Bobby G. Can't Swim Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		0.5
Audio		1.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		1.0

Bobby G. Can't Swim Blu-ray Movie Review

Bobby G. Can't Do Blu

Reviewed by Michael Reuben July 1, 2011

Discovering a little-known independent film can be a thrill, and 1999's Bobby G. Can't Swim has much to recommend it. The story isn't especially original, but the performances feel authentic and lived-in, and the Hell's Kitchen locations have the casual, trashy look of places where people are just as likely to hang out, hustle or kill with equal enthusiasm or indifference. If the distributor, Allegro Films, had released Bobby G. on DVD, it would be an intriguing novelty.

But Allegro opted for Blu-ray, and that changes the game. If you're going to release a film on a high-definition format, then it ought to be high-definition. Bobby G. is not. It should be required viewing for anyone who's ever indulged in hyperbole about how this-and-such studio release looks "no better than DVD".

This is what a Blu-ray looks like when it's no better than DVD.

Bobby Grace (writer-director John-Luke Montias) is a small-time hustler and coke dealer on the streets of Hell's Kitchen, New York, a legendarily rough neighborhood west of the theater district that has resisted all efforts to rechristen it with a gentrified name ("Clinton" and "West Midtown" have both failed). The film appears to be set in the mid-Nineties, judging from the absence of cell phones and the lack of major construction.

Bobby spends his days hanging out with local loafers, selling small amounts of coke, and sometimes getting beat up by rivals. Probably his best friend is Popeet (Norman Middleton), a blind junk peddler whom Bobby is always stopping to help. Bobby doesn't earn much of a living, but he's supported by a prostitute girlfriend, Lucy (Susan Mitchell), who brings johns back to their apartment and gets annoyed when Bobby interrupts her, though Bobby himself doesn't seem to mind. Lucy clearly anticipated a different life when she moved to New York from Puerto Rico, and she's troubled by nightmares in which her mother calls out but Lucy can't find her. Ironically for a woman who spends her days performing sex acts with strangers, Lucy becomes insanely jealous if any woman so much as looks in Bobby's direction, especially a local floozy named Gina (Donna Sonkin).

As with many stories about small-timers, Bobby G. turns on a Big Deal. Some yuppies from out of town want to score a kilo of coke for a major celebration, and a mutual friend puts them in touch with Bobby. Bobby, in turn, presses his buddy, Coco (Vincent Vega), to put him in direct contact with their supplier, a high level dealer named Astro (Steve Heinze). This is his chance to score, and Bobby intends to charge these one-time customers a hefty mark-up.

But big numbers bring complications. The buyers get skittish, the terms of the deal change, and Astro is not the sort who's inclined to be flexible. (He stares more than he talks.) To makes matters worse, the undercover cops who routinely prowl Hell's Kitchen have had their eye on Bobby, and a kilo of coke ups the stakes. Long before Bobby finds himself creