Urbania

Rating:
Summary: I Minor, Boring Film
Review: How anyone can deem this silly movie "Brilliant" is beyond me. It was deliberately confusing, and often boring. The sex scenes were unpleasant, and frequent enough, I think, to ensure that this film never finds a wide audience. The characters were unbelieveable, their actions gratuitous and cliched. This movie might appeal to an audience looking specifically for a "gay" movie, but if you're looking for a GOOD movie, keep looking. (If you want a good "gay" movie, try "A Man of No Importance," with Albert Finney. It is a character-driven movie, not an agenda-driven one.)

Rating:
Summary: Decide for yourself
Review: Urbania is one of the best, and most affecting movies I have seen in the past several years. Director Jon Shear takes chances with how to use the medium, and how to tell a story, and the risks pay off. I look forward to his next work, and to future films with Dan Futterman, who delivers an Oscar-worthy perfomance.

One of the things that makes this film unique is its intimate and realistic portrait of love (not just sex, not just puppy love) between two of the male characters. This has made the film very popular with gay audiences and no doubt prevented it from achieving wider success when it was released in late 2000.Too bad... in a year where the best indpendent movies were either exquisitely polished masterpieces (Crouching Tiger), or else flashy and memorable variations on formulas that have now been used a million times (Amor Es Porras), this disturbing and hopeful movie charted completely new territory -- bringing to film the immediacy and impact of the stage. It deserves a wider audience.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, Original and a Performance-of-a-lifetime!
Review: I cannot get this movie out of my head. I bought it in large part as a result of reviews I read here, as well as the initial buzz that surrounded its release. But no review prepared me for an edge-of-your-seat-thrill-ride far more impressive than "Gladiator's" spectacle. This is surely one of the best films of the past 5 - 10 years, and marks the arrival of an amazing director, Jon Shear, and an actor at the top of his form, Dan Futterman (of "Birdcage" and "Angels in America" fame.) Futterman - recently visible, yet practically unrecognizable, to TV audiences on "Will & Grace" as Karen's just-out-of-the-closet cousin - id flat out brilliant here.

A one-of-a-kind illusionary film, "Urbania" blends flashbacks and flash forwards in a time-twisting test of visions and reality, gore and humor. By keeping us breathless till the bitter end, "Urbania" - like "The Usual Suspects" before it, is one of the most suspensful, sharply drawn who-dunnit ever released.

Futterman nails a difficult, emotionally disturbing and exhausting role as Charlie. His performance was inexplicably ignored during the year end Awards yet it's a towering tour-de-force that takes a special kind of actor we rarely see, with full range of throttle...someone willing to give their audience a raw edge and still remain immensely likeable throughout. Like Hilary Swank in "Boys Don't Cry" Ruseel Crow in "The Insider", and Javier Bardem in "Before Night Falls" Futterman literally INHABITS his Charlie, warts and all, and in the process helps us finds his character's soul, and our own. As the pieces fall into place and the tangled web deconstructs, we share his grief, though we don't know the well from which it springs. But we're there with him, every step of the way!

With a haunting script that takes repeated viewings to appreciate fully, plus editing that astounds AND confounds at times, and several jaw-dropping sequences of reality doses that take your breath away, "Urbania" is a film ANYONE will love, gay, straight, left handed or right. It's even the stuff of legend - so innovative it will draw comparisons to "Citizen Kane," and so terrifyingly real and personal it hits home like "American Beauty."

Forgive it its flaws, which are minor ... some of the "stories" in the City of Stories, New York, fall flat, and a couple of sub plots seem out of place with the rest of the pic. That aside, Futterman deserves to be a MAJOR star! This was hands down one of the finest flicks of 2000 and I only wish it'd been released this year so it could be re-considered for all the Awards it should have won. I predict a cult following will re-discover it in the years to come. As a testament to life in New York, after watching it, anyone who lives here will never listen to another "New York story" the same way again. See it!

Rating:
Summary: Unexpected. Haunting.
Review: Urbania is one of the most original films around. While there are plenty of original and innovative movies, this one stands above the rest by telling a very human movie, not just artistic for artistry's sake. Charlie's quest hooks you and you don't know quite what to expect or his motivations until late in the game. This not just a "gay" movie. This is a truly great filmmaking.

Rating:
Summary: Powerful, Disturbing and Intense
Review: This movie certainly isn't for everyone but I found it to be one of the most powerful and intense movies I've seen in quite some time! I knew something was coming but wasn't a 100% sure and the last 20 minutes had my stomach in knots. I thought the performances were great and I liked how the urban folk tales were intertwined within the story. The dvd has some good extras on this as well. I just really enjoyed it! A deep, dark and moving experience! Hats off to the director!

