chiffre-le

It is quite remarkable in this documentary how you start to forget that you are watching a documentary and start feeling like you are living on the street as well - or at least following the main characters around on the streets of Santa monica. This sunny coastal town more known for movie starlets with little poodles sticking out of their Fred Segal shopping bags and shiny expensive cars rolling around palm tree lined boulevards while shallow people on cell phones ignore them is also home to a large amount of homeless people - equally ignored by shallow people on cell phones. There are some scenes in this documentary where the police arrives and wants to move some transients along and you can see how they spot the camera and decide on a different tone than they would have used had there been nobody observing. Well worth seeing.

I cringed through half of this film. Not because it was bad but because it was dealing with a horrible subject in a brutally direct way. This is not a film to sit and eat pop tarts. The skinner character will haunt me for months to come. A skinhead bastard from today or hundreds of years ago. And the whole claustrophobic atmosphere is just depressing and hopeless. Of course in reality it must have been even worse, but in this film we are spared the token stereotype compassionate Hollywood hero type who helps the slaves and proves to the audience that we white people were not all that bad after all. This is volatile stuff. Like a box of dynamite. No wonder it is having a hard time to get word of mouth.