I switched to this thing twenty minutes in and it really hooked me. I was in a flipping mood too, but I started to care about these guys almost immediately and put down the remote. Some of it is captivating. Like a scene in which the loss of a child is communicated in painstaking detail by the heartbroken father. At times the tone can be overly sentimental, but in this case, I won't begrudge the film maker his love of subject. It's kinda like the regular guys Big Chill. The Summer of Love leaves some free and others on a road of drug addiction and ruin. Plenty of honesty on display. Well edited and scored. The music especially evoking.
9 Reviews
Charming, bittersweet documentary
runamokprods23 April 2013
Charming, bittersweet documentary following a bunch of male friends who grew up in the streets and playgrounds of Brooklyn in the early 60s, and follows them from early boyhood, through drugs, sex, Vietnam, etc. in the later 60s and into the 70s, and onwards to marriage, divorce, careers and sometimes awful losses.
The men are mostly charming and honest, and while in some ways this is like a Sienfeld documentary; 'about nothing', it successfully captures a time and a place and is frequently funny and sometimes quite moving.
If I have any complain it's that between the many characters followed, and the short running tine, some of the stories get short shrift. Also, there are some amateurish visual techniques. But none of these seriously undermine a lovely film of humanity and humor.
The men are mostly charming and honest, and while in some ways this is like a Sienfeld documentary; 'about nothing', it successfully captures a time and a place and is frequently funny and sometimes quite moving.
If I have any complain it's that between the many characters followed, and the short running tine, some of the stories get short shrift. Also, there are some amateurish visual techniques. But none of these seriously undermine a lovely film of humanity and humor.
A Piercing Look at a Troubled Generation
lawprof4 April 2004
Don Klores and Ron Berger's "The Boys of 2nd Street Park" struck chords of memories for me, some pleasant, others grating. The co-directors of this outstanding documentary recount the lives of six men and the former wife of one of them, all originally from Brooklyn's Brighton Beach neighborhood. The interviewees aren't that much younger than me. Their story is part of the kaleidescope of a time that segued from a sometimes stereotypical normalcy for a city kid to a strident, confusing and polarizing period. And that's my time too.
This is emphatically a male story. As one of the subjects states, he doesn't know to this day what girls of his generation did for play. His focus, and that of everyone interviewed in the film, is about growing up as a guy in Brighton Beach.
Urban parks are very important. Often they are, along with the not too safe streets, the places where kids can unwind, form lifelong bonds and test barriers. Living in cramped, unairconditioned apartments, these oases were central to a boy's social (for which read sports) life. For most New York kids who grew up from the forties through the sixties, a city park didn't mean Central Park or Riverside Park. Parks were nearby asphalt playgrounds, often just large enough for several basketball courts and the usual swings, ladders and seesaw boards.
The park in this film is right by the boardwalk and beach bordering the Atlantic Ocean. I grew up near what we thought, with local pride and the arrogance of the young, was the "better" beach a few miles away, Rockaway with its similar boardwalk and park culture. Any New Yorker from my generation will recognize the 2nd Street Park as a Gotham staple without knowing its name or location.
The men relate their lives from childhood to the present in well-edited interviews interspersed with documentary footage and photos of everything from local basketball games to the Vietnam War and the culture that was buffeted by many changes and challenges.
At first the documentary appears to be one more exploration of childhood adventures and misadventures related by nostalgic older men. And these guys - apparently all Jewish and from a neighborhood with many survivors of the Holocaust - talk initially about their early youth. Then, very quickly, a darker side emerges from the skilled film-makers' vision. As one director remarks in an interview on the DVD, he never actually intended the film to be solely a reminiscence of playgrounds and boys' bonding.
The child's life of makeshift games and wholesome competition elides into the fracture of an unpopular war and the emergence of a counterculture that wreaked more havoc, in my unchanging view, than it did any good. And central to that phenomenon was a destructive subculture of drugs smoked, ingested and injected within an ersatz community in which individuality, including making ethical choices based on personal values, was subordinated to the likes of a group-think rarely before experienced in America.
The men here, to a larger or smaller degree, bought into that culture with results, for at least one of them, that were disastrous. All were on at least the outskirts of a criminal drug world and one interviewee still becomes emotional describing a loved member of the cohort who ended up murdered in a sleeping bag by persons unknown, undoubtedly because he got in too deep for his own good.
