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Attitude

2003, Movie, NR, 101 mins

Attitude: Review

ATTITUDE
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Stark and defiantly free of redemptive Hollywood clichés, this bleak B&W film charts the last doomed days of an articulate but self-deluded ex-con whose poisonous anger proves his downfall. Spoddy (Michael Disend) lives and works in a small commercial garage and does the bulk of his business with car thieves Big E (Marion Christian) and Blackie (Vernon Medearis). Perpetually seething and conditioned to lash out at the world before it can lash out at him, Spoddy channels his chaotic emotional energy into an obsessive fascination with birds, whose sharp beaks and claws, sleek beauty and ability to soar high above the Earth represent everything that eludes him. Spoddy bullies his mechanic (Paul Greenberg), needles Blackie and Big E, treats homeless people with withering contempt and belittles his doctor (Michael Smith), who's bearing the bad news that Spoddy is HIV positive. Spoddy in turn delivers the diagnosis to his sometime girlfriend, Meryl (Selena Allen), with a callous mix of evasion and bluntness; she in turn pours out her rage and fear to her brother — Big E — who responds by going gunning for Spoddy. Though Spoddy finds temporary refuge with a group of homeless people encamped on a strip of desolate landfill, time is finally running out. Since the early 1990s, director Rob Nilsson has been developing films with the Tenderloin yGroup, a collaborative acting workshop based in inner-city San Francisco that welcomes professionals and amateurs from a wide variety of backgrounds. Like English director Mike Leigh, Nilsson encourages his cast to improvise dialogue based on previously worked-out situations; the resulting performances are fiercely raw. Lead Disend (whose novel Stomping the Goyim is a hallucinatory slice of late '60s lowlife on New York's Lower East Side) has the meaty, battered face of someone who's been kicked around by life, and the rest of the cast is equally convincing. Nilsson, an early convert to video now committed to the unobtrusive flexibility of DV, calls his style of filmmaking Direct Action Cinema; it aspires to a documentary realism and keeps the focus on the characters at all times. Though the results can't really be called enjoyable, the intensity that bleeds off the screen is undeniably effective. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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