Miguel Pinero became a leading figure in New York's art scene during the 1970s as a poet, actor, and playwright whose vibrant, often pointed, work spoke directly to the lower classes and to disenfranchised minorities. As a founder of the influential Nuyorican Poets Cafe, his poetry soon became recognized as a forerunner to rap and hip-hop music. TV screenwriter turned director Leon Ichaso spins this impressionistic biographical look at this artist. Raised in an abusive family, Pinero (Benjamin
Bratt) turns to streets for solace. Soon he is engaging in petty crime, drug dealing, and addiction. When he finds himself in Sing-Sing, he turns his experiences in prison into the play Short Eyes, which eventually garners him seven Tony awards in 1974. Uncomfortable with his new fame, he clings to his girlfriend, Sugar (Talisa Soto), and his childhood buddy, Miguel Algarin (Giancarlo Esposito), who is a literature professor and who co-founded the Nuyorican Cafe. Though Pinero makes cameos on such shows as Kojak, his art begins to suffer as he starts to succumb to his drug addictions. This film was screened at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi
Overlapping the artist's biography and his work, writer-director Leon Ichaso pointedly reflects the chaos in his subject's shortish life, but he links the artist's frustrations and talent in the usual manner: as cause and effect.
It's impressionistic and risks incoherence, but it works as a successful montage of the unruly life of a sensitive, talented, but conflicted man whose self-destructiveness it never tries to sugarcoat or deny.
Flashily but irritatingly shot, full of unmotivated switches from colour to b/w, sudden flashbacks, mannered slow mo and jump cuts, this is hardly a subtle evocation of its subject's life.
Who was Piñero, and more to the point, why should we care? Bratt brings him to life, but we come away appreciating his genius no more than we did before.
The only reason a person hops back-and-forth in one scene, from scene to scene, using (a) color film, (b) black-and-white stock, and (c) digital video (then back to (b), then (c) again, then (a), then...) is merely to do it because they can.
The film's cinematic technique is supposed to be vibrant and alive and reflect Pinero's variegated lifestyle, but it never gets to the soul of the man....
Benjamin Bratt, the pretty boy once seen on the arm of America's sweetheart Julia Roberts, plays Piñero with a passion. It's a star-making performance.
Benjamin Bratt is Amaizing in this Feature Film. I had the opportunity to work in this Movie and I was just blown away looking at him Performing.
June 16, 2007
Ricardo J Salazar
**1/2 (out of four)
Pinero was a poet who lived in New York. The troubled man's life was splattered with excessive drug and
alcohol abuse.
Benjamin Bratt stars as Pinero and he does a good job at showing the poet's torment and disinegration. But his performance is the highlight. The film never finds a cohereant
narrative, losing its focus.
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