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(More customer reviews)Recalling your childhood can be a slippery slope: you can choose to glaze over the bad and present an imaginary world in which very little is based on reality or you can choose to tell it like it is or was.
Whether or not Dito Monteil scrimps on the bad in his film of his autobiography, "A Guide to Recognize Your Saints" is very doubtful because this film is at turns brutal, violent, emotionally poignant and difficult and many scenes are so truthful that they are almost impossible to watch.
There is also much beauty here: scenes of Love: Dito (a truly amazing Shia LeBeouf in a career making performance) and his father (the great Chazz Palminteri) in the bathroom after Dito's friend is killed, a grown up Dito (Robert Downey Jr.) and his mother (a tragic, loving, disappointed Dianne Wiest) on the porch stoop discussing Dito's friend Antonio (a terrific Channing Tatum )...these scenes form the emotional center of the film around which all the others rotate and draw strength from.
"AGTRYS" is ultimately a story of friendship among 5 boys (Dito, Antonio, Mike, Joey and Nerf): all desperately poor, all full of pride and bravado and all full of emotional and sexual fire with very few ways to diffuse and direct it.
Dito Monteil has created a thoughtful, emotional and heartfelt film, a memoir really, about his childhood and the people that were most important to him at that time. It truly is about the everyday Saints and Angels that people our lives and because it is set in a slum in no way diminishes its beauty and grandeur.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (Steelbook) (2006)
A coming-of-age drama about writer/director Dito Montiel's youth, the film captures the mid-1980's in the toughest neighborhood of Astoria, Queens. Dito (Robert Downey Jr.) called home after 15 years because his father (Chazz Palminteri) is ill, encounters old friends - the ones he lost, the ones he left behind, the ones he can't help but remember. These are Dito's saints. An honest account of a bittersweet return to a neighborhood where relationships can never be what they once were, Dito's story is about to come to terms with a father's rage and a father's love.
Click here for more information about Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (Steelbook) (2006)
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