AGuideToRecognizingYourSaints Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Maybe a few of you saw Fighting over the weekend; I'd guess that most Cinematical readers chose to steer clear. I kind of liked the film, which is thin and silly but has a nice measured earnestness and is beautifully directed by Dito Montiel (A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints), a prodigy with a terrific sense of rhythm, motion and place. But the real reason I'd recommend Fighting to all of you is a completely deranged, unmissable performance by one Roger Guenveur Smith. Smith has bided his time over the past couple of decades in B-grade DTV efforts, small roles in Spike Lee films (he was Do the Right Thing's Smiley), and an occasional appearance in something higher-profile, like Ridley Scott's American Gangster. I hope that Fighting earns him some cult popularity and maybe some more interesting work.

He plays "Jack Dancing," a New York mobster and streetfighting kingpin who gives Channing Tatum's Shawn his first bout at the urging of hustling small-timer Harvey (Terrence Howard). He doesn't have a lot of screentime, but he takes the movie to a whole new, utterly bizarre level whenever he appears -- and in the process made me laugh harder than almost anything else this year. His performance has been described by others as "Walken-esque," but while Smith is compellingly weird in a similar way (and speaks with a comparable off-kilter cadence), he adds an element of hardass gangster menace that somehow makes the whole thing even funnier.

Click image below for full poster

Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster for Fighting, starring Channing Tatum and Terrence Howard. Directed by Dito Montiel (A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints), Fighting follows a young fighter/ticket scalper who's "discovered" and subsequently mentored by a smooth-talking trainer with eyes on making a whole lotta money on the underground fighting circuit. Kinda feels like Fight Club meets The Fast and the Furious, but with Montiel behind the camera, you're going to get a strong, gritty realness since he grew up on the streets of New York City (where the movie is set) and likes to inject a lot of his own experiences into his films. (And hey, you ladies get Channing Tatum without his shirt on for an hour and a half -- life ain't so bad after all, eh?)

Fighting hits theaters on April 24. Check out the full poster below and the trailer over on Moviefone.

I'm of two minds about A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, a new dramatic film written and directed by Dito Montiel and written from his own memoirs of growing up in Astoria, Queens during the mid-80s. Parts of it are engaging, thoughtful and affecting, from the first-rate cast (headlined by Robert Downey, Jr. and Shia LaBeouf as different ages of Montiel) to Montiel's skill in demonstrating through visuals and dialogue how what we're watching is not necessarily the past as it happened but as Dito remembers it. At the same time, it's hard to be too engaged by the adolescent struggles of Dito and his friends Nerf, Guiseppe, Mick and Antonio as they drift aimlessly through a humid swamp of testosterone and ignorance.

In the present day, Dito's a writer, living in Los Angeles, far from New York. But a call from his mother Flori (Dianne Wiest) imploring Dito to come home to see his ill father Monty (Chazz Palminteri) puts Dito on the next plane to New York … and onto the on-ramp for memory lane. Dito (played in the past by LaBeouf) is spending a sweltering summer in Queens hanging out with his pals. He has the possibility of pleasure in a romance with neighborhood girl Laurie (Melonie Diaz) and the possibility of danger as a local graffiti war heats up. …

I just returned to the Park City Marriott - AKA Sundance Headquarters – from the Eccles theater, where the lines were around the block for the fourth public screening of Dito Montiel's A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints. i had been told by someone in the press office that, even though I didn't have a hard-copy ticket, I would have no problem getting in with my press pass. That statement was wrong, wrong, wrong, and I knew it would be as soon as I got off the bus and walked straight into a scalper offering a pair of tickets for a hundred bucks. The parking lot looked like a rock concert. The two seperate lines - one for those poor, optimistic suckers who actually believed that if they waited out in the cold for long enough, they'd be rewarded – and each stretched almost all the way down to the street 45 minutes before show time. By the time I actually got to the box office (above: the view of the line from the front), I passed four seperate, desperate souls whispering, "Tickets? Got tickets? Got an extra ticket?" Though some people with press passes were getting in, I was told that my press pass was "the wrong kind", and there wouldn't be enough room for me. So I booked it out of there – but not before watching a guy fork over two fifties for a single ticket.

This is all very,very strange, because press reaction to Saints has been decidedly mixed. The film, which is in Dramatic Competition, also screened three times yesterday (well, twice at the Sundance Resort, but still). Based on Montiel's Brooklyn-based childhood, the film stars Robert Downet Jr, Rosario Dawson, and Shia LeBouf, who has been everywhere for the past couple of days. In the press room, a couple of reporters joked that after the screening, it's possible that Montiel couldn't pay anyone to line up for it – but with the kind of weight that buzz seems to have around here, we'll have to wait and see.