Two members of the loose Brooklyn fraternity had a child die in their arms of leukemia and it's difficult to hear their recounting of so awful a happening. While all are doing well today, it's obvious that their immersion in a shaken world at least sidetracked their lives and perhaps foreshortened their ambitions.
The only woman interviewed was wed to one of the men for nine months before the marriage was annulled. She mentions she was a virgin when they married but before long she was sleeping with her husband's best friend and, clearly, others. He's still bitter about what he described as a betrayal that he tried to rationalize as a valid free choice exercise at the time. She's remarried, he's gone through a second marital breakup. They meet at the end of the film. Their affection for each other clearly survives decades of separate and very different lives. She's quite candid - and insightful - in recognizing that the counterculture was very bad for her vulnerable husband but did some good things for her. Very bad, indeed. He was on drugs for twenty-three years.
"The Boys of 2nd Street Park" may highlight a discrete microcosm of a generation but it's easy to forget that the overwhelming majority of that age group didn't lose their lives to drugs nor did most young men buy college degrees from a fake rabbinical school or get a psychiatrist to falsely certify them as unfit for military duty. Some of these fellows did one or more of those things.
A few of the men here were, at least for a time, lost. Others were simply skilled at making the most of the situations they encountered. Taken together, the film portrays a segment of a generation of boys and young men growing up in a Brooklyn where their park remains a central part of the lives of the current crop of neighborhood youth. Ethnicities shift but core needs don't.
The special features include interesting interviews with the co-directors and several deleted scenes worth viewing.
9/10
This is emphatically a male story. As one of the subjects states, he doesn't know to this day what girls of his generation did for play. His focus, and that of everyone interviewed in the film, is about growing up as a guy in Brighton Beach.
Urban parks are very important. Often they are, along with the not too safe streets, the places where kids can unwind, form lifelong bonds and test barriers. Living in cramped, unairconditioned apartments, these oases were central to a boy's social (for which read sports) life. For most New York kids who grew up from the forties through the sixties, a city park didn't mean Central Park or Riverside Park. Parks were nearby asphalt playgrounds, often just large enough for several basketball courts and the usual swings, ladders and seesaw boards.
The park in this film is right by the boardwalk and beach bordering the Atlantic Ocean. I grew up near what we thought, with local pride and the arrogance of the young, was the "better" beach a few miles away, Rockaway with its similar boardwalk and park culture. Any New Yorker from my generation will recognize the 2nd Street Park as a Gotham staple without knowing its name or location.
The men relate their lives from childhood to the present in well-edited interviews interspersed with documentary footage and photos of everything from local basketball games to the Vietnam War and the culture that was buffeted by many changes and challenges.
At first the documentary appears to be one more exploration of childhood adventures and misadventures related by nostalgic older men. And these guys - apparently all Jewish and from a neighborhood with many survivors of the Holocaust - talk initially about their early youth. Then, very quickly, a darker side emerges from the skilled film-makers' vision. As one director remarks in an interview on the DVD, he never actually intended the film to be solely a reminiscence of playgrounds and boys' bonding.
The child's life of makeshift games and wholesome competition elides into the fracture of an unpopular war and the emergence of a counterculture that wreaked more havoc, in my unchanging view, than it did any good. And central to that phenomenon was a destructive subculture of drugs smoked, ingested and injected within an ersatz community in which individuality, including making ethical choices based on personal values, was subordinated to the likes of a group-think rarely before experienced in America.
The men here, to a larger or smaller degree, bought into that culture with results, for at least one of them, that were disastrous. All were on at least the outskirts of a criminal drug world and one interviewee still becomes emotional describing a loved member of the cohort who ended up murdered in a sleeping bag by persons unknown, undoubtedly because he got in too deep for his own good.
Two members of the loose Brooklyn fraternity had a child die in their arms of leukemia and it's difficult to hear their recounting of so awful a happening. While all are doing well today, it's obvious that their immersion in a shaken world at least sidetracked their lives and perhaps foreshortened their ambitions.
