gillyannasstudent This movie did a great job at teaching you to take control of your life. I believe if each character took control of their life sooner events in the movie wouldn't escalate. What i did like was how the author portray new York he took time off to put in scenes where it showed hot summer, dirty subway stations, trains, corner stores which is all still alive in new York city today. Another thing i liked is how he got characters out of their comfort zone every body knows channing tatum to be a romantic kind of guy in movie but in this movie he was the hot headed and angry kid that did anything he wanted to the point of watching his brother die. The author also did an excellent job at showing that it is important for parents to listen to their kids. Throughout the movie you can see that dito's father never listened to him and always aired in his opinion and that backfired in this face when dito suddenly snapped because his dad never listened to him. As a result showing viewers that it is important for them to pay attention to their kids. At the end of the movie what i liked was how the author showed the lives of the characters after years and i thought that was necessary to show they grew as a person.Overall it was a good movie.

Gordon-11 This film is about the turbulent childhood of a writer who published his memoir of his days in a rough neighbourhood."A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints" tells a depressing story where life is very tough for the residents of the neighbourhood. It is plagued by violence as the residents seem to have poor impulse control. Even though I like Channing Tatum and Shia LeBeouf, their characters (and all other characters) seem to wander around the neighbourhood looking for fights, making them rather unlikable characters.With so much swearing and violence, it would be easy to think it is a gangster film. Of course, it is a personal film for the writer and director, hence the pacing is slow. Events in the film are bad, but they are not particularly cinematic, and not interesting for the big screen. I find the film boring and not engaging. The thing that bug me the most is that the film doesn't make any mention of any types of saints, either directly or metaphorically. I am disappointed by "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints", as it could have been an engaging and emotional drama with a very strong cast.

Steve Pulaski Dito Montiel's A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints takes the style and approach similar to Robert De Niro's A Bronx Tale and Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, which both overshadow this film for their grandscale look on issues and the exploration into certain relationships and how they grow and decimate over time. All three films possess common attributes; all three take place in a part of New York, they are directed by first-timers, they are stories that the men hold close to their hearts, all utilize the storytelling method of narration or breaking the fourth wall in some way, and they focus on a large group of characters all with something to say. Whether it's worth hearing or not is up to you.A Bronx Tale effected me in a way that totally came out of left field. By delivering its brutal honesty with cold, authentic realism was audacious and showcasing three exquisite talents (one of them, Chazz Palminteri, present here), it delivered a coming of age drama, deeper and more reliant on values than any one I've previously seen. Do the Right Thing was a crisp, lively drama relying on racial tensions and impending chaos that would ensue from enduring a brutally hot day in Brooklyn. Spike Lee brilliantly concocted tension through character development and human conversation, and almost implying, throughout the course of the entire film, that no character did "the right thing." But whatever your definition of the right thing was, you could disagree with me.Montiel is more interested with telling his story more than tacking on a fancy moral or showing any deep, subversive element in particular, which is perfectly fine with me. His close-to-home story is buoyant on its own, relying on strong performances from charismatic leads and is elevated by bright, humid, and mercilessly seamy cinematography. Montiel himself is our protagonist, played in his later years by Robert Downey Jr., a successful writer, yet absent family-man, Dito's mother calls him one day, twenty years after leaving behind his home in Queens, to return home to convince his father (Chazz Palminteri) to go to the hospital after falling gravely ill. Upon returning home, he sees Queens isn't much different, still crime-infested and relatively unprotected from the destructive youth and the passive adults, but notices that his longtime friends' ambitions of being lawless and as juvenile as possible have surged into adulthood.This story is spliced with flashbacks from 1986, the year when Dito (Shia LeBeouf) abandoned everything he erected in Queens, when Dito was only concerned about hanging with his friends Antonio (Channing Tatum), Laurie (Melonie Diaz), and Mike (Martin Compston), causing trouble and wreaking havoc. The film casually follows the youth's events and run-ins with relationships, sexual encounters, conversations, and troubled instances, and often showing their home-lifes as the least of their concerns.Palminteri gives a wonderful performance here, confidently lax, yet remarkably genuine and subdued, often providing his son Dito with father-like guidance that often gets ignored when the going gets tough. When Dito is seen in present time, he is unforgiven by his father who views his move to leave home not noble and commendable, like some would, but rather shameful and deviant. He views his son's return home as no more than a cop out move, somewhat more shameful than him leaving. His offer to make amends feels forced and trite and he ain't buying it.A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints consistently maintains a gritty atmosphere and always feels alive and raw, even when it's at its calmest times. The performances, mainly from LeBeouf, Tatum, Downey Jr., Palminteri, and Rosario Dawson, who could've benefited from more screen time, use the story's difficult themes of family relations and devotions to their favor, and never does much of this lack genuine feeling, thanks to Mantiel manning the camera and working the pen on this project. To call this film "solid" would be sort of an understatement, yet to call this "groundbreaking" or even "wonderful" would be a bit much. I'll go with "meaningful:" seems to meet them halfway.Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Shia LaBeouf, Rosario Dawson, Melonie Diaz, Chazz Palminteri, Martin Compston, Eric Roberts, Channing Tatum, Dianne Wiest. Directed by: Dito Montiel.

secondtake A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006)The premise of the movie is a total slice of life in a changing ethnic neighborhood in Queens, mostly with conflict between Puerto Rican and Italian immigrant families and their kids. It's often raw, violent, sexual, and depraved. It's also laced with beauty, has real family loyalty, and is a picture of survival. It portrays in particular one family and the conflicts in it with particular urgency.Overall, the movie is highly realistic. It pulls only a couple punches (a little boy gets beaten up on the street and it isn't shown). But all the other violence, the sex, the near rapes (depending on how you look at it), the anger and the misunderstood anger, all of it is wearing. I have to say I didn't enjoy a lot of it just because it was so unpleasant. Even when the light glowed and the train glided overhead on the El and a family was being peaceful and loving, there was an underlying anxiety and ominousness that made watching it an uneasy process.This might be a sign of a great film, or a good one. I don't want to disagree with those that find this mise-en-scene enough. There is a feeling of meandering plot, or no plot at all, through most of it. If other movies that try to address the problems and reality of the hood are more readable (Spike Lee has a couple, or Larry Clark's Kids, as starters), this one has the benefit of not being pigeon-holed. It's just a ride through the times, a snapshot, sincere and feeling.Robert Downey Jr. is a small presence, actually, and doesn't always fit in quite right, and in fact the peaceful quality of his portions of the film are easily mistaken for the most boring. Dianne Wiest is a fabulous actress but she seems miscast--though the director ought to know who represented his mother best. The whole movie is based on the real life of the director, Dito Montiel, and it has an authentic feel, though Wikipedia makes clear it's full of mistakes for a movie set in the mid 1980s. Not that it really matters. It's the energy of the youth that gives it its recklessness, which is what its all about. Forget about making sense of it. It's just the real deal on some level, and convincing enough to be artful. The filming, and editing, make up for a lot of the lack of narrative sense. It's not about sense, it's about being there, it's about the experience of traveling through the scenes.