Gotham Fish Tales

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02/06/2009 Fascinating documentary filled with interesting people. If you are intersted in fishing as a sport, I suggest you check out this film! See more 11/26/2007 Great movie for anyone who enjoys fishing. Especially if you enjoy fishing in disgusting, polluted water. See more 06/06/2007 great documentary! informative, entertaining, hilarious! Inside look at brooklyns fishermem, and women. everyone has their own unique story See more 10/02/2006 I expected too much from this documentary on fishing in NYC. I had read how great this film was. It was okay. It was sort of interesting. But, for the most part, it was a choppy film saturated with the same guys who weren't that interesting. I did learn a few things. It could have been better. See more 07/27/2006 [b]And now for something completely different...[/b] We move from the vast emptiness of Antarctica, to the densely populated New York City. From some of the most gorgeous documentary photography around, to a guy with a cheap video camera. But our focus still remains on the little creatures that cohabit our world. From the bit I thought I knew about NYC's water, [i]Gotham Fish Tales[/i] sounded like an oxy-moron. Filmmaker Robert Maass, a former Newsweek photographer, set out to overturn that myth. Over a seven-year period Maass traversed all over New York's metropolitan area, meeting with fishermen (and women) of all kinds. The film begins with a nice little sequence of an outfitted fisherman catching the subway on the way to his favorite fishing hole. Then we meet a cab driver who's never without his fishing gear, his trunk so full of it, that if a passenger carries a piece of luggage, they'll need to find another ride. We meet a variety of folks who fish right off the pier across the street from their apartments. We meet a few of the area's dying breed of professional fisherman. And we meet some guys that run fishing tours in the shadows of the city's skyscrapers. The film seems to introduce us to every single breed of NYC fisherman. [center][img]http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/truth/images/gotham.jpg[/img] [size=1]Fishing: NYC Style[/size] [/center] Besides one guy, who brings his fishing tales into church with him; we don't really get to know anything, further than the length of their fishing poles about these people, in most cases not even their names. That's not the point of this documentary, it's all about the fishing. Through these guys, at least the ones that have been at it for a while, we learn that about thirty years ago the city's water was full of pollution, pretty much inhospitable. But thanks to America's 1972 Clean Water Act, it has drastically changed for the better, and nowadays the fishing is top-notch. That there is a wide variety of fish to be caught from albacore and bass to decent size sharks, that there are crabs and eels in abundance, all it takes is the guts and the will to catch them. After the slick and beautiful [i]March of the Penguins[/i] it was a shock to jump into [i]Gotham Fish Tales[/i]. Most of the film looks like it was shot hand-held on digi-8mm. (A lower-end consumer based camera.) Despite his technical limitations, the photographer in Maass does come through, as there are some pretty images to be found. The city's skyline with a fisherman in the foreground making up the majority of those nice shots. But there are some extremely amateur bits as well. There are at least two scenes where a fairly big glob of something is stuck to the lens the whole time, which I'm sure, was tough to keep in the final edit. Somewhere towards the end of filming he changed the camera he was using, the colors get better, the grain a little finer, but it's still nowhere near the beauty of 35mm. Much of the film's imagery is backed up by stock sounding Jazz or Blues oldies; some of the music works nicely and some of it is distracting. [img]http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/truth/images/gotham-2.jpg[/img] [i]Gotham Fish Tales[/i] is one of the new breed of homemade documentaries, looking at it from that point of view, it's just middle-of-the-road. If we were holding it up to the professionally produced films, it simply wouldn't stand a chance. I'm glad that it was a shortish seventy-minutes, because after the first twenty-minutes or so, I had seen all I really wanted to. There's not a story to pull you along through the film; basically it is a bunch of vignettes about the various people who fish around New York. Some of the folks are colorful and interesting characters, and a lot of them, not so much. If you live in or plan to visit New York and you're looking for a good fishing spot, check it out; otherwise don't bother. See more Read all reviews

Gotham Fish Tales

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