Watched it on Amazon last night. It's a documentary made in the late 90s about bums in the Bowery NYC who live at the Sunshine Hotel, a 100 year old flop house.
Most of the residents are batshit crazy, almost all of them have drug and alcohol problems that stripped them of any dignity or purposeful life.
These people get annoying fast but the black guy in the do-rag is fascinating. He nails our American elitist culture hard, no sugar - I'd watch a docu about just him.
Anyway, what's annoying is how the director treats these people like animals in a zoo. "See the mentally ill in captivity?" He of course won a bunch of awards for this movie because there's nothing Hollywood elites like better than degraded humans. He did an interview lamenting the gentrification of the Bowery:
People should remember what NYC was. They should remember it as something unique and beautiful, albeit seedy. We as a city have overdone it on clean-up. We have lost character. I hope that my film caught a little of the last of that era of New York, "when the Bowery was the Bowery."
I can guaran-doubledamn-tee you that he doesn't live in a shithole roach infested flop house, but he's sad because they're starting to go away. And it is a problem, but not for the reason he gives. He's more like, "Where are we going to slum for entertainment now??" whereas my take is, where are these people going to live? Robert De Niro and Madonna sure don't want them in their 'hood.
We are a wealthy nation, and yet American citizen human beings live like this while we hemorrhage money at foreign countries and illegal immigrants. We have $25 MILLION to give the effing Kennedy Center so rich people can admire themselves, but nothing to help the indigent mentally ill. We throw our borders open to wealthy drug importers and do nothing to help the addicts they create.
This is where the liberal in me comes raging forth because NOBODY needs billions in personal wealth. Nobody needs that. Oprah Winfrey could do her nails herself and use that money to feed and house three poverty stricken families. Jeff Bezos could sell ONE of his mansions and give that money to the poor. But they don't do that. Instead, they amass even more wealth, passing it back forth with other rich people. It's crazy.
Democrats in particular blahblah about how they "care", and yet it's almost exclusively the cities they run that have the most abject poverty and homelessness sitting right alongside ridiculous wealth and opulence. They tax the chit out of us, claiming it will go to help the needy, but poverty continues to grow. My whole entire life politicians have been promising to tax the wealthy and transfer that money to poor people, and it has not one single time actually happened. And yet we still buy into the bullshit.
And I'm just griping because I know nothing will ever be done about this and it will never get better. Most humans aren't smart enough to ignore what the TV tells them and look around at reality. Effers.
</rant>
Most of the residents are batshit crazy, almost all of them have drug and alcohol problems that stripped them of any dignity or purposeful life.
These people get annoying fast but the black guy in the do-rag is fascinating. He nails our American elitist culture hard, no sugar - I'd watch a docu about just him.
Anyway, what's annoying is how the director treats these people like animals in a zoo. "See the mentally ill in captivity?" He of course won a bunch of awards for this movie because there's nothing Hollywood elites like better than degraded humans. He did an interview lamenting the gentrification of the Bowery:
People should remember what NYC was. They should remember it as something unique and beautiful, albeit seedy. We as a city have overdone it on clean-up. We have lost character. I hope that my film caught a little of the last of that era of New York, "when the Bowery was the Bowery."
I can guaran-doubledamn-tee you that he doesn't live in a shithole roach infested flop house, but he's sad because they're starting to go away. And it is a problem, but not for the reason he gives. He's more like, "Where are we going to slum for entertainment now??" whereas my take is, where are these people going to live? Robert De Niro and Madonna sure don't want them in their 'hood.
We are a wealthy nation, and yet American citizen human beings live like this while we hemorrhage money at foreign countries and illegal immigrants. We have $25 MILLION to give the effing Kennedy Center so rich people can admire themselves, but nothing to help the indigent mentally ill. We throw our borders open to wealthy drug importers and do nothing to help the addicts they create.
This is where the liberal in me comes raging forth because NOBODY needs billions in personal wealth. Nobody needs that. Oprah Winfrey could do her nails herself and use that money to feed and house three poverty stricken families. Jeff Bezos could sell ONE of his mansions and give that money to the poor. But they don't do that. Instead, they amass even more wealth, passing it back forth with other rich people. It's crazy.
Democrats in particular blahblah about how they "care", and yet it's almost exclusively the cities they run that have the most abject poverty and homelessness sitting right alongside ridiculous wealth and opulence. They tax the chit out of us, claiming it will go to help the needy, but poverty continues to grow. My whole entire life politicians have been promising to tax the wealthy and transfer that money to poor people, and it has not one single time actually happened. And yet we still buy into the bullshit.
And I'm just griping because I know nothing will ever be done about this and it will never get better. Most humans aren't smart enough to ignore what the TV tells them and look around at reality. Effers.
</rant>
