Life is Hot in Cracktown

Saw Life is Hot in Cracktown. Last time I asked for grit and by golly I got it. A fairly dismal movie (it opens with a rape (ffs)) but its punches are inadvertently pulled by the unrelenting misery of it. As soon as I saw two adorable moppets I knew they were doomed. I was right. There's no shock in that, only tedious inevitability. This amount of despairing hopelessness is anyway uninteresting in its completeness. If there's no hope at all, then the only thing I'm watching for is creative suffering. Perhaps there's some neat meta-level commentary going on that I'm supposed to understand that the true tragedy is that the people in these situations are locked into their fates just as their film-counterparts are, but I think it's really just shoddy shooting. Plot aside, it's a tense film, well-acted, well-shot and terribly exciting, if fairly lurid. There are movies that have left me far more shaken (I'm looking at you, Come and See.)