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Urbania

Urbania

List Price: $24.98
Your Price: $22.48
Product Info Reviews

Features:
  • Color
  • Closed-captioned


Description:

Jon Shear's film, one of the overlooked gems of 2000, simmers under a tense, disturbing air of inevitability. Charlie (Dan Futterman) wanders the nighttime streets of the city, a mournful lost soul determinedly pursuing a mysterious stranger whom he is convinced holds the key to his redemption. He encounters chatty bartenders, pompous pickups, and dying friends (including a biting Alan Cumming), and before long you are treated to that rare, great surprise of realizing that you have no idea where any of it is headed. Some of Shear and Daniel Reitz's play-based dialogue is stagy, but the mercurial Futterman, both subtly sympathetic and unstable, is superlative. The film surrounds him with loopy urban legends (the poodle in the microwave, the AIDS-infected one-night-stand, etc.), then cunningly lifts the veil on such stories to reveal the fear motivating them. Uncertainty and isolation create the need for fantastic terrors. Shear hauntingly suggests here how much more horrifying and heartbreaking real life can be. --Steve Wiecking
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