My Review of "Snow on tha Bluff"

Damon Russell’s hyper-real, 2011 “found footage” flick is a movie every Atlanta resident would be wise to check out

There’s a place in Atlanta called “The Bluff,” which rests inside English Avenue and Vine City. Long story short, it’s a place you should never, ever go to if you value your own mortality.

For those of you unfamiliar with Atlanta’s geography, “The Bluff” makes up neighborhood planning unit L, which is nestled in the northwest side of town. For a while, it was where Martin Luther King, Jr. called home (and to a much, Much, MUCH lesser extent, Herman Cain, too.)

The area is famous, primarily for its almost entirely-drug fueled economy - allegedly, it’s the place to go if you want heroin in the ATL. According to a 2010 report, “The Bluff” is the single most dangerous neighborhood in Atlanta, and the fifth most dangerous in the country. Words simply fail to describe just how horrific life in “The Bluff” is - to give you just an inkling of an idea, it’s a community where, in 2006, local police had a lethal shootout…with an 80 year old woman.

A lot of times, it’s easy to exaggerate how horrible living conditions are in such environments. I’m not quite sure accurate the depiction of life in “The Bluff” is in “Snow on tha Bluff” - a 2011 film directed by Damon Russell - is, but gauging from the myriad reports I’ve read about the area (with some describing the neighborhood as a literal biohazard for Atlanta), I’d say there’s probably more fact to Russell’s film than fiction.

For my money, “Snow on tha Bluff” (a film that’s currently being screened in small-chain theaters nationwide, but much more accessible as an instant view on Netflix) is the absolute greatest “found footage” flick in almost 30 years, and the movie within the subgenre that’s most effectively fused the real with the cinematic since “Cannibal Holocaust” - an Italian horror-flick so realistic that the director of the film found himself in court on murder charges until he could fly the cast in alive.

The only difference between “Cannibal Holocaust” and “Snow on tha Bluff,” I suppose, is that the corpses in the former were all staged. There are several scenes in Russell’s film which show real-life homicide scenes in Atlanta - of course, the director didn’t cause these incidents, but he managed to weave these real-life acts of violence into the narrative of the picture. That, I suppose, says more about life in “The Bluff” than any feature length expose could - if you need stock footage of a homicide scene, all you have to do is walk around the block for a while, and you’ll be sure to find some.

I’m not sure which aspects of the film were real and which were staged. Pretty much all of the scenes of violence - the drive-bys, the car chases, etc. - we’re clearly staged, but as for everything else in the film, including the scenes of drug use and production, I’m almost 100 percent certain that everything we view is legit, beginning with the movie’s main character.

Curtis Snow, a lifelong Bluff-dweller, is the kind of human being that seems like he could ONLY exist within the mind of some eccentric crime-drama writer. He’s a philosophizing, morally ambiguous drug-runner whose life consists of armed robberies, tossing back Tecates and babysitting his son while cutting up lines of dope. The only thing is, Curtis Snow is a real-life person, and he swears that he’s essentially playing himself in the movie. Snow, now in his mid-20s, claims to be a real-life stick-up-boy, and has gone on record as stating that the film accurately mirrors his own life. There are scenes in the film where Snow visits his mother, and the two talk about Snow’s deceased brother. There’s an additional scene where Curtis guides the cameraman to the telephone pole where he said his brother was gunned down. It’s tied with ribbons and balloons and teddy bears and flowers. These scenes may or may not real, but they feel about as authentic as anything I’ve seen in an Errol Morris film. Last year, Snow had has face slashed by a man wielding a box-cutter - and his commentary after the attack synchs up absolutely perfectly with what we’d expect to hear out of his “character” in “Snow on the Bluff.”

The acting in the film is so natural and unstilted that I’m convinced that nobody’s really acting. Perhaps the director did just waltz into Snow’s territory with a camera one day, and just started recording him shooting the breeze with his pals and neighbors. The highly dramatic scenes, obviously, feel a little less authentic, but even then, you can’t help but feel as if that’s how the people within the film’s world would react to such events. While the authenticity of the film is certainly questionable, there’s absolutely no denying the film’s realism.

