M O V I E S illtown Written and directed by Nick Gomez Starring Michael Rapaport and Lili Taylor - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LAST WEEK Nil by Mouth Gary Oldman's working class antiheroes find life nasty, brutish and short Live Flesh Is Almodóvar all grown up or just worn out? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Blue Glow DAILY TV PICKS - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - RECENTLY A full list of recent reviews, interviews and table talk. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE ARCHIVES MOVIES TELEVISION INTERVIEWS FEATURES

_____The voice that Nick Gomez finds in his third film, "illtown," is so original that searching for comparisons doesn't get you anywhere. There really is no other movie like it. Gomez has leapt from the street-level naturalism of his first two films, "Laws of Gravity" and "New Jersey Drive," into a virtuoso new style, hallucinatory and elliptical, where dreams have the concreteness of reality and reality the inescapable pull of dreams. "illtown" opens with a camera tracking forward down dark, grimy basement hallways, a junkie hangout. The feeling is like one of those dreams where you're drawn into a place you don't want to enter but are powerless to resist. The whole film has that same deliberate undertow, and something else of dreams: their precariousness. At one point I realized I was sitting in my seat as quiet and still as I could be, as if some sudden noise or movement would cause the whole thing to disintegrate. The characters -- small-time Florida smack dealers, their bosses, customers, police connections and even smaller-time runners -- are called upon to account for every sin of their past, and you know there will be no escape until all debts are paid in full. That may be the simplest reason the film feels so quiet, almost hushed: They know that protesting fate won't do any good. "illtown" was shown at the 1996 New York Film Festival but has taken a year and a half to open in theaters. No distributor picked it up, so the film is being distributed by the Shooting Gallery, the independent production company that made it. You can see why the "independent" distributors that are owned by the major studios would pass on it -- it's too unusual and too personal to attract a mass audience. But wasn't there even one small distribution company willing to take a chance on this movie? "illtown" has already opened and closed in several major cities. Many of you may still have a chance to see it at independent specialty theaters; most of you may have to wait for it to come out on video. But "illtown" needs to be seen, not just for itself, but because moviegoers should be aware of the economic realities of what films get made and released. If a daring and singular movie by a uniquely talented young filmmaker can fail to attract a distributor, let alone an audience, then all the current hype about the strength of independent films is just cant. It doesn't help Gomez's visibility that he's attuned to his milieu but out of sync with the prevailing style. He isn't interested in his characters as an excuse for flashy violence or as a way to display his street cred. He couldn't be further in style or sensibility from Quentin Tarantino or from testosterone-jazzed Hollywood action blockbusters. In Gomez's films, the perpetrators and the victims are often hard to distinguish. He neither makes excuses for them nor condemns them. This determination not to pull punches combined with Gomez's refusal to judge may cause some people to imagine that they're seeing flat slices of reality. That was part of the problem with his first film, "Laws of Gravity" -- too obviously influenced by "Mean Streets" and too often, in the course of long single-take scenes, feeling like an actor's exercise. "New Jersey Drive" was tighter in every way, and got at something almost every other life-in-the-'hood movie missed. In one scene, one of its young black car thieves complains to his mother that a buddy was shot by the cops for no reason. He's telling the truth, but his mother's response is a cold slap that awakens him to the reality of his life: "Oh," she says, "you need a reason to get shot nowadays? ... I don't think so." We realize we're seeing a world where even a sense of injustice has become a luxury. N E X T_P A G E _| "Now a kid's dead"

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