Henry Hill (2000)

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+     Extras: D     Main Program: C

 

 

When I heard about a film called Henry Hill a few years ago, I expected that maybe someone was trying to tell us about the early years of the real-life lead character in Martin Scorsese’s brilliant Goodfellas (1990) to capitalize on that film’s reputation.  Instead, we get a story of another New York kid (Jamie Harrold) in more recent times who wants to be a musician, but has some serious emotional problems.

 

He goes far away from his hometown to work at a gas station when the music career falls through, but then he meets a strange woman named Cynthia (Moira Kelly) pulls up in an old gas hog and seems a bit upset herself.  They get together and he mighty be back on the way to making music again, plus, they might make “beautiful music together” or thereabouts.

 

Director David G. Kantar shot this on tape and it inadvertently looks like some kind of soap opera, which is usually not the case of such projects, in which the would-be filmmakers think they are part of an imagined “new wave” and land up making bad Blair Witch-styled garbage.  He has patience, but the material here is not up to some apparent skills and pacing capacities.  This was very predictable, flat and dull.  The acting was mixed, but this is an early project.  Hope he does better next time.

 

The full frame image is clean and was shot in some lower-definition video format, complete with all its limitations and the Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo is definitely of the simple on-location variety stereo.  There are no extras, and at least it is not an actual soap opera.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo