Rating: 
Summary: Props to Edwin Torres
Review: While I agree with some reviewers who felt that this film started off strongly then fell off a bit as it progressed, I have to take issue with a couple of reviews that stated (not verbatim) that the racial politics of NYC as depicted in the film do not accurately reflect real life. One reviewer (the Amazon critic, I believe) went so far as to refer to the race dynamics in Q&A as far-fetched.Wellllll.. as a Latino, raised in the Big Apple but having spent much time up and down the East Coast, I have to respectfully disagree on that one. Granted, Q & A does take liberties with the interpersonal-relationships-as-microcosm-of-the-social-picture thing, but the actors, some of whose performances go waaaay over the top, are more to blame than the story itself . The film is based on a book by Edwin Torres, who also authored After Hours and Carlito's Way, both of which provided the basis for the Al Pacino starrer of the latter name. Torres, who grew up in Spanish Harlem, wrote these books while working as an Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan. He is now a Judge in Manhattan District Court. Point being that though the general suspicion and distrust among the races might appear to some of us in the 21st century as inaccurate, they are based on Torres' observations of the various peoples in and around Spanish Harlem during the 1960s and 70s, and are actually quite on target. Anyone who has ever found themselves staring down the business end of a police department-issued service pistol during a routine traffic stop can attest to this. And I say this not as a gripe, or as a means of using this forum as an online soapbox, but to state that sometimes, just sometimes, the veracity of a world create for the screen but based on "real life" can only be determined by the subjective views of those who've experienced it, one way or the other. But don't take my word for it, ask a cop, white, black, Latino or whatever else, if race plays a part in how people treat him or her when they answer a call. That said, Q & A does present a bleak, seemingly hopeless picture, but viewers shouldn't fault it for not providing cut-and-dried solutions to our social problems. Instead, watch it as a small slice of life, as experienced by a select few, and glean your own answers.
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