From My Collection: Ghost World Movie Review

It’s sort of a rite of passage of being a teenager that you think you’ve got the world figured out, have everyone’s number, and believe your own views to be absolutely right. I suppose it takes most people until sometime in early adulthood to realize that you didn’t know half of what you thought you did when you were seventeen. Some teenagers (I might have been one of them) take it a step further and believe there is an authentic way of living and that just about everyone walking this earth is a big phony. Think Holden Caulfield. It should suggest something important that he was my hero at fifteen and then a sad tragedy at thirty.

From My Collection: Sleepers Movie Review

Back in 1996 I was truly taken in by Barry Levinson’s Sleepers, adapted from Lorenzo Carcaterra’s allegedly autobiographical novel relating his experiences as a boy growing up in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, becoming the victim of terrible physical and sexual abuse at a boys’ reform school, and the revenge he and his friends exacted upon their tormentors as adults years later. When the book was published and then later when the film was released, there were many who questioned the validity of the story. There is no independent record of any of the events described. Of course juvenile records are expunged and Carcaterra claims he changed locations, which offers reasonable explanations as to why journalists were unable to unearth any court records similar to what takes place in the second half of the story. Just looking at it in terms of sheer believability, the first half involving Carcaterra (his character goes by the nickname Shakes) and his three best friends as adolescents is selling something so much easier to swallow than the revenge-filled latter half.