ON THE OUTS
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2005 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): *** 1/2
ON THE OUTS will break your heart. Never manipulative and unflinchingly honest, it tells three overlapping stories of teenage girls growing up in a Jersey City ghetto. Under the constant gaze of nearby Lady Liberty, seen frequently in the background, these girls come painfully to learn that with liberty comes responsibility. And with responsibility comes the opportunity to make the same bad choices that your friends are making, putting yourself on the path to a life of drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, uncared for babies, guns and violence. For them, jail becomes like a fast food place, a location where they go often.
With acting so real it's chilling, Anny Mariano plays Suzette, the good girl led astray by her "man," Judy Marte plays Oz, an entrepreneur who turns her skills to dealing drugs, and Paola Mendoza plays Marisol, a crackhead mother who can find money for drugs but not for food for her little girl whom she claims to love.
In this environment, in which 12-year-old kids turn guns on others with tragic consequences, the father of the baby Suzette is carrying is a "grown man," Suzette tells her mother. Well, this 20-year-old father of her baby deals crack and likes to play macho man with his buddies in games of Russian roulette. That's really grown up behavior.
In a movie filled with poignant images and painfully accurate dialog, two lines are perhaps the most memorable. In one of the times when the three girls find themselves having gone through jail's revolving door at the same time, they get a lecture from a tough love speaker sent to them by the jail's authorities. "It's 8:14 a.m. Do you know where your mother is?" the speaker tells Marisol about what others are saying about her to her little girl. The most dead-on line occurs as one of street toughs brags to his friends with sad irony, "I ain't stupid!" Which reminds one of the old adage, "Stupid is as stupid does."
ON THE OUTS runs a really fast 1:22.
The film is being shown as part of San Jose's Cinequest Film Festival (www.Cinequest.org), which runs March 2-13, 2005.
Web: http://www.InternetReviews.com
Email: Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com
Want free reviews and weekly movie and video recommendations via Email?
Just send me a letter with the word "subscribe" in the subject line.
========== X-RAMR-ID: 39581 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1371244 X-RT-TitleID: 10005088 X-RT-SourceID: 703 X-RT-AuthorID: 1271 X-RT-RatingText: 3.5/4
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews