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Sorry, this movie sucks

Overrated and overhyped

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Dito Montiel's A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints takes the style and approach similar to Robert De Niro's A Bronx Tale and Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, which both overshadow this film for their grandscale look on issues and the exploration into certain relationships and how they grow and decimate over time. All three films possess common attributes; all three take place in a part of New York, they are directed by first-timers, they are stories that the men hold close to their hearts, all utilize the storytelling method of narration or breaking the fourth wall in some way, and they focus on a large group of characters all with something to say. Whether it's worth hearing or not is up to you.A Bronx Tale effected me in a way that totally came out of left field. By delivering its brutal honesty with cold, authentic realism was audacious and showcasing three exquisite talents (one of them, Chazz Palminteri, present here), it delivered a coming of age drama, deeper and more reliant on values than any one I've previously seen. Do the Right Thing was a crisp, lively drama relying on racial tensions and impending chaos that would ensue from enduring a brutally hot day in Brooklyn. Spike Lee brilliantly concocted tension through character development and human conversation, and almost implying, throughout the course of the entire film, that no character did "the right thing." But whatever your definition of the right thing was, you could disagree with me.Montiel is more interested with telling his story more than tacking on a fancy moral or showing any deep, subversive element in particular, which is perfectly fine with me. His close-to-home story is buoyant on its own, relying on strong performances from charismatic leads and is elevated by bright, humid, and mercilessly seamy cinematography. Montiel himself is our protagonist, played in his later years by Robert Downey Jr., a successful writer, yet absent family-man, Dito's mother calls him one day, twenty years after leaving behind his home in Queens, to return home to convince his father (Chazz Palminteri) to go to the hospital after falling gravely ill. Upon returning home, he sees Queens isn't much different, still crime-infested and relatively unprotected from the destructive youth and the passive adults, but notices that his longtime friends' ambitions of being lawless and as juvenile as possible have surged into adulthood.This story is spliced with flashbacks from 1986, the year when Dito (Shia LeBeouf) abandoned everything he erected in Queens, when Dito was only concerned about hanging with his friends Antonio (Channing Tatum), Laurie (Melonie Diaz), and Mike (Martin Compston), causing trouble and wreaking havoc. The film casually follows the youth's events and run-ins with relationships, sexual encounters, conversations, and troubled instances, and often showing their home-lifes as the least of their concerns.Palminteri gives a wonderful performance here, confidently lax, yet remarkably genuine and subdued, often providing his son Dito with father-like guidance that often gets ignored when the going gets tough. When Dito is seen in present time, he is unforgiven by his father who views his move to leave home not noble and commendable, like some would, but rather shameful and deviant. He views his son's return home as no more than a cop out move, somewhat more shameful than him leaving. His offer to make amends feels forced and trite and he ain't buying it.A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints consistently maintains a gritty atmosphere and always feels alive and raw, even when it's at its calmest times. The performances, mainly from LeBeouf, Tatum, Downey Jr., Palminteri, and Rosario Dawson, who could've benefited from more screen time, use the story's difficult themes of family relations and devotions to their favor, and never does much of this lack genuine feeling, thanks to Mantiel manning the camera and working the pen on this project. To call this film "solid" would be sort of an understatement, yet to call this "groundbreaking" or even "wonderful" would be a bit much. I'll go with "meaningful:" seems to meet them halfway.Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Shia LaBeouf, Rosario Dawson, Melonie Diaz, Chazz Palminteri, Martin Compston, Eric Roberts, Channing Tatum, Dianne Wiest. Directed by: Dito Montiel.

Kind of movie to determine a trip in your universe. Self definition. Ballas of memories. Faces of friends and family members, images of birth place and events of lost ages. An experience but in a strange form. Behind that, a good, real good film. Great cast and usual Robert Downwy jr. Bricks from America as pieces of puzzle. Speech about friendship and freedom, values and love, sense of gestures and returns, roots and teenage circle. And more. The words without letters, the emotions like smoke or snow, the images of people and streets, the perfume of past who is not base for future, all ordinaries facts , without importance but essentials for time of answers when questions are just ash flowers.The saints, saints of this film are shadows of every meeting. Silouettes, crumbs, just men and women , strange, boring, without any relevance. But sick, need of reconciliation, a girl who is mother today, 20 years, a friend in prison breaks appearances. And finish becomes beginning. So recognize your saints.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006)The premise of the movie is a total slice of life in a changing ethnic neighborhood in Queens, mostly with conflict between Puerto Rican and Italian immigrant families and their kids. It's often raw, violent, sexual, and depraved. It's also laced with beauty, has real family loyalty, and is a picture of survival. It portrays in particular one family and the conflicts in it with particular urgency.Overall, the movie is highly realistic. It pulls only a couple punches (a little boy gets beaten up on the street and it isn't shown). But all the other violence, the sex, the near rapes (depending on how you look at it), the anger and the misunderstood anger, all of it is wearing. I have to say I didn't enjoy a lot of it just because it was so unpleasant. Even when the light glowed and the train glided overhead on the El and a family was being peaceful and loving, there was an underlying anxiety and ominousness that made watching it an uneasy process.This might be a sign of a great film, or a good one. I don't want to disagree with those that find this mise-en-scene enough. There is a feeling of meandering plot, or no plot at all, through most of it. If other movies that try to address the problems and reality of the hood are more readable (Spike Lee has a couple, or Larry Clark's Kids, as starters), this one has the benefit of not being pigeon-holed. It's just a ride through the times, a snapshot, sincere and feeling.Robert Downey Jr. is a small presence, actually, and doesn't always fit in quite right, and in fact the peaceful quality of his portions of the film are easily mistaken for the most boring. Dianne Wiest is a fabulous actress but she seems miscast--though the director ought to know who represented his mother best. The whole movie is based on the real life of the director, Dito Montiel, and it has an authentic feel, though Wikipedia makes clear it's full of mistakes for a movie set in the mid 1980s. Not that it really matters. It's the energy of the youth that gives it its recklessness, which is what its all about. Forget about making sense of it. It's just the real deal on some level, and convincing enough to be artful. The filming, and editing, make up for a lot of the lack of narrative sense. It's not about sense, it's about being there, it's about the experience of traveling through the scenes.

The story of our lives begins in youth, and no matter how far we walk into time, those moments of our life walk with us. And hard choices will be made and never taken back, and we will struggle ahead, never knowing what lies down the road. And we will always look back to remember the ones that touched our lives, filled our soul with inspiration, and gave us the strength to continue on.And the door to the past swings open, and we are led into the life of Dito Montiel. And through his pen do we witness a dramatic story of one living on the hard streets of Astoria, Queens, and as the camera rolls, we follow his journey from past to future. And with heart and soul do the actors bring characters to life, memories of those carried forever, and the depth of one revealing the fabric of his being, his definition echoes deep through the talented Robert Downey Jr . and Shia Labeouf. And inspiration meets us in the end, and love, friendship touches our heart. And the bitter sweetness of life are the tears that slide down our skin and fall like shooting stars across the night, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints.