To me, this movie is perfection.

Great Film overall

Good concept, poorly executed.

Absolutely Fantastic

After reading a lot of the other reviews, I realized that the context in which this film was reviewed was rather skewed. This film is not like your normal Hollywood film, and yes, I must admit that the plot leads up to a not very exciting climactic ending... but this depends on how you view the film. Growing up in working class resident of Northeast, Minneapolis, I see the struggle and lives of these people daily. I see poverty on the cities north side and I see the dramatic effects of the cities North side. This film was very inspiring to me because it documented these lives in a very emotional way. The film was scattered, unorganized and confused... but the film is beautifully shot and the raw emotions and life stories of the characters mirror the typical members of my community as well as many communities like mine. If you understand that this film is not your typical Hollywood flick and if you just open yourself up for 80 minutes to celebrate the lives of these characters and their story then this film will enrich your life. Watch this film and analyze the lives introduced, set aside your film 101 ego and just learn something. It is a film which documents how these characters come together in a struggle. You cannot critique the beauty of knowledge being documented in this film. So relax, watch, then walk around your community and reflect.

If you are watching this movie and thinking that perhaps these disparate, banal, meaningless , ordinary threads of interaction are going to lead somewhere into a plot or storyline of some kind, they do so only slightly in the end. About two-thirds of the way through the movie, all I had to do was check the year this movie came out (2009) to confirm my suspicion of what this movie is about: a foil for universal health-care. This script of this movie could have been written in a day. It is utterly blasé, predictable, and uninciteful, unless you think that social network message that infected the mind-numb robots of this summer "No one should die because they cannot afford health care" is genius.

Crumbling, hollowed-out buildings, trash-strewn alleyways and weed-infested empty lots provide the backdrop for "Explicit Ills," a low-keyed, understated account of a group of largely unrelated people struggling to make a go of things amidst poverty and urban decay in Philadelphia. Yet, despite the grimness of the setting, the movie offers a basis for renewal and hope through a cast of characters who don't exactly fit into the stereotypical slum-drama mold - and in the film's commitment to social justice through unity and action.In terms of form, Mark Webber's film is more a series of vignettes than a conventionally structured narrative, an approach that actually works quite well given the slightly amateurish, rough-around-the-edges nature of the piece. Yet, despite limited financial resources, Webber has fashioned a stylish, sometimes even quite visionary work that clearly cares about its characters and the community to which they belong.Those characters include a young couple caught up in the web of drug addiction; an aspiring actor who's struggling with depression; a seven-year-old chess player who gets picked on at school; a sweet-natured teenager who's trying hard to impress his girl; a pot-smoking mother who's having to counsel her son to stay away from the drug till he's older; and another mother (played by Rosario Dawson) who's desperate to get some much-needed medicine for her asthmatic child. The characters have little in common with one another except that they happen to live in the same geographical locale and they're all trying to do the best they can with what fate and, in some cases, their own choices and actions have led them to. The movie ends on a powerful note of optimism and reconciliation after a heartbreaking and gut-wrenching event befalls two of the main characters.When all is said and done, Webber's first directorial effort is more a work of "promise" than a fully realized work of art in its own right. But if your taste runs more towards the experimental and the "hip" and less towards the stale conventions of commercial movie-making, then "Explicit Ills" might well be the movie for you.

I heard so much good things about these but then I saw it and I must say i was not impressed. I thought it was very formulaic and jarring. The characters were indie film cardboard cutouts. None of the performances stood out despite a strong cast but you couldn't blame them as the dialogue was trite and uneventful. This was a standard crash-esquire drama with a decent message that was told more vividly at the Q & A by the director Mark Webber than was portrayed in the film. Sorry, wanted to like it but it just didn't mesh or flow. But I must say a good chunk of the audience members enjoyed it, as it seemed to move them. But as an avid film lover, i was not engrossed in any of the characters(I just wanted the movie to end) It felt like a hallmark special movie albeit with good, urban score that was frankly the best part of the film. The film is way over saturated but I know that's what the director intended.