Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Bobbie (Vincent Kartheiser) is a young, petty thief with little going for him by himself. If he continues to act alone, he's going to get nothing but screwed in the long run. However, he decides to team up with the charismatic junkie and thief Mel (James Woods), who is prepared to take the kid under his wing and make a true, big-time crook out of him. Bobbie brings along his girlfriend Rosie (Natasha Gregson Wagner) to work in unison with Mel and his longtime girlfriend Sid (Melanie Griffith) with plans to conduct a large drug heist that will provide them with another cash for life. The challenge at hand now is to assimilate Bobbie and Rosie to the cut-throat lifestyle of the drug life, and to get them in a position where they'll be able to survive.Another Day in Paradise comes from the uncompromisingly honest and brutal mind of Larry Clark, who answered with this film after his unbridled masterpiece Kids made waves of controversy a few years beforehand. Clark's subjects in that particular film were young, impressionable teenage boys and girls, running around New York unsupervised swearing, robbing, and having unprotected sex. Clark now sets his sights on a group of people who are slightly older but possess a similar, youthful, impulsive mentality about the world.Consider Mel, who constantly acts with animal-like dominance whenever he is challenged, mainly by Bobbie. "You never mess with a man's money, you never mess with a man's dope, and you never mess with a man's p****," Mel tells Bobbie when Bobbie remarks how attractive Sid is. This sort of animalistic protection over what Mel thinks is his carries over throughout the picture.Because Clark, who was already in his fifties making this film, has his reckless background and definitely has his checkered past, Another Day in Paradise feels authentic and real, mainly because we could see these series of events having their place in Clark's life. Whether or not the film is partially autobiographical is up for debate, but with every Clark effort comes shockingly natural and believable scenes involving teenagers or troubled subjects feels as if it could've been extracted from real-life circumstances. If not Clark's dizzying, completely fascinating style, the film needs to be seen for a terrifically over-the-top performance by James Woods, effectively stealing nearly every scene he finds himself in. Kartheiser and Wagner work well with what they have, in addition, and Melanie Griffith begins with her string of rebellious performances, continuing on with John Waters' Cecil B. Demented in 2001. Immediately, Another Day in Paradise finds itself sandwiched between Clark's exceptional directorial effort Kids and Clark's future directorial effort Bully, both of which I find to be more complete pictures with a smoother, more original focuses. This particular picture feels a bit sloppier, a bit more ordinary in its focus, and bears a style which can only be viewed as Clark being something he isn't, between the imperfect camera shots, dazed-and-confused style shooting, and the seventies-infused soundtrack. However, the film emphasizes what I love about Clark, which is do what you want, how you want, and let your age be your justification for experience and knowledge.Starring: Vincent Kartheiser, Natasha Gregson Wagner, James Woods, and Melanie Griffith. Directed by: Larry Clark.

Melanie Griffith is excellent; how many times do you get to say that? She hasn't been this good since SOMETHING WILD. In fact all the acting is outstanding - Natasha Gregson Wagner and Vincent Kartheiser are scary real; James Woods rarely gets his own movie, and this proves again that when you want to cast a scumbag's scumbag, you call this man and you ask nicely.The whole thing is better than it oughtta be by a significant factor. This is how you make a no-budget crime movie. Every scene moves the story, every line explains character, every shot reveals and compels. The music lends texture to a thinly designed world. And the locations are so gritty you will want to watch it with your shoes on.The story's nothing new to the crime couples-on-the-run genre. You got the obligatory drug deal gone bad, you got your ever-popular motel o.d. girl in underwear, you got another batch of criminals who think they're about seventy percent smoother than they actually are.But the dialog's sharp and the scenes are directed with the immediacy of vintage Friedkin or Grosbard. The kids having sex, the hideous claustrophobic gunfight, the kids arguing after she shoots up - sure, it's hard to take. But it's undeniably arresting. I haven't seen Larry Clark's other stuff on purpose, and I had to be talked into seeing this. Unpleasant as this world is, I'm glad I visited if only to enjoy a tale well told.

Larry Clark's follow-up to Kids combines the themes of a crime gone awry and the would-be father/son bonding with a style that is unquestionably "indie". Would it be too much to ponder over hand-held even when not entirely necessary? It's not an extreme annoyance, and it does serve some purposes of tense vibes when James Woods chides out his mentee or during one of the said gone-bad crime scenes. It's only when it doesn't serve a purpose that really suits the material that you want Clark and his DP to get back to the steady-cam and tracking shots- which he does do from time to time- as opposed to say, for example, the overlong jittery shots of Bobbie (Kartheiser) running through a field. In fact if there is any one glaring flaw on Another Day in Paraidse it's not knowing how to quite get a scene completely together properly, on the technical fronts. One of the scenes that should be the most powerful emotionally, involving the death of one of the principle characters, is shot and edited shabbily, as if an anything goes approach will be just fine, as a good but inappropriate blues song plays over the scene and then into the next small scene until it finishes. Scorsese Clark is definitely not when it comes to timing with the soundtrack.On the other hand, it is what Clark does get right as a director that does make this violent and foul-mouthed effort a look some ten years later. The blues songs, for example, are mostly very good and placed in nicely in some scenes, specifically towards the beginning as Bobbie runs away from a botched robbery and during a hot and heavy sex scene (a live performance of "Looking for a Fox" also is 100 times better off of the cover done in Blues Brothers 2000). The casting of Woods, who also served as producer, was a sharp move as well, because it provides him ample time to go for small subtle moments of authority (the "what are you doing" bit in the diner), and really BIG scenes (emphasis on capitals) as he yells and kicks and screams and yells the F bomb every other word. It's not entirely a great performance, but it works for what his character is: a washed up old crook of a drug dealer who looks for scores when he cans but puts on an air of seeming to be in control and smart, which he isn't.It's good to see someone like Griffith in the matriarch (or would-be one) role, and Gregson-Wagner, who maybe is the least effective of the lot of the actors, is still up to the challenge of playing the sort of tag-along of the four. They all go for realism, which works pretty well with all things considered; those being that the script veers into predictability after the first half hour, and the dialog, while about as sharp as can be under the circumstances (Clark is, more often than not, at his best when he has Harmony Korine writing for him), does go into the fold of not being as revelatory as potentially allowable as the characters go further into downward spiral territory. Save for some bits of pretension and a couple of botched techniques, it is a solid film, with one of the more shocking gun fights from the late 90s.

What is it with people thinking that Larry Clark is actually talented? I saw two of his movies this week and this guy sucks. His movies go nowhere, have violence in them just for violence sake and if he made his movies any darker, you wouldn't be able to see what the hell was going on. Maybe that would be for the best.Why James Woods and Melanie Griffith would agree to be in this movie couldn't have been anything more than a venue to line their pockets.This movie wasn't as bad as Kids (1995) regarding the nudity that was needless but the violence made up for it. Anything I see with Clark's name on it at the video store will remain on the shelf as far as I'm concerned.