Stars: Benjamin Bratt, Giancarlo Esposito, Talisa Soto

Director: Leon Ichaso

Summary: Miguel Pinero was a New York City poet and playwright who wrote what he knew: a world of 'stabbing, shooting and dying'. This gritty, non-linear biographical film presents Pinero's dark charisma and even darker life in all it's angry glory. A junkie, a drug dealer, and a thief, Pinero (played by Benjamin Bratt) spent time in Sing-Sing prison, an experience which was the basis of his most famous play, SHORT EYES, which won the Tony award in 1974. Pinero also pioneered the spoken-word poetry (the forebearer to rap and hip-hop) of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, which he helped found. Mixing digital video in colour with 16mm film in black and white, the film creates a convincingly harsh and lively portrait of life on the mean streets of Lower East Side Manhattan in the 1970s and '80s. There were a number of people in Pinero's life who recognised his genius and tried to save him from self-destruction: his mother (Rita Moreno), theatre impresario Joseph Papp (Mandy Patinkin), and his longtime girlfriend (Talisa Soto). But the allure of crime and drugs won him over, and Pinero finally crashed and burned, dying young in 1988. This film is a passionate tribute to a passionate artist who remains an important Puerto Rican-American icon.

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Breathless, Jim McBride's 1983 remake of Au Bout de Soufflerewrites Godard's existential hipster as a vain, style-obsessed hood and in the process loses some of the point. Godard's hero was a translation and productive misunderstanding of a quintessentially American sort of delinquent; because it is a retranslation, Gere's intelligent, nervy performance as Jesse Lujack suffers by comparison, however admirable it is taken in itself. McBride's direction strokes Gere's face and body lovingly--his every foxy smile, or glance at himself in a mirror, is played for passionate significance. This is also a good-looking film: the back alleys of LA and sunset over the Mojave desert have rarely looked as good. Valerie Kaprisky's Monica is inevitably given secondary importance; the decision to make the woman who goes along with Jesse's wild final ride on a whim an exchange student makes her at once more and less like her equivalent in the Godard--she has a touching exoticism that is at the same time somehow beside the point. The DVD includes the original theatrical trailer. --Roz Kaveney

Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Release Date:	February 28, 2005
Runtime:	94 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	B E D 881595
Keywords:	General, Drama, Elevation, Pinero
Genre:	Drama