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37 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It takes hard work and ingenuity fo live in a subway tunnel, September 11, 2004
This review is from: Dark Days (DVD)
This documentary won three separate awards in the Sundance Film Festival in 2000. I can well understand why. At that time there was a whole colony of homeless people who lived underground in the subway tunnels in New York City. It was dark and damp and full of rats, but yet they preferred it to a homeless shelter. There, they erected their personal shacks and struggled for survival, venturing out to forage in garbage cans for food as well as for stuff to sell. British Producer Marc Singer was so fascinated by these people that he ventured into these tunnels and spent two years getting to know them. Eventually he wound up living with them and made this film, using the homeless people themselves as crew.
The film is unique in that it shows these homeless people as human beings and the viewer gets to know them as individuals. Yes, many of them have drug problems, but they still have lives, hopes and dreams, a tough will to survive and often a sense of humor. They manage to cook meals on makeshift stoves and there is a feeling of camaraderie among them. We also see their ingenuity with the very little they have. And realize that their days are full of hard work just to survive. The conditions they live in are absolutely squalid. But this is their home.
During the course of the film, Amtrak decided to rid the tunnels of the people and homeless advocates negotiated for them to be placed in real housing. By the end of the film we see them in real apartments. There is an upbeat quality to this ending of the film.
However, the DVD is much more than the actual film. There's a 40-minute interview with the filmmaker, Marc Singer, which is equally as fascinating as the film. I hadn't realized that he was a non-professional person who had never made a film before. He spent all his money on a camera and had to learn how to load the film. He became obsessed with making the film, and became homeless himself after starting to edit the more than 50 hours of film he had shot. There were many delays and setbacks but eventually the film was made and received many accolades.
On the DVD we also get to find out what happened to the many individual homeless people who we got to know through the film. A few had died but most of them had moved on and were leading more productive lives. It felt good to know this and to realize that Marc Jacobs had really done a tremendous good deed by merely making this film. I applaud him in every way. And I also applaud the film. Highly recommended. Especially on DVD with the added features.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Incredible Black & White Sundance Award Winner, September 10, 2005
Imagine for a moment that you're a regular bloke and you want to do something to help the New York City homeless. You've got very little money, no resources, but a big heart. What could you possibly do to make a dent in their population?
If you're Marc Singer, the man behind this Sundance Award winning documentary, you found a way to do quite a lot.
For a person who'd never touched a movie camera before starting in on this "project", one can see why this film impacts its viewers on multiple levels. Shot in grainy black-and-white 16mm film, this documentary gives us a startlingly real-life look at several homeless people living in self-built shanties in the Amtrak tunnels under the city. No light makes it down there, except whenever a train skirts by or via the makeshift lighting this weird community has produced by tapping into Amtrak's electrical system.
Marc Singer delves into this society. And I mean he DELVES. Mr. Singer gave up living on the surface and slunk into this netherworld for two years in order to shoot his film. And who did he use as grips, sound assistants, and lighting experts? The homeless themselves.
More interesting than the film itself is how it got made. After watching the documentary, I went ahead and looked over the special features on the DVD and found a "Making Of" track which focused on Mr. Singer and how he accomplished his film making. This showed the incredible lack of understanding of anything related to filming and those who helped him out, both in teaching him and by giving him financial help so that the documentary made it out to the public. We also get to see the amazing multiple awards that the documentary won at Sundance; an incredible set of scenes that contrasts starkly with what Mr. Singer had gone through in order to make this film a reality.
Never giving up on his newfound tunnel companions, never letting financial devastation overtake him, never giving up creative control, all added to the success of the film and my enjoyment of all aspects of it. Bravo, Mr. Singer.
(You might be asking what happens to the tunnel-bound homeless. It's a perfect ending to the film, so you'll have to watch it. I ain't giving it away!)
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Looking into the unknown..., November 30, 2005
...and finding the mundane.
I would suggest to the people that are slamming this movie that this type of flick is not your cup of tea. Go pop a Matt Damon movie in.
This is a great movie on two fronts. First of all, the camera work and editing is perfect, and secondly, it seems to me that Singer's approach to this film is to simply show the viewer that homeless people are not the paper-thin cliche's that our mind conjures up when we hear the word, but three-dimensional human beings that have the same concerns, and live the same life that any of us do.
What is so incredible about this movie is that you expect to see something truly bizarre occurring in those tunnels, and what you actually see is a group of people, doing their thing, just like anyone else. They are a diverse group, which in itself is unexpected. As the film progresses, their plywood huts really begin to seem like any other community, except in a tunnel. It's surreal.
I don't think for a second that Singer wants us to pity these people, honestly a lot of them aren't doing too bad (considering the circumstances). I think the point here is just to observe, and to see that these "freaks" are pretty much just standard-issue human beings.
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