Rating:
Summary: I would give it less...but maybe I just didn't get it
Review: I don't know what the previous reviewers saw that I missed. I didn't notice any groundbreaking acting or storytelling. In fact, the screenplay is very poor and is rather like a mosquito net full of holes...it's there, but not good for much of anything. The urban legends thing has been done...and with much more entertainment quality...I'd even prefer Urban Legends to this lousy flick. If you like artsy (but not pretty) cinematography, there is definitely something there. My recommendation: Rent it or borrow it first.

Rating:
Summary: Utter Garbage
Review: This is the worst serious movie I have seen in years. It's non-narrative exists on a continuum between boring and loathesome.

If you dig homoerotic sex scenes, you MIGHT be able to withstand the long, talky, weepy scenes that separate them, scenes in which men talk sensitively with one another about their feelings, their relationships, their disappointments, about "us, what we had." This movie is Oprah with chest hair. The dialogue is not witty; it is persistently unclever, despite the attempts at spooky subtleties, and the corner-of-the-eye observations of urban legends (the point of which remains obscure).

Here's an example of the shamefully trite dialogue the filmmakers torment us with. Charlie and his anonymous pickup are lying in bed, and Charlie confides, "I'm afraid that if I stay in your space, you'll be in my dreams." Really! BARF! Soap opera pablum. Can you imagine John Wayne saying something like this? No, and for good reason. It's shameful to hear words like these come out of a man's mouth!

Charlie finds the "friend" he is looking for, a vicious homophobe who, OF COURSE, is really a gay who hasn't acknowledged this to himself yet...Yes, THAT old cliche. I really can't say more without giving the ending away...let me just say that when you think this movie can't get any worse, it does. And then it goes back to boring.

Okay, there are a couple of funny moments. Charlie runs into his neighbors during his peregrinations around town. These neighbors interest him because he digs listening to them have noisy sex upstairs. But when he meets them, and bumptiously invites himself to sit down, he proceeds to taunt them, eventually telling them that he hears them going at it. Then he berates them for so noisily "forcing your lifestyle down everybody's throat." Get it? Okay, so it's not hilarious.

The other amusing moment comes when he goes into a camera shop, where a grating woman is describing to the black clerk how "natives" broke into her hotel room in Jamaica and stole everything but her toothbrush and her camera. Out in the street, she looks at the vacation pix she has just picked up, and, lo, the burglars had photographed themselves scrubbing an unmentionable part of their anatomies with her toothbrush.

But that was it. There is NOTHING else in this movie worth seeing (and it's even arguable, I suppose, that those two scenes are.)

This movie is a real dog. Do yourself a favor: Spend two hours watching roadkill rot instead.

Rating:
Summary: A Top Ten Choice on ANY List!
Review: What makes Urbania such an important film is not just the fact that a strong gay component is present in the story, and that the film is accessible to all adult audiences with the ability to invest a little intellectual response to a film, but also the fact that director Shear has found new and fascinating ways to use film, as Welles did in his first venture into the medium. Is Urbania another Citizen Kane? Well, almost, especially in its evident enthusiasm for film as a means of artist expression. Often a young director will throw his camera, and story, around with such carelessness in an effort to be "new," that the viewer is confused and frustrated. Pi exhibits some of this exaggerated, imposed expression. Or, someone like Spielberg will so obviously move his camera like his idol Hitchcock (his idol technique-wise, he has confessed) that innovation is hardly a term one could use for a director who is merely a technologically glitzier -- and even more juvenile -- de Mille.

Shear has taken care to use film to express a state of mind, and a gay man's life, in such a way as to actually innovate. Viewing the documentary on the DVD one can SEE how enthused Shear and his collaborators are about the film and its genesis. They enjoyed the creation, the polishing, the cultivation of their film. Urbania uses technology to enhance its story telling, not to draw narcissistic attention. It breaks ground the way Kane did, only with new tools such as digital editing and color correction, titling...all to make the film visually interesting while relating a story of deep human feeling.

For years I have waited for a talent similar to Welles, a film maker who knows there is more to movies than just technique. I mean, learning mere technique in a film school simply because some egocentric fool thinks he or she can be a great director is no different than painting a picture by the numbers. Both will turn out "art" that looks okay, superficially, but it is devoid of soul and heart.

Urbania is an expression of the artist, not only the technician, who is Jon Shear. It is his soul and heart. I hope and pray he will do more films, and if he should wander into mainstream temptation, I hope he will not avoid the gay thematics he so wonderfully incorporated into this fine and unique film. I can enjoy a bowl of popcorn with a Spielberg adventure, and laugh at yet another camp gay comedy clothed in outrageous garments so that the straight world might come and laugh (at us?) too. And I can always retreat to a library of noir, silent and foreign classics to satisfy my film buff cravings. But now, for the first time, I can sink my teeth into a picture unashamedly revolving around the character of a gay man who is abnormal ONLY for the fact that he has been terribly wronged. As he seeks to right that wrong, we learn a bit more about ourselves, whether we are gay or straight.

Thank you Jon Shear, Dan Futterman (I love you!), cast and crew of Urbania for giving us the FIRST profound expression in the genre of gay cinema.

