The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 104

Hi Subterranean homeless blues Documentary explores a shantytown deep below New York's Penn Station. Dark Days Produced, photographed and directed by Marc Singer, music by DJ Shadow, distributed by Palm Pictures. With Henry, Greg, Dee and other homeless men and women. Running time: 1 hour, 21 mins. Parent's guide: No MPAA rating (adult themes, profanity, vermin) Playing at: Ritz at the Bourse I IL-eu i 1 1 -ii mill Miimw mm limn ni ffc JL By Steven Rea INQUIRER MOVIE CRITIC Dn many ways, life for the people of Marc Singer's sobering, unsettling documentary, Dark Days, is full of the humdrum of the everyday world: There's TV to watch, there are meals to cook, commutes to make.

There's a man who bakes cornbread for breakfast. Another is keen on darts, and one young guy keeps a small pack of dogs. Film There's laundry to do, there are walls to Review paint, coffee to brew, conversations to be had. Just watch out for the rats, the cops, and the trains. Dark Days, a hit at Sundance and on the festival circuit, is a revealing, if occasionally frustrating, account of a community of homeless New Yorkers who live in a makeshift shantytown several layers beneath Amtrak's bustling Penn Station.

Here's a subterranean enclave where men and a few women many of them drug addicts, some mentally disturbed eat, sleep and socialize, dodging giant locomotives (and giant rodents) and venturing onto the street to scavenge for food, furniture and funds. Singer, a young English filmmaker, spent two years working on the project, gaining the trust of his subjects before he set up power lines, mikes and cameras and began shooting. Sometimes ABBOTT GENSER Michelle Rodriguez as Diana and Jaime Tirelli as her trainer in Karyn Kusama's "Girlfight." Rodriguez is riveting, radiating cynical charm, and Tirelli avoids the sentimental coach-as-dad schmaltz. This fighter, and this low-budget debut, are winners. She's a Rocky-ette, punching her way out of Brooklyn blight he tracks longtime residents such as Henry or Greg (no one gives a last name) on the city streets, as they prowl for aluminum cans to cash in at recycling depots or hunt through garbage bags behind restaurants for doughnuts or meat.

Other times, Singer does interviews on their home turf, in their huts and lean-tos, trying to get at the history, and the tragedy, that brought these people here in the first place. Although Julio, an addict trying to go straight, says that 80 percent of the folks living in this sunless underground are crack-heads, there's a level of resiliency and an instinct for survival that gets at the core of the human condition. "You'd be surprised what the human mind and the human body can adjust to," says one person, scanning the bleak, graffitied landscape, a literal wasteland beneath one of the See DARK DAYS on W10 Girlfight Produced by Sarah Green, Martha Griffin and Maggie Renzi, written and directed by Karyn Kusama, photography by Patrick Cady, music by Theodore Shapiro, distributed by Screen Gems. Running time: 1 hour, 50 min. Diana Michelle Rodriguez Hector Jaime Tirelli Sandra Paul Calderon Adrian Santiago Douglas Parent's guide: (violence, profanity, sexual situations) Playing at: Ritz at the Bourse blind amateur featherweight contest.

But Kusama, who came out of the New York University film school in the early '90s, shoots with a sharp, smart un-derstatedness and she has cast her film wonderfully. Rodriguez is riveting, with a drop-dead cynical charm, and when she finally cracks the slightest of smiles, it's all over: She's won the audience. Douglas has a tough, easygoing manner, and Tirelli avoids the sentimental, coach-as-surrogate-dad thing with cool aplomb. (Paul Calderon, in the role of Diana's real dad, has a tougher job: He's the bad guy, the drunk, the loser, and it's too much a stereotype.) The photography, too, by Patrick Cady, gives Girlfight a gritty, documentary feel that successfully works against Kusama's script's more corn-wail elements. The boxing sequences not Raging Bull slo-mo, not Rocky-esque intense are filmed close-in, so you see just fists, or feet, or a glove coming straight at you (from Diana's point of view).

It works, and so does the music, a kind of hip-hop flamenco for this pugilist ballet. The world of Girlfight feels real, and so does Rodriguez's Diana. You're with her every step of the way. By Steven Rea INQUIRER MOVIE CRITIC Diana Guzman (Michelle Rodriguez) walks the halls of her Brooklyn high school, radiating sulky defiance. She gets into shoving matches with other girls, she's lost in her classes, she's bored, she broods.

In Girlfight, writer-director Karyn Kusama's assured low-budget feature debut, Diana a senior biding her time before she (hopefully) grad- Film uates finds her rum calling: wearing Review gloves, a head pro tector and a mouth guard, trading punches in the boxing ring. A kind of distaff Rocky without the Hollywood hooey (there's even a love interest named Adrian, a guy, although Diana never says "Yo, Adrian!" at least I don't think she does), Girlfight is set in the faded world of a run-down Brooklyn fight club. The men who run it are bloated and rheumy-eyed, and the kids who train in it are clinging to a dream: Maybe, just maybe, this is their ticket out of there. Playing Burgess Meredith to Rodriguez's Stallone is Jaime Tirelli as Hector, a trainer who reluctantly takes Diana on at $10 a session. (Diana, who lives in the projects with her younger brother and their overbearing, dismissive dad, says, "I don't have that kind of money," and then goes and steals it from I V-.

I 1m. tJLft her father's wallet.) Of course, she's a natural, with a powerful jab, with a mean right hook, quick on her feet. Some of the old-timers don't like the idea of a woman in the ring (other than the ones who parade around in bathing suits and heels, holding up the "Round 3" placards). This isn't one of those yuppie gyms where female lawyers are taking it to the punching bags it's an ancient club with bad lighting, lousy equipment and motivational phrases Is Brain Over scrawled on cardboard. On paper, Girlfight must have looked woefully heavy-handed: Diana's mom was a suicide, she hates her dad, and the boy she meets and falls in love with, Adrian (Santiago Douglas), is the boxer she ends up battling in the ring in a big, gender- if Steven Rea's e-mail address is sreaphillynews.com Julio sweeps the tunnels in a scene from "Dark Days," a young English filmmaker's unsettling documentary about homeless people.

'TH'fe ptil ri i'X i kh i 'Friday5, September '29, 2000.