In "City of Hope," John Sayles appears on screen as one of his urban cliche characters, but off screen he's Jerry Lewis, wheeling out his crippled city and his crippled movie and trying to manipulate the viewer into phoning in a pledge or something.
Unfortunately for him and his poster-child city, the kid is thoroughly unlovable. Sayles' fictitious Hudson City tries to be a composite of real-life New Jersey industrial towns, but it ends up being just a laundry list of big-city problems--poverty, racism, bad government-- slapped up on the big screen with Sayles saying nothing more than Isn't This Awful? and Don't You Want to Do Something About It? This might work if we were given more reason to care, but the characters never get a chance to become more than cartoon characters in a one dimensional place.
I live in a big city, but if someone tried to get me to see "City of Hope" again, I'd split for the suburbs.
Unfortunately for him and his poster-child city, the kid is thoroughly unlovable. Sayles' fictitious Hudson City tries to be a composite of real-life New Jersey industrial towns, but it ends up being just a laundry list of big-city problems--poverty, racism, bad government-- slapped up on the big screen with Sayles saying nothing more than Isn't This Awful? and Don't You Want to Do Something About It? This might work if we were given more reason to care, but the characters never get a chance to become more than cartoon characters in a one dimensional place.
I live in a big city, but if someone tried to get me to see "City of Hope" again, I'd split for the suburbs.