From the Daily Herald: "Futterman's 'Urbania' twists time and truth into great storytelling

"Every once in awhile, a movie comes along that defies conventions and finds new ways to combine old forms. The grainy shots and deliberative jump cuts in Jon Shear's "Urbania" make it look like an 8 mm. experimental work. Shot on Super 16 mm. film stock, the movie's deep, saturated colors give it an eerie nocturnal glow, like an animated version of Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks." The splintered narrative pulls out all the stops. Flashbacks merge with memories, all motion comes to a fluttering halt at the contact of lips, some scenes could be real, but others simply imagined. This movie plays with time, truth and temperament, yet possesses a thread of conventional story structure to hang everything on."

Shear Interview: http://popmatters.com/film/interviews/shear-jon.html

http://www.urbaniamovie.com http://www.filethirteen.com/reviews/urbania/urbania.htm

Rating:
Summary: Had any good dreams lately ?
Review: I really dont care that 'You can count on me' was voted the Best Picture at Sundance in 2000. That honor, to me at least, was most deserved by Jon Shear's 'Urbania', and though it never won, it at least whipped up an audience and stirred commentary from various quarters, and any film that can do that is truly revolutionary.

To say that 'Urbania' is gay-friendly would be naive. While this is predominantly a movie that deals with homophobia and the universal issue of acceptance and lack of, it becomes some sort of poster-boy for the neccessity of tolerance in our lives. It also goes on to show us that the greatest films are the ones least talked about. After I saw this movie, I was amazed at just how little attention it had received. Perhaps people aren't ready for such in-your-face storytelling. But I was, and have benefitted immensely in my personal life, from the lessons this film teaches us. 'Urbania' is one long lesson in enlightenment.

The story is fairly simple. It starts off with our hero, as a sad wandering twenty-something searching for his special someone on the streets of New York, the city of the Urban Legend. Jon Shear goes on to show us that NYC really is the home of the tragic folk tale come true, and then proceeds to introduce us to the fact that the hero is gay. This comes not so much as a surprise as a casual unfolding of the story and fits in very nicely. However, the object of his obsession at the moment appears to be a straight man that most people would keep away from. Why the main character follows this man forms the rest of the tale, and I can't really give away more without revealing the ending and the mysteries between.

Lets just say that this is a film with a shock at every turn. And not just for effect either. It has heart, and Charlie Futterman as our hero is anything but. I haven't seen such a powerful performance in ages. But the real star of the film is the director and his message. Jon Shear has the most interesting film-making style. I could compare him to Lars Von Trier, but Shear is more choppy and unrestrained in the use of the camera. He does have a lot of heart, though, and this shows, both in the intelligent script and in the amazing performances he extracts from his lead cast, including a spellbinding one from Matthew Keeslar.

I have no idea where 'Urbania' will figure in the history of gay and lesbian cinema. But I can say that there has been no other film that has dealt with homophobia and bashing in such intelligent tones. This is not an easy work of cinema, but it must be seen. Its a pity that many audiences missed out on it when it was first released in theatres around the United States. I would therefore highly recommend the purchase of this item on DVD.

And spread the word.

Rating:
Summary: Awesome, atmospheric and even a little sexy
Review: One of the best gay oriented films ever. Definitely on par with films like "Parting Glances". Urbania is one of those films in which the central characters are gay but it's not a film about "being gay" and thus is not exclusively a "gay" film.

It's the story of a 30'ish gay man living in the Chelsea area of NYC. It's not really the traditional NYC - you won't recognize it. It's gritty and could be almost any large city anywhere. The story involves this young man's emotional journey through a few days. The first thing we learn about him is that a romantic/love relationship he was recently involved in was terminated unexpectedly leaving him adrift emotionally.

As the film progresses, we learn more about this man and the reasons for his turbulent emotional state by seeing him making self destructive and unexpected choices in his relationships with other people. Gradually we learn that that things are not always as they first seem and context for his seemingly strange behavior becomes more clear. During the course of the film, he interacts with a homeless man, his handsome upstairs neighbor and girlfriend, an interesting bartender, and an old friend who is now ill, as well as see flashbacks of scenes with his former lover.

The story unfolds weaving back and forth in time rather than in a straight forward fashion. This causes a couple of red-herrings in terms of how the viewer learns about Charlie's situation and mental state. But by the end of the film, his story becomes heart breakingly clear.

A number of well known urban legends are woven into the story (hence, Urbania) and they intersect the Charlie's story at various intervals. These range from the man who loses a kidney during a one night stand, to finding a rat in a hot dog bun. When the poodle makes an appearance we know exactly where it's headed.

The director managed to beautifully capture a number of scenes with those quiet moments that tell us volumes more about the interior lives of the characters than pages of dialog can. Dan Futterman is nothing short of amazing. He manages to carry the film and make difficult emotional transitions seem natural.

Overall, this film easily captures a spot in my top ten (and it's near the top!)