Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Tayyab Torres Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

morrison-dylan-fan Searching round online for any Bob Dylan news,I was surprise to recently to discover that Dylan had contributed 2 songs for a low budget documentary.With having a family friend about to pay a visit during the run up to Christmas,I was happy to see that the documentary had been brought out on DVD,which would allow everyone to pay a quick visit to Bombay Beach.The outline of the film:Film maker Alma Har'el goes to a poor, census-designated-place in Imperial County,California called Bombay Beach,that has a population of just under 300 people.Deciding to focus on three distinct residence of Bombay:the first one being an old man called Red,who despite recently suffering from ill health,continues to travel to a drug store based out of Bombay Beach,so that he can buy cigarette's which he can sell at a few pence more than he paid for them,at the trailer park that he lives in.The second person who Alma looks at is a young man called CeeJay Thompson,who after being sent to Bombay Beach by a relative who was fearing that he may get involved in gangs,is shocked to find paradise at Bombay,where along with becoming the star player in the high school's football team,Thompson also begins to fall in love with one of the schools cheerleader's.For the third person,Har'el focuses on the family of 7 year old Benny Parrish,who along with having bright dreams of being a firemen in the future,is also having to make long journeys out with his parents to medical facility,due to suffering from a bi-polar disorder.View on the film:Working closely with dance and stage choreography Paula Present,director Alma Har'el intercepts the three threads of the movie with surreal dance and stage pieces,that go from Ceejay and his girlfriend having a dance off,to the film jumping 20 years to show Benny as a firemen.Whilst this does make the documentary more openly "staged" than most,Har'el cleverly uses " the fantasy severance's" to build up a strong,dusty,ambient wasteland mood that erupts at the precise moment Alma unleashes any of the two (written just for this movie) smooth Dylan tracks on the soundtrack.Basting the film in Bombay Beach,Alma opens the movie with archival promotional Video footage from the building of Bombay Beach,where people were being told to buy property there so that they could have a piece of "the American dream".Jumping to the modern day,run day wasteland of the place,Har'el smartly shows,that no matter how much the American dream is pushed to the edge of the cliff,there are still people who are trying to find their part of the dream,in the suburb of Bombay.

ell1981 Very well made and innovative docu drama. Most important to all films of this genre, the subject is utterly fascinating and contains people with genuine quirkiness and character. The story and the people are captured in a unique and compelling way too which adds to its wonder. Rightly acknowledges and thanks the great Werner Herzog in the credits as his ability to look beyond characters and create drama through them has clearly influenced the feel of this film. Thoroughly enjoyable throughout. I wish it had received more coverage and will hopefully get Oscar acclaim this year if submitted. A real gem and very much worth watching.

Spiked! spike-online.com Bombay Beach is a small, barely populated desert town in rural California. It is situated on the edge of a former dust bowl that was flooded by the Colorado river in 1905, transforming it into the Salton Sea. By the 1950s, a number of high-profile yacht clubs had appeared around its coastline and innumerable developers bought up land in the hope of building a holiday resort. Unfortunately, the project was quickly discarded and Bombay Beach became a ghost town, littered with derelict houses and dead, rotting fish, washed up on the shores of the now heavily polluted water.Today, it is a tourist destination only for a handful of hipster photographers hoping to take vaguely poignant-looking pictures of the decaying, sun-baked town. It is with a similar romantic eye that Alma Har'el sets about exploring this battered little hamlet in her debut documentary, Bombay Beach.The documentary opens with an old promotional film, urging investors to throw their money behind the Salton resort. But as two smiling holidaymakers walk joyfully into the California sunset, the celluloid runs off the reel and we are faced with the current state of the town. We are introduced to three of Bombay Beach's residents, each with a necessarily heartbreaking backstory. There is Red, an aged cowboy who hasn't seen his children in half a century; Cee-Jay, a black teen from the inner-city who moved to Bombay Beach to escape gang violence; and Benny, a troubled child of convicted felons who suffers from an array of behavioural disorders. Combined with Har'el's highly stylised images, these three narratives unfurl in a way that feels oddly contrived.The residents of Bombay Beach go about their day as if the camera wasn't there, yet many scenes feel almost too candid. We see Cee-Jay's friends trading sordid stories about losing their virginities, and Red's ne'er-do-well neighbours shamelessly sponging off him. Considering that all the time Har'el is standing behind the camera, it makes one start to question the film's legitimacy as a documentary. Throughout the film there is a continual sense that Har'el's subjects are acting like themselves rather than being themselves. Even more mystifying is the inclusion of several staged dance routines and visual montages which augment the narrative. Yet while the amount of artistic license taken by Har'el is a little troubling at first, it is central to Bombay Beach's charm.Of course, fictive elements have been employed by documentary filmmakers since the very beginning of the genre. In the 1922 silent classic, Nanook of the North, which followed the lives of an Inuit family, Robert Flaherty purposefully directed his subjects and staged many of the scenes. While this undoubtedly compromised its factual integrity, the film remains a poetic and enjoyable depiction of a fast-disappearing culture. Like Flaherty, Har'el embraces the artificial in order to forge a compelling narrative, which comes to us from reality but is unrestrained by the need for objectivity.More than anything else, Har'el seems intent on expressing the strange beauty that she herself sees in the town, and she does so rather well. Red narrates much of the film with his homespun truisms about love, life and family and, in tandem with the desolate imagery, it is ghostly and evocative.In many ways, there's very little substance here. At times, the stylistic gloss Har'el lays over the film can feel painfully superficial, and some of the dance routines seem to be nothing more than artsy visual non sequiturs thrown in for good measure. However, Bombay Beach remains an oddly stirring film and a veritable feast for the eyes.Last month, when the UK Mirror blasted David Attenborough's BBC documentary, Frozen Planet, for its use of stock footage, the reaction from the public was not one of horror but nonchalance, and a slight fear that, due to this accusation, Attenborough's lush visuals and soothing voice might be taken away from them. So it seems, we enjoy documentaries for the aesthetic pleasures they provide as well as their factual content. Bombay Beach is a film that capitalises on this to incredible effect.

djdavig If you have a creative bone in your body then see this film. I took a chance and was astounded at how good this work of art is. Everything Gummo was not this beauty is. The subjects are interesting enough on their own but the subject matter and characters are not the center piece but how she creates astounding scenes using the subjects in creative ways to weave a larger story just blew me away. A little boy struggling with the effects of multiple behavioral medications suddenly falls into a dreamlike trance and becomes a fireman riding a giant fire truck. A little boy and girl act out going on a date before dumping water all over each other in hilarious laughter. Two teenagers in love suddenly put on theatrical masks and dance together in slow and sensual synchronization. One minute an old man is comatose and near death on a gurney in the ER and the next he is racing in the desert on his ATV, which I think actually happened. It is the juxtaposition of the stark reality of their poverty and problems with their dreams that so pleasantly surprises. As great as the writing and editing is the sum total of the parts work together to create a film that takes you on a magical mystery tour through this desert community near the Salton Sea. Simply phenomenal and hopefully the first of many.