Word: levins
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...director Marc Levin's bifocal vision, Ray is a thug and a saint: he sells weed to the locals and buys ice cream for the neighborhood kids. Of course Ray will be nabbed, for a minor crime, and sent to the rathole of a D.C. jail. Another new guy, a rich Asian American (Beau Sia, scary and very funny), is so sure he'll be sprung that he spits wild invective at the screws. But Ray knows not to mouth off. Jail for him is a familiar horror: school with the toughest students and faculty...
Shot in a wandering, often annoying quasi-documentary style that might be called faux verite, the movie sometimes seems its own slamfest of verbal and visual attitudinizing. But Levin is attentive to the rhythms and politics of street and prison life: shootings that disrupt a conversation, animosities expressed in upended food trays. Gradually, the film's earnestness pays dividends in accumulated passion; its colliding moods--dank pessimism and loopy sentimentality--finally embrace. And it's always nice to see an independent film made by people who aren't secretly angling to produce the next season of Caroline in the City...
Directed by Marc Levin...
...important piece to the puzzle of Slam which cannot be overlooked is the superb craftsmanship of director Marc Levin. A veteran of documentaries, Levin employed a cinema verite style in this feature, utilizing non-actors and improvisation and filming over 90 percent of the movie with hand-held cameras. These directorial choices succeed in imbuing the film with a feeling of gritty realism, especially in the numerous jail sequences which were, justly, shot in Washington, D.C.'s correctional facility (as debatable a term as that is). Levin's choice of DJ Spooky's music for the soundtrack only intensifies...
...orgies show WHRB at its nonpareil best;they set a standard probably unsurpassed anywherein the world," Levin says...