11/2/2022 0 Comments Snow on tha bluff atlanta![]() “People don’t even know what they have,” Curtis told us. A girl showed up hoping to sell some Xanax, eight for $10, though when she showed Curtis her pills he told her it was Roxicodone and she looked sad and left. We chilled in the dark and shot the shit. Framed paintings of a bed and an angel and an original painting of what I could only think of as Monet’s Waterlillies on lean covered the otherwise light yellow walls. Two cold McDonald’s burgers sat on the coffee table in their wrappers. A kid’s show about a rabbit played to no one. SNOW ON THA BLUFF ATLANTA TVThe trek ended back in Curtis’s apartment, a small, dark living room with two deep-seated sofas around a big screen TV whose screen had been damaged, making the picture look muffled under yellow oil. I asked one of the younger guys in Curtis’s crew if he had hopes to ever leave the Bluff, and he kind of grinned and said he wasn’t sure, but that the one way out he knew of was “to use my knowledge, just like Tupac.” Damon Russell, the film’s director, told me later that every local dope boy gets buried by the same funeral home. The owner came out from behind the glass to tell Curtis he was not welcome, proceeded as he is his by his own rep. With no local grocery, the only nearby place to buy food or anything else was a corner store or a liquor store, where while visiting the latter to buy water after hours spent in the sun a fight almost broke out. Truly, life in the Bluff seemed like urban wilderness, a kind of wild west set in destroyed suburbs. ![]() “Beggars ain’t beggin’,” Curtis told Michael. More stories of recent violence, including one about a 15-year-old who was recently killed trying to barricade his home’s door against robbers, reinforced that. I had to remind myself at several times how if I were here alone and beyond cameras it would be a wholly different story, particularly at night. ![]() SNOW ON THA BLUFF ATLANTA FREEOne of Curtis’s crew grabbed a handful of free condoms with a smile and said to himself, “I use these in five minutes.” Michael seemed particularly moved by the presence of this establishment, and recorded an impromptu plea to Obama to make this a nationwide program. We visited a random safe house pretty much in the middle of nowhere, independently run by a kind old woman who regularly gave away free HIV and hep-C testing, as well as free food and clothes and syringes for anyone who came in. For a place as notoriously dangerous as this one, people’s general tone was positive, and good hearted. “The trick is not being able to leave the ghetto,” he told us, “the trick is coming back.”ĭespite the surrounding damage, everyone seemed in good spirits. As we came along down streets lined with houses that looked like they’d come through a hurricane, boarded over and abandoned, torn to shit or half burnt down, Michael sat at the window looking out and thinking aloud about the strange shift in terrain. Most seemed to want their neighborhood kept to itself. I remember realizing we were getting near the Bluff when passing a group of men standing on the street shouted, “No pictures!” Most of the people we ran into throughout the afternoon not involved with the film made a point of this: Fuck cameras, and fuck you for aiming one at me. Atlanta is interesting in that cultural and economic divisions can often change from block to block, with hardly any bleed-over between expensive loft apartments and projects. It was hot and there were eight of us packed into a large black SUV, though we didn’t have to drive too long from the expensive midtown hotel where Michael was staying to the hood. ![]() Every city in America has ghetto's such as these that are largely ignored by the mass public, and I think we need to look at restoring these places in order to help the children (like a young Curtis Snow) who were born into drugs, guns, and violence.We met up on a Thursday afternoon. I feel that this film really is a call to action. SNOW ON THA BLUFF ATLANTA MOVIEI would suspect that the deep underlying issues that this film raises is the reason this independent movie has seen such attention in the press (and the reason I watched it). Though the film's content is harsh and unrelenting the way the camera follows the action, the way in which this film was cut together, and the social questions it raises along with the controversy are quite an artistic accomplishment. To the reviewer who mentioned that this film has no artistic value, I would definitely have to disagree. ![]() When you watch this movie, you see it from Curtis Snow's perspective, who is a drug dealer, robbery boy who only knows the life he was born into. This is another found-footage film that veers into uncharted waters and takes a look without any moral judgement (like most Hollywood movies) of Atlanta's most dangerous hood, "The Bluff". ![]()
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