By the end, Ventimiglia’s shifty performance and Olunsanmokun’s sincere humanity transcend all of the film’s feeble, transparent attempts at kinetic cinema.
In one taut moment inside the cramped OTB, Ventimiglia’s chameleon-like character shifts on a dime, turning an incriminating situation completely around on one of his fellow immigrant friends, utilizing post 9/11 angst and fear for his own survival. But once Ponies becomes more theatrical in its final act, the film finds an increasingly tense groove. Sandow attempts to complicate Drazen’s subtext with flashbacks and jump cuts, but these needless aesthetic flourishes simply convolute certain narrative subplots.
Unfortunately, Ponies never distinguishes itself as engaging cinema apart from Drazen’s vile charisma and a few dynamic dialogue sequences, which one has to attribute more to Ventimiglia’s performance and Batistick’s tight script. With his mixture of arrogance, entitlement, and obliviousness, Drazen becomes a striking example of the American dream gone wrong. At one point, he confesses to a fellow handicapper, “I have a major fucking gambling problem, so bear with me.” Obviously unemployed, something the OTB cashier (Tonye Patano) points out during one of their many verbal fisticuffs, Drazen spends his day talking shit about other ethnicities, even revealing to fellow immigrants Ken (Babs Olusanmokun) and Wallace (Kevin Corrigan) that he married a “fat” American just to get his green card. While he’s the kind of snake who “burns bridges,” as one close friend puts it, just to get a two-dollar win ticket down on the latest horse race, the film constantly asks us to see Drazen as man and not a complete bastard, a task that grows more difficult as Ponies progresses.Ī specialist in manipulation, something that must have come in handy during his journey from Croatia to New York City, Drazen hangs out in an Off-Track Betting parlor, gambling away the small monetary scraps he can muster by conning his friends into lending him money. Part of what makes the film interesting is how Sandow and Batistick, who adapted his own play, slowly reveal Drazen’s true colors over time, building his serpentine character by juxtaposing his initial façade of good will with his increasingly damning betrayals of supposedly close friends. As the lead character in Nick Sandow’s Ponies, Drazen dominates every single scene with the kind of sweaty presence that brings to mind ‘70s-era De Niro and Pacino. Lacey Schwartz Producer and Co-Writer Mehret Mandefro Editors Toby Shimin Erik Dugger Co-Director and Director of Photography James. Easily one of the most groundbreaking LGBTQ+ films ever made, Natasha Lyonne, Clea DuVall, Melanie Lynskey, Dante Basco, Eddie Cibrian, Cathy Moriarty, RuPaul, Mink Stole.
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Sexy, stylish, complex and thrilling Plata quemada is no waste of your hard-earned plata.Bald and twitchy, Drazen (John Ventimiglia) struts through the urban jungle of New York City as if he owns the place. But I’m a Cheerleader (2001) Stop whatever you're doing and put on Jamie Babbit's feature debut, But I'm a Cheerleader (also featured in our best free movies online story). So like most true stories, trouble enters the picture-Nene and Angel’s relationship starts to fall apart from the strain of multiple angles-Nene’s difficulty in confronting his own sexuality, and Angel’s possible schizophrenia-and oh yeah, in case we forget the police are still after them all and are finally closing in. Standard crime thriller territory, you might think, but for the fact that Angel and Nene are gay lovers known as the ‘twins” and Cuervo brings his own sexual intensity along with his hottie girlfriend Vivi, and BTW all of this is based on a true story. When the heist goes wayward and several cops are shot the trio makes a getaway for Uruguay and the tight crew, all energy and excitement when planning their caper but now at loose ends, starts to lose their bearings.
A big score is the focus of Piñeyro’s sexy thriller set in a stylish, Mad Men-era 1960s in which lookers Cuervo, Angel, and Nene plot to pull off a major heist along with the help of a constellation of crooked characters.