So many crime-dramas glorify the lifestyle, a message that the typical Martin Scorsese film can’t dilute no matter how perfunctory the “crime doesn’t pay” finale in films like “Goodfellas” and “Casino” are. Alike the truly excellent 2008 film “Gomorrah,” “Snow on the Bluff” gives us an un-romanticized, un-stylized look at just how gritty and scummy professional criminality can be. Nobody in the film wears Gucci or drives BMWs; rather, they roll around in Nissans and dirty Atlanta Braves hats. Unlike Tony Montana, nobody watching the film would feel even the slightest desire to switch sneakers with Curtis - a character that, throughout the film, remains more unsavory and contemptible than sympathetic and tragic.

As a philosophical text, especially regarding the sociology of the drug trade, “Snow on the Bluff” is an absolutely fascinating work. In so many films, you wonder why people would continue to involve themselves in affairs where they KNOW that the only outcomes or jail, destitution or a funeral home. In a particularly effective scene, Snow lays out his raison d’etre, stating that drugs can do some good for him and his family - primarily, by keeping his bills paid and keeping him from being evicted. It’s such a simple, albeit revealing, answer: the business might kill him, but at least it’s going to keep him alive until it does.

I have difficulties considering “Snow on the Bluff” to be a great film in terms of technicalities and production, but it’s clear that the filmmakers’ intent wasn’t to create an excellent theatrical experience, anyway. Instead, they wanted to tell a story about life in a place where society seems to come to a complete stop, and the people that can’t - or in some cases, won’t - leave a neighborhood routinely looked upon as hell on earth by the media.

“Snow on the Bluff” is a troubling film, a riveting story and a movie that makes you wonder where we’re headed as a culture. It’s a morally ambiguous glimpse into a segment of humanity that we tend to overlook and a movie that - perhaps indefinitely - changes the way you look at your own urban landscape.

A word to my fellow Atlantans: it may not be the best movie you’ll see this year, but it might just be the one you ought to see the most in 2012.

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Celebrating 75 Years of "Reefer Madness!"

Just in Time for 4/20 - A Look Back at Arguably the Greatest Anti-Marijuana Propaganda Flick of All-time!

Kids, let me level with you: in all my 26 years on Earth, I have never tried the marijuana. Hell, for that matter, I’ve never even smoked one of those regular cigarettes, so consider me one naïve summinabitch when it comes to any and all drug related matters.

As far as the “mortal perils” of marijuana goes, I reckon I am in a pretty unpopular camp, because I still think it does more harm than good to people. As a generality, people that smoke ganja are pretty much the reason I don’t, as literally EVERY single person I have personally met that routinely hit the bong or rolling paper were people that, to varying degrees, were all pretty dim. Now, that’s not saying that ALL people that smoke weed are losers, lazy or incompetent, but as it pertains to people that I know that smoke weed, it’s pretty much a unifying, non-fluctuating characteristic.

That said, the demonization of weed by certain activist organizations (and especially the federales) is probably ten times stupider than the stupidest dope smoker I’ve ever met. As a Gen Y kid, me and my cohorts were pretty much beaten over the head from birth that marijuana was a.) bad, b.) evil, c.) going to kill you and d.) help Osama bin Laden conquer the Americas. If the feds spent as much time, money and effort on investing in alternative energy programs as they did anti-drug campaigns in the late 1980s, we’d probably be driving solar-panel-powered cars while listening to our wind-powered iPods right now.

Obviously, marijuana isn’t necessarily the healthiest lifestyle choice out there, but I think it’s a foregone conclusion that MOST of the reported health consequences of the drug are, at the very least, overstated, and just about all of the long-term psychological complications supposedly associated with usage is pretty much unfounded. That said, the United States government has invested god only knows how much money in programs, campaigns and weird-ass policies to get us to think that marijuana use is a launching pad to prostitution and insanity, with the only end dividend being a bunch of goofy propaganda for us to sit around and laugh at while high on wacky tobacky.

