Hurricane Streets
Call Hurricane Streets, which took home the director and audience awards
at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, Kids with a conscience.
Writer/director Morgan J. Freeman (not the actor) tenderly brings us into the
life of Marcus (Brendan Sexton III), an adolescent petty thief with a mother in
jail, no father, and a group of multiracial pals rapidly heading down the wrong
road. Marcus is a lovable, charismatic teenager struggling with bottled-up
emotions and escapist dreams of leaving New York City for his birthplace, New
Mexico, where he naively imagines a trouble-free existence. Then he meets the
sweet Melena (Isidra Vega), who challenges him to face his demons and, in a
somewhat simplistic plot line, save her from a cruelly overprotective father.
But even the father is too complex to be a mere villain. All of Freeman's
characters are needy humans looking for and capable of giving love. The kids
are fighting (and often failing) to find their places in an imperfect world;
the adults are just trying to protect what little they've got. And where the
film could easily have collapsed into melodrama, Freeman saves it with a
suspenseful (if somewhat unbelievable) conclusion and a cool, in-touch sense of
humor. When one of Marcus's gang rips off an MC Hammer CD, he's mocked for
making such a poor selection. At the Nickelodeon, the Harvard Square, and
the Allston and in the suburbs.
-- Mark Bazer
|