The only woman interviewed was wed to one of the men for nine months before the marriage was annulled. She mentions she was a virgin when they married but before long she was sleeping with her husband's best friend and, clearly, others. He's still bitter about what he described as a betrayal that he tried to rationalize as a valid free choice exercise at the time. She's remarried, he's gone through a second marital breakup. They meet at the end of the film. Their affection for each other clearly survives decades of separate and very different lives. She's quite candid - and insightful - in recognizing that the counterculture was very bad for her vulnerable husband but did some good things for her. Very bad, indeed. He was on drugs for twenty-three years.
"The Boys of 2nd Street Park" may highlight a discrete microcosm of a generation but it's easy to forget that the overwhelming majority of that age group didn't lose their lives to drugs nor did most young men buy college degrees from a fake rabbinical school or get a psychiatrist to falsely certify them as unfit for military duty. Some of these fellows did one or more of those things.
A few of the men here were, at least for a time, lost. Others were simply skilled at making the most of the situations they encountered. Taken together, the film portrays a segment of a generation of boys and young men growing up in a Brooklyn where their park remains a central part of the lives of the current crop of neighborhood youth. Ethnicities shift but core needs don't.
The special features include interesting interviews with the co-directors and several deleted scenes worth viewing.
9/10
Touching Documentary focusing on the lives of men who grew up in a predominantly Jewish, working class area of Brooklyn
bjames-1211 July 2005
This film beautifully touches on the lives of boys growing up in Brooklyn, the ways their lives continue to intertwine through their twenties, and the different turns their lives have taken. By the end of the film, you feel like you know the characters personally. The film progresses from high school kids playing their playoff basketball game in scary Boys' H.S., to the different stances the young men took on Vietnam, to continued drug use, to marriage and family. Boys of 2nd Street Park takes viewers back to a time when boys had real nicknames("Cuda" and "Bass"), and the neighborhood park was a place to bond and imagine. A wonderful yet tragic film with a beautiful culmination.
Excellent documentary
gianello1 October 2003
I watched this movie Sunday night on Showtime and it was excellent. It is about 6 guys who grew up in Brighton Beach Brooklyn and it followed their trials and tribulations right up to present day. A very moving and well told story and a must see really. The filmmakers are in midst of making a documentary about the Benny "Kid" Parent/Emile Griffith fight in 1962.
Adored the film and the subjects
julaphina1 August 2008
I was born in 1947, one of four daughters, and raised in the Midwest(northwest Wisconsin). This was so interesting and nostalgic. I have visited NYC three times, and have always wanted to live there. Each of the subjects was interesting and lovable. It was amazing to see how they received a formal education, despite limited resources, and how they still return to their wonderful childhood memories. I loved all of the interviews and file footage. I, too, chummed with friends who reminded me exactly of the people here. If I had lived there, I'm certain I would have been best friends with the guys and Madelyn. Please do an update on all of the individuals. Steve Satin touched my heart - he truly has been through hell and back and persevered. I LOVED ALL OF YOU. I have watched this four times.
A film worth watching
matthewmorra18 March 2008
I could watch this documentary over and over again. I had the good fortune in the summer of 2001 to be staying in Brooklyn. We played hoops on the very court in the film. These guys were a bit older than me but I could relate to so many of the things they went through as a group. The group of guys I grew up with in the Bronx and later NJ were basketball enthusiasts to say the least. We enjoyed watching basketball on TV but nothing compared to a pick up game at the park.We played organized basketball for our high school and it spilled over the school yard.We played together. We rejoiced together. We suffered together and we cried together. Just like the guys in the film.Bravo to the filmmaker it was a job well done.
Humdrum
Scoval7116 December 2008
Nothing terribly watch worthy or notable here....and, as a matter of fact, rather boring. Nothing out of the ordinary from many, many other young men who grew up in similar neighborhoods and who had similar experiences. Trite and hard to watch. Repetitive and really humdrum. Similar situations; similar plots. The men seem to all blend together into one boring person and come together at the end of this so called documentary at the park for a geriatric game of basketball, huffing and puffing away. Sad occurrence of one friend who either was murdered in a drug bust or who killed himself. Boring. Whoever hatched this idea together should have selected men, at least, who have dissimilar backgrounds. Then, it may be more interesting. A glimpse into time gone by, but good bye is more like it.
One word.....
budthechud23 October 2003
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