The Local

I was bored with Hollywood fare and began looking for something different. This is the perfect example to keep you excited on a Sunday. I was totally engrossed in the movie. I was once beset with hard times, picked myself up and this is the part I relate to most in the movie. But that road is long and hard. Thank the lord my path to success was not the same one this character had to follow. The Director portrayed the route perfectly. The characters look like they are straight out of my personal nightmare. I cannot imagine anyone not enjoying this movie. It was powerful. Some of the actors look like they are coming direct from the streets. You simply cannot predict your own feelings at the end of this movie. Everything in this movie is a metaphor. I cannot wait to see more movies with the main character, the writers and the director. Absolutely a great movie made on a small budget. Amazing!

The story is overly simplistic and melodramatic, like some slightly better than after-school teen film.

I.e., yet another boring inner city drug drama.

Impressive technically, but little more. The acting is all impressive (excluding Eberle who is also the writer and would have been better off writing himself a cameo role). The score, soundtrack, and filming all help make the film tolerable. Hopefully everyone except Eberle will get better films to be in from now on.

So what do you watch instead? Gamer has some similar sub-story lines and written into a more interesting film overall.

Wow, one comment on such a movie, hard to believe it, because it's great.

First, it takes a lot of guts to release a movie so atypical compared to the "hollywood stuff" were watching normally. No stunts, no great looking actors, no digital tricks, no commercial music, no brilliant colors, not even a pleasant hero.

Nevertheless this film offers something, that most of the 1a productions lack off: Credibility!

Dan Eberle plays a loser, who is selling his soul for thirty bucks a day to work as a courier for drug dealers. If that would nor be bad enough, every time he jobs something goes wrong and he ends up beaten up, without money and with even more problems than he had the day before. Nobody is respecting him or taking him for serious. The only thing he seems to be able to manage in his life is his addiction to drugs, he is clean.

So what's so interesting about this film? Well, the fact that it could be a real story, something that really happens every day in every part of the world. The dirty truth, ugly, bloody, revolting and pitiful...

But very interesting, like when two people have a fight in front of you... you can't stop watching, you just stare at it motionless although you don't support it.

Do yourself a favor and watch this movie, it's original, brutal and somehow very fascinating. I will keep my copy and watch it again, what not happens to often.

Went into this with pretty high hopes and honestly the first half hour made me a bit weary. I thought i was going to be extremely disappointed. But from the half hour mark until the very end, this movie was real, raw, and honest. This is the first time I have heard of Dan Eberle, although he does look familiar, and he did an incredible job at portraying his emotions and confusion about where his place in life is. I always have an immense amount of respect for people who can write, direct, and star in the same movie. The acting from each character didn't come off as strong or over the top. In fact, it didn't seem like acting at all, it was very natural. Happy to say that I was impressed with this film, and I'm very glad that I watched it. Great underlying story of the importance of family, the support needed to be clean, and how we can go out of our way to help others that are in worse shape than ourselves.

Okay look, this movie flat out sucks. The "action scenes" are only brutal if you're a child who's never been in a fight, or seen a decent movie. "Collateral" had short, relatively brutal and engaging fight scenes, "Snatch" had a brutal efficiency to the violence in it. This movie has BUTCHERED "flutter sequences", where there is no fluid attachment to the motion, and what you're really supposed to believe, is that a bunch of fat guys in cameo who are coked up are bad asses. Or that the main character is from a video game, where he receives a horrendous beating, charges his super meter, and suddenly "finish him!" rings out and bam, opponent dead from a nonsensical and badly edited series of moves, I mean seriously, these action sequences wouldn't make sense to Michael Bay. If you want a gritty and violent affair, that's fun to watch as well as professionally filmed and acted, check out "Harsh Times", please don't watch this pile of dung.