GOMORRAH comes about as close to being a documentary about The American Way as anything else. Take it from someone who sees exactly these kinds of crimes on a daily basis: Crime is the Universal Language- especially when it comes to "illegal narcotics." (In the past five days, we've had four murders here in Crack Town; a man was shot down in cold blood a few years ago less than a hundred feet from where I live; the body of a young woman suspected of preparing to testify against local meth dealers was found rotting in her apartment a few blocks away; the housing project where I used to live, notorious for its open-air drug dealing, was finally shut down when one of the dealers shot the father of two kids when he asked them not to deal drugs in front of his apartment (the man was shot in the head, at point blank range, and I just happened to drive by as a school bus full of underage eye-witnesses poured out into the street to look at the still-bleeding victim); when "authorities" made an arrest, the scores of large dumpsters in that complex were set alight and allowed to melt to the ground (I saw light flickering outside my back door and looked out to see what was going on: I saw flames that reached all the way up past the telephone lines- right next to my car, which just happened to be the only car in any of the parking lots; moving my car required ducking under flames that extended out over the hood and backing it across the parking lot; I was later told by firefighters that MINE had been the only 9-1-1 call made that night), etc. (I could go on for quite some time, but you get the idea. Oddly enough, Crack Town actually made the cover of a national magazine just recently; it was picked as the most "beautiful" place to live or somesuch nonsense.) While I have no desire whatsoever to see "all illegal drugs made legal," I think that writers like Johann Hari (CHASING THE SCREAM) make good arguments for Decriminalization. English comedian Russell Brand has made EXACTLY the same argument(s), pointing out that it's often the shortcomings of Society itself that results in drug addiction. (I can honestly say that, with only two exceptions, I've never met anyone in my life who WASN'T a User.) GOMORRAH never came close to shocking me the way I think it was meant to shock the viewer, but that's not a knock against the film nor the filmmaker(s): it's just a sad comment on Our Times.