While the generation of NARC, DARE and “Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue” probably got the most of it, we were FAR from being the first generation inundated with anti-weed propaganda. As a matter of fact, federally-funded anti-ganja “entertainment” in the States actually predates the Second World War, with scores of fantastically crappy movies pushed on theater owners throughout the 1930s to get neighborhood teens to think marijuana would turn them into instant schizophrenics that would axe-murder their entire extended family.

While movies of the sort are really a dime(bag) a dozen, there is undoubtedly one piece of propaganda that stands head and shoulders above them all from the era, a film that has gone on to become one of the most screened and (ironically) beloved midnight movies in history: Louis Gasnier’s 1937 masterpiece (of crap), “Reefer Madness.”

As one of the most notorious public domain films out there, the flick has been re-released, re-screened and re-distributed under a half dozen or so titles, including such sensational monikers as “Doped Youth,” “Dope Addict” and “Love Madness.” Additionally, the film was played constantly in the early days of MTV, which is where it probably garnered its modern day following.

As the cult-classic celebrates its 75^th anniversary this year, I’ve decided to give the film a thorough combing, providing a little bit of commentary and insight on the picture as a whole. I’ve embedded the entire movie below, so if you’ve got an extra hour or so to kill (or if you’re really, really stoned right now), why don’t you give the flick a good look-see and read along with my own stream-of-conscious thoughts as we watch it?

As you can see, the film begins with some scrolling text warning us about the perilous “marihuana,” which we are told often leads to bouts of “incurable insanity” for smokers. After being informed that the “scourge” could possibly claim the lives of our sons and daughters (or even “yours,” which is listed in two separate fonts, seemingly to indicate both a masculine and feminine emphasis), we are shown a series of faux newspapers, with headlines boasting of increased police and PTA efforts to combat the drug.

From there, the film jumps to a lecture at a PTA conference, where some guy is demanding that schools institute compulsory narcotics education problems…which is shit that TOTALLY doesn’t happen today in the States. Like, at all. After he talks about the importance of PTA participation in combating the “scourge” of ganja, we get a brief scene which details the production cycle of marijuana, from its harvesting to its distribution (with the not so subtle suggestion that parents check their children’s’ high heels and pocket watches for dope residue.) After our narrator informs us that marijuana is deadlier than heroin and the news reports about the effects of weed AREN’T exaggerated, we segue into a story about a woman named May, who is ordered by an older male figure to clean up their house, most likely because that’s the only thing women are good for. In the next scene (which parallels a scene in which May spends eight hours putting on a dress, apparently), the older gentlemen gets invited to a party by what seems to be some coworkers. So, we skip to the party, and it’s your typical soiree; people drinking, smoking some cigs, and generally dancing like they were experiencing epileptic seizures. Then, the guy playing the piano decides to get up and spark a J in the closet, all the while doing his best impersonation of Cesar Romero’s Joker as he puffs away.

Next, we cut to a scene with two Osmond looking kids playing tennis. They drink chocolate and recite Shakespeare for a bit, and then the male (a fellow named Bill) decides to head back home, where he’s endlessly berated by his younger brother while his parents act impossibly white. Because we don’t have enough subplots going on already, we’re then introduced to an additional four characters, a bunch of vanilla high school kids that like to hang out at the neighborhood malt shop and say things like “gee whiz” and “golly” a lot. By the time this thing ends, it looks like we’re going to have a larger ensemble cast than “War and Peace.”

In the next scene, we have some more white people seizure dancing, which Bill looks upon with palpable disgust. While some indeterminable fog hovers below the ceiling, some kids across the room start making out, which seems to really upset Bill, for some peculiar reason. Bill is just about to light up a cig, when one of his gal pals hands him a mysterious doobie. After being called chicken, Bill decides to join the crowd and light up. And uh, try to ignore the ensuing product placement for Phillip Morris that immediately follows suit, because I’m SURE that the cigarette manufacturers of America had ZERO involvement in either bankrolling the picture OR instigating a nationwide marijuana ban that ultimately helped their bottom line in the long run. I mean, not at all.

