Raising Victor Vargas 2003
I picked this one out soley because it scored high at metacritic and both Ebert and Roeper liked it. It’s a critic’s movie: cheap, independent, ethnic, set in New York City, no plot. This isn’t a bad movie, it just isn’t a real good one. Not funny and light enough to be like Greek Wedding, but not gritty enough to make a social comment. A couple left the movie halfway through (not sure why, because the movie wasn’t obviously pointless yet, but there was a lot of bad language) and at the end when my girlfriend commented that at least they didn’t spend much money on the movie, the person in front of us said with relief "We survived."
It’s a sometimes cute movie about a family of three middle to high school kids being raised by their grandmother from the Dominican Republic. Hormones are raging as overinterested boys try their moves on girls who feign disinterest. The grandmother struggles as the kids turn in to teenagers. Some of it is funny but mostly this is a character study and just follows these people around for a week. You may really like these people, you may feel sorry for them. The movie is kind of bleak but kind of uplifting. Critics will say "it takes its time" and that "it draws you in". These are ways of saying the movie is boring. At 88 minutes it seemed to take 2 hours. Don’t be too scared away from it if you like character studies, but don’t expect a whole lot either.
I’ll give it a B-.