Oddly, this film’s closest relative is not another New York story but one from across the ocean. It is a city of sagging bodegas, ancient club date flyers on palimpsest lampposts, and hopelessness for all. Instead of Nora Ephron’s fairy tales or Spike Lee’s street-corner racial divides, director Harrison depicts a New York of egalitarian decay, an equal-opportunity dead-end street. They are trapped by the web of the city, unable to crane their necks up to garner a better look at the world’s greatest metropolis. The lead-footed rhythm of the story that I had disparaged in the past helps to create this hermetically sealed atmosphere, a gutter-level view of New York that equals the outlook of the characters. The New York of Rhythm Thief is a small world, indeed. When Marty (Eddie Daniels) arrives from his hometown with unending patience and letters from his dying mother inscribed on her arms, Simon’s tightly constructed life buckles from the pressure.
But Simon would never consider such a syllabus, because he is an asshole and proud of it. If Simon had ever read a self-help book by a cut-rate armchair psychologist, he would claim these losers project their own needs onto the blank canvas he provides. He is a lone wolf who attracts a pack of followers that see through his diffidence and detect a soulful human the hopeful protégé Fuller (Kevin Corrigan) who nips at Simon’s bulldog haunches like a panting terrier Cyd (Kimberly Flynn) his partner in theoretically empty, aerobic sex or drug-frazzled Rat-Boy (Bob McGrath), a skittish bootlegging competitor who has the balls to stake out Simon’s sidewalk hawking spot but cowers when the man comes to reclaim his territory.
#Rhythm thief free#
Outwardly, he appears to want a life devoid of human interaction but he can’t keep free from the entanglements of other people. He prowls a New York previously inhabited by Jamie Conway from Bright Lights, Big City along with similarly unresolved mother issues, and even appears to have sub-letted John Lurie’s apartment from Stranger in Paradise. Simon (Jason Andrews) is a feral force of nature, a creature dedicated to survival and self-preservation above all. What I had expected to date as poorly as a Spin Doctors album instead exhibited an odd timelessness, a historical limbo that mirrors the weightlessness of a clutch of characters fettered by economic and imaginative poverty. Rhythm Thief captures the music of New York’s streets with great skill and affection, exhibiting both a kinetic visual style and a novelist’s eye for detail. The intervening 14 years has either aged the film nicely or it is only I who have aged (I’m partial to both explanations). The story of a dickhead who ekes out a living on New York’s Lower East Side selling pirated cassettes of local musicians did nothing to impress me, failing where Nick Gomez succeeded with The Laws of Gravity. I felt the narrative was built upon a plodding structure that blunted any of the energy often linked to this kind of guerilla-style curb-view filmmaking. I first saw Matthew Harrison’s Rhythm Thief at the 1994 Toronto International Film Festival and walked away unimpressed. Those same trees in Central Park now bowed over at the hip, wilting from the heat, and 42nd Street blinked and chirped like a Disneyland attraction. However, the Rudy Giuliani law and order age along with the disfigurement of the skyline had changed New York. Revisiting the city 12 years later, I recognized much from my previous visit. My first trip to New York in the David Dinkins era of 1991 left me enthralled, from the snow-canopied trees of Central Park to the frightful squalor of 42nd Street. A return can confound expectations and confirm or deny a previously held judgment. Interestingly, the version and date text suggests that the game started development around 3 - 5 months after the reveal of the Nintendo 3DS at E3 2010.Revisiting a film is much like revisiting a city. On the root of the filesystem is a file called "00_readme.txt". If you are fluent with this language, please read our translation guidelines and then submit a translation! This game has text or audio that needs to be translated.
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