''Sleepers''

The Greatest Priest Ever

I recently watched this because I saw it in mates house and asked if we could watch it. We did, and i was extremely glad we did. The film depicts the story of 4 boys living in Hell's Kitchen in New York back in the 80s. Hell's Kitchen was a small, almost separate, part of NYC and it essentially governed itself with a zero tolerance on crime with everyone knowing everybody, each protecting theirs and their neighbours own.  The beginning of the film shows their lives at the time, pulling pranks, exploring and just generally being kids. The film includes a few well known names such as Robert De Niro, a rogue priest who smokes, drink and all the things a man of the cloth should not do. But this is why his character is so excellent, it enhances the good parts of being a priest, like, looking after the boys, protecting his flock and the residents of Hell's Kitchen but ignoring the 'sinful' ones like smoking and drinking because choosing a path of supposed righteousness should not condemn those same people for enjoying some simple pleasures in life.

The film is set in what is basically two halves. The first half is the boys life in Hell's Kitchen when they were kids, and the second is when they have all grown up and found jobs/become criminals. Now I won't delve into too many details otherwise i'll ruin the film but i will delve into some of the particularly interesting parts of film. Such as the attraction of priesthood too two of the boys. Now as i watched it was thinking 'Why would you want to become a priest'', because i certainly wouldn't, but as we watch we realise that, as all young boys want, is action and excitement and the best way to find this is listening to real life confessions which is the real version of the stories and movies they like at the time.  One particular incident is them sneaking into the confession booth and listening to a woman who is confessing her sins of adultery. As we listen to the woman s confession we believe the woman thinks the two boys are a priest but at the end she says 'Thanks boys, i know you'll keep it too yourselves''. This is obviously quite unexpected because we think the woman is unaware that they are not a priest. One of the boys then says 'Why did she tell us if she knew who we were?'' the second then says '' I guess she had to tell someone''. This i found very interesting as it highlights another important part of religion as well as condemning it slightly as well.  It shows us that confession is a good thing but the person on the receiving end does not have to be a man of the cloth  because the whole confession act was incited by the church and is a good thing, but doing something good like coming clean does not need to be done by a believer, it just has to be done. 

The film captures emotions really well and this is shown really well by one of the main scenes in the film. The boys, due to a foolish prank end up accidentally killing someone. Now this doesnt ruin the story don't worry but the scene where it happens is fantastically well done. When the incident happens the sound goes all muffled and unclear which i think captures perfectly how people feel when something bad has happened. The look of pure terror and shock on all the boys faces, in addition to the loud ringing sound that has been added to replicate the ringing sound you feel when you hear a loud noise. The narrator also builds us up to this incident adding a sense of strong tension as we know something bad is about to happen but we don't know when or where or why. When we finally observe the horrific incident it really gives you a empty feeling in your stomach as you feel yourself in the boys position, being young, scared, alone and innocent in the fact that these boys would never intentionally harm anyone but unfortunately circumstance dictated otherwise.

This wasnt, again, so much a review more than a musing of ideas but I thought this film was too brilliant not to write about. I would recommend this film to anyone as everything about it is done so well: the cast, directing and story is all done superbly well. I'll give it a solid and deserved

9/10

And this is not an exaggeration at all