We have our first on-screen corpse in the next scene, as a driver under the influence of that devil weed ignores a red light and runs over some innocent dude just trying to cross the street. A few moments later, and we’re re-introduced to the lecturer that opened the movie, who claims that some furtive underground network is distributing marijuana to the city’s schools. A police officer of some kind then lists a number of unreferenced, reefer-inspired acts of murder and mayhem, which the lecturer decides to use as an educational tool to scare his students straight. Oh, and he also advocates snitching en masse, too. Make of that, whatever you will.

As it turns out, old Billy has become a truant, who spends all of his free time attending dope smoke parties and living in sin with that one broad that gave him his first taste of cannabis.

Well, things take a turn for the more disturbing when Mary (you know, Bill’s formerly straight-as-an-arrow girlfriend) decides to toke up with some generic dude, who then proceeds to maul her like a lawnmower – until some moderately stoned guy off to the side makes the save, of course. Cue a pretty lengthy fight scene, in which the violated broad on the couch somehow gets shot in the back. Bill, obviously fraught with sorrow, weeps over her corpse, while the guy that threw the party cooks up some cockamamie yarn to tell the po-po. 

In our next scene, the two guys that decided to drive while baked have a brief discussion, in which they vow to NEVER, EVER tell anybody about the fact that they sort of ran over a dude in broad daylight with about 20 eyewitnesses watching them.

Apparently, Bill’s legal defense team was pretty lackluster, since he finds himself on trial for the death of his girlfriend in the next scene. His principal – the lecturer/narrator from earlier – says that he’s noticed Billy slacking off during tennis games, which is an indicator of how marijuana leads to “errors in time and space.” Oh, and teachers of America? If one of your student starts busting out into hysterical laughter during “Romeo and Juliet,” it’s a foregone conclusion that damned devil weed has gotten a hold of his/her mind. 

Hey, remember the couple that was routinely throwing weed parties earlier in the movie? Well, they’re doing their best to cover up their role in the murder, a feat that is just a tad complicated because their partner in crime is a Level 60 dope-addict that could go all murder-tastic at any point in the movie. Following another long-assed courtroom scene, the jury finds Bill guilty, and we jump back to the young couple’s house. Hey, you know that blonde dude that tried to have his way with Mary earlier? Well, he’s all paranoid and crazy now, so he decides to smoke some reefers to calm himself down. Unfortunately, he smoked the kind that was laced with crazy juice and plutonium, because all he wants to do now is listen to a piano being played really, really fast and beat his business partners to death with oblong poles.

Of course, since this was some Hays Code shit, the entire cartel gets brought to justice at the end of the flick.  One of the molls fesses up, so Bill’s murder charge is overturned…and then, that same moll decides to jump out of a window. But, uh, Bill is now free to go, so, yay? Oh, and the guy that actually killed Mary, and his business partner? Apparently, he smoked so much sticky green that it rewired his DNA, turning him into an anorexic Incredible Hulk that has to live in a mental institution for the criminally insane for the rest of his life. And after a repeat of the lecture that began the movie, the flick ends with the lecturer/narrator pointing directly at the audience, while the words “TELL YOUR CHILDREN” flash on the screen.

Well, uh, that was something, all right. It’s easy to see why this one has become such a cult favorite, with its uneasy mixture of melodrama, lecture and unintentional humor. All in all, this is a REALLY entertaining movie, which is something you really can’t say about most anti-drug propaganda flicks out there. I think it’s a pretty safe bet that 150 years from now, we’ll probably still be watching this one, having plenty of guffaws at how awkward and clumsy our coercive, manipulative media was way back when. If you haven’t seen “Reefer Madness” before, it’s something you need to catch at least once before you croak - and since it’s 4/20, I really can’t think of anything better to view while you, ahem, “celebrate” the day’s festivities.

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