A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints | Dianne Wiest, Robert Downey Jr.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints | Dianne Wiest, Robert Downey Jr. | Growing up in Queens

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A Guide to Recogni...

	A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints Dianne Wiest, Robert Downey Jr. First Look Pictures, 2007 average customer review:based on 30 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A coming-of-age drama about a boy growing up in astoria ny during the 1980s. As his friends end up dead on drugs or in prison he comes to believe he has been saved from their fate by various so-called saints. Studio: First Look Home Entertain Release Date: 09/04/2007 Starring: Robert Downey Jr Chazz Palminteri Run time: 98 minutes Rating: R

An Inspiring Tale From The Inner City

A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints tells the tale of director Dito Monteil's struggle for life and inner peace while growing up in crime-riddled New York, and the escape he barely makes to California. The friends he had become the faces he sees when he pictures who he has become today and, returning years later to help his sick father, he finally faces the people he'd left behind and tried to forget. With gripping performances from Shia LaBeouf and Robert Downey Jr, supported by a talented cast, this movie is a must-see for any fan.

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Growing up in Queens

Sincere and heartbreaking story about four friends growing up in Queens. They go to school together, they spend time after school together, they protect each other. One of them, the main character Dito (portrayed by Shia B. as a teenager and R. Downey, Jr. as an adult) has complicated relationship with all of them. He feels loyalty to his freinds, but also realizes that he may be loosing his life to local thus if he stays around for a while. His relationship with his parents is a complicated one. His parents got him late in their lives and they are overly protective of him. They seek to be his friends, but Dito feels that all the love is smothering him more than helping him grow emotionally and spiritually. Dito's father loves him fiercely, but is it a jealous kind of love. His father is possesive and probably fearful of his own impending death (his health is frail). In an effort to keep his son close in order to ensure that there is someone taking care of him and his wife in their last days of their lives, he pushes his son away with his stubborness and inability to let go. Before long, Dito leaves East Coast for California where he spends another 20 years as a writer before coming back to Queens where memories of his childhood start to haunt him: his first girl crush, his friend duying accidentaly when he is hit by a train, another friend murdered by the local gang member, third friend drowning is drugs and alcohol in order to hide his own hopelessness and despair and and the last friend (played by fantasticly handsome and convincing Eric Roberts) is in jail after murdering a gang member who beat Dito with a baseball bat. All these people are tied together by the neighborhood they live in and never venture from (going to Manhattan is almost like taking a vacation to them). They do not know of any other world outside their own. They are also bound by the "old world" expectations where children's roles are defined from their birth to be a caregivers and safekeepers of their parents' old ages. When that conflicts with realities of our (american) culture, our own peronsonal needs and desires it is almost impossible to reconcile the two. Heartbreak is inevitable, but it is a kind of heartbreak that does nto erase the love. To the contrary, it seems to make it even stronger and more resiliant.

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LIKE THE FILM'S CHARACTERS...THIS FILM GOES NOWHERE!

I like these types of films and this film has some excellent performances. Diane Wiest is fantastic in her role as the loving mother and everyone else is on cue in this depressing "coming of age" movie. Life in the innner city looks bleak and hopeless for the characters in this film. It's biggest problem is it really doesn't go anywhere. It's worth watching, but I have seen better films dealing with the same subject. It's a good movie, but not great.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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