Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Really Surprised!

Let's be realistic.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

This film has: no plot; countless, pointless, extended shots of virtually nothing happening (a guy getting a tattoo for ten minutes, a girl crying on a dark porch for eight minutes, people swimming and smoking weed, people with nothing to say driving around in the dark, etc.); no character development; and apparently no script. Take a camera, go to a poor neighborhood and film the most boring people you can find sitting around doing nothing, and you can personally recreate this waste of time disguised as film making. Apparently, this guy had $50,000 on hand to accomplish this feat. What? The backdrop for the end credits is actually more interesting than anything else in the movie (which is why I gave it a 2 instead of a 1). Well paid critics apparently like the novelty of seeing what poor people do all day, but for those who already know, this is utterly pointless.

I saw this film as part of the Ghent filmfestival 2011. My reason to book this film was its original format, as could be derived from the announcement. The latter also contained a bold reference to a film that I much admired: Winter's Bone.To start with the reference to Winter's Bone: the resemblance proved to be literally superficial. I refer to the looks of the people, their houses, and the way they live in general. Main difference with Winter's Bone is that nothing really happens in Putty Hill. We witnessed a series of empty dialogs, starting with How Are You, Good, etcetera, but ending soon after that with nothing important to remember. I know these opening lines are standard, but what followed after that remained nearly empty.It all did nothing to tell us about the deceased, other than an OD. What his relationship was with the interviewee, was also left unclear. Other than bare facts as being a relative or a school mate, it revealed nothing about how they got along, and whether they saw any pointers leading towards the OD. This utter lack of information was intentional, and meant to be the core of the message (as I extracted from the synopsis): no one knew the deceased very well.A technical fault that I observed several times, was the background noise with some of the interviews. It made it hard to understand what was being said. This cannot (and should not) be intentional.After 1 hour the interview format is dropped. We see two real-life scenes that make this film a bit interesting, one before and one after the funeral. We observe how the funeral worked out indirectly on people standing by. It was clear to me that it was rather the atmosphere around a funeral that triggered the emotional outbursts, and not because of some good friend died.The funeral after-party between these emotional scenes was a bit interesting, mostly while being different from what we here (in The Netherlands) are used to do around a funeral. A large photo of the deceased was prominently visible. Alas, neither the photo nor the speeches revealed anything further about him. And the nightly visit to the junkie's former house also failed to reveal something interesting; it left us literally in the dark.I've seen some positive reviews about this film, but I don't get it. For the public prize competition, I marked it with a 2 stars (out of 5). The actual contents deserved 1 star, but the original setup worked a bit to compensate. It may encourage the film makers to repeat the process, at which time they should take a subject where people show more substance. And finally, before I forget it: thanks for the live demonstration how graffiti is produced.

This is a drama about a wake that's kind of coalescing just after the death of a young man from an overdose. The cast includes ex-cons, skate-kids, dropouts, long-suffering retirees, generally low status folk sat on the sidelines of modern America doing their own thing. It's shot well enough that it looks like a documentary even though it's not. Lots of folks are interviewed about the dead guy and end up having a karaoke wake. The guys in the movie seem pretty anaesthetised most of the time, they're just trying to get along, and take things as they come.There's some nice stuff, including a memorial graffito sprayed as we watch, of the words Rest in Peace spelled out on three Japanese bridges that look like they could come from a Monet painting.At the end the film unfocuses on a road scene (an old trick) and you get all theses spheres of coloured light dripping across the screen. Like I say, an old trick, but it's done well here, and the unfocus is meaningful for this film, as the folk we see try not to focus too much, for example they go paintballing a week before the service, they just get on with it and don't mope. The wake at the end is actually fairly moving, and fleshes out the film a lot, adds meaning to some of what you see beforehand.I have a lot of love for this film, and I can see what it was trying to do, it's grown on me a lot since the night I watched it.I must warn you though that some shots are held for too long, and I'm a guy who likes long takes, furthermore there was a spalling walkout, which quite astonished me, probably the first time I've seen it happen in a film which wasn't violent, overtly sexual or confrontational. In fairness the film was shown quite late at night, and folks may well have seen several films beforehand and been tired (this was film #4 for me of the day at the Edinburgh International Film Festival).

A junkie's house, a boy's death. Girls smoking in the woods. Cops on the hunt for a bank robber. Grandma is a good egg. Tagger – "Rest in Peace, Cory." A girl comes home to her estranged father's tattoo party. A karaoke wake. Visiting a dead brother's junkie lair at night. All he kept was his skateboard. The friendship of girls.Putty Hill in the Northeast of Baltimore is both urban and bucolic. A filmmaker was working a coming-of-age tale about a group of metal-heads skirting the fringes of Baltimore. It was a timely script, but financing fell through. To rescue the work of everyone involved, he shot a new film in 12 days.A triumph of salvage. Not to be missed.