impelled by categorical imperatives -- Joe Morton as the Councilman representing the black and Hispanic district -- and in the end, it seems he may have been won over to the other side. It's hard to tell. The ending of the film is ambiguous. Periodically the viewer has seen David Strathairn as a raving lunatic who goes around shouting things like, "Help!" and "Prices have never been lower!" Everyone pays him civil inattention. He's seen in jail, on the streets, and in crowds. And here, at the end, Vincent Spano is hiding atop a building crane with a bullet in him. His father, Tony Lo Bianco, tries to comfort him and then cries out "Help -- somebody help!" The camera shows us the street far below, lighted with those garish yellow city lamps. It's entirely empty except for a lone figure. It's Strathairn, who waves his arms back at Lo Bianco, shakes a hurricane fence, and begins to shout, "Help!" The likelihood of an improved situation is small.You have to hand it to John Sayles. It took a lot of courage to make this movie, and some of his others. They're filled with corruption and sometimes murder but they're not simple minded. The figures at the top of the hierarchy are sometimes the main cause of urban rot -- as in this case -- but they're not exactly evil. Like everybody else, they're move in a direction towards reward and away from punishment -- only their rewards are greater and their punishments less. At least in this movie. Historically every man who served as mayor of Newark, New Jersey, between 1962 and 2006 was indicted for corruption.It's really an ensemble movie and there are multiple intertwined plots so it's hard to outline them. Overall, it's a picture of life among the working class and the poor. The film doesn't leave anyone with an easy way out. As I say, a courageous movie.

John Sayles directs "City of Hope". With an atypically fluid camera he weaves his way in and out of a fictional city, dipping into the lives and stories of over 40 characters. As always with Sayles, racism, crime, blue collar anxieties and political corruption are the points of interest.It's a big soap opera, and the dialogue rarely rings true, but the sheer ambition of the film nevertheless wins us over. Sayles opens on Nick Rinaldi, a young man who has spent his life getting free rides from his mafia connected father. Searching for autonomy, Nick quits the easygoing contractor's job provided by his Dad and sets out to make it on his own. Other characters are then introduced: an alderman looking to heal the black inner city, hoodlums trying to make a buck by playing the rich against the poor, contractors who face various moral problems, drug addicts and dope fiends on the streets, city mayors and politicians, lowly builders, two black kids who are perpetually hassled by cops, a professor who is falsely accused of abuse, black militants, the "white establishment", body shop owners plagued by crime...and on and on it goes.The film's title is ironic; there is little hope in sight. All of Sayles' characters seek to extricate themselves from a crumbling society, seek to find some form of flight, but escape is shown to be impossible. The social fabric is too dense, everyone is too connected (yet too bent on individualism), every action has too much of a knock on effect on every other character, for emancipation to prove successful.Aspirations are raised and discarded by Sayles, the wants and needs of some directly affecting the wants and needs of others. Characters are constantly breaking either rules, beliefs or souls, everyone pushed into making compromises, all of which have far reaching effects. This is urban life as warfare, the cast struggling to dodge ripples and repercussions. Take a character called Joe, who makes a deal with the mayor's office which unfortunately eventually leads to the death of a young woman and her baby. It's a domino effect Sayles hopes to capture, a city whose inhabitants believe themselves to be divided, at odds, but are in actuality inextricably connected.For all its ambitions, Sayles' work here is actually fairly superficial (it's a pre WW2 version of leftism). His characters are stock, walking mouthpieces with obvious character arcs, and he rarely goes beyond a kind of one-dimensional understanding of society. It's a film which only pretends to offer complexity, and if you've seen "The Wire", or read some Balzac, you'll find that Sayles lacks a certain sophistication. That said, the film becomes increasingly engrossing as it progresses, and its structure was somewhat novel back in the early 90s (only Kasdan, Spike Lee and Altman were doing similar things).Some have compared the film to Altman, but Altman's working methods are completely different. Altman's ensembles are subtle, improvised, like jazz. Sayles, in contrast, is foremost a writer. All his camera moves and characters are locked in, sealed, rigid. Where Altman's world is indeterministic, gracefully chaotic, Sayles' is blunt, rigid deterministic, his characters not allowed to escape the ink of his pen. It's closer in tone and outlook to early Spike Lee.7.9/10 – Worth one viewing. Watch "The Wire" instead.

Like another Sayles film, Matewan, this really is one of the little known very solid films of our time. This precursor for Crash is a compelling look at the substantial impact strangers may have on each other.While the acting is at times somewhat melodramatic, the direction of the film is typical of the brilliant Sayles. The film contains some very interesting tracking shots where inter-connected characters unwittingly enter and exit each other's lives.Unfortunately, the film's title often has it mistaken for the awful "City of Joy" featuring Patrick Swayze

Some people complain about the number of subplots:That's precisely what makes this movie so original and so endearing.This is a small microcosm of characters we follow during two hours without getting bored.Sometimes the director leaves two people talking for two other ones in the same sequence:this technique is an update of what William Wyler used to do notably in "detective story" (1952) and even "best years of our lives"(1946).The sequences are very short and are intertwined with skill;the cast is uniformly good,with Tony LoBianco as the stand-out.This is a very interesting movie ,focusing on such important subjects as responsibility,honesty and dignity.Really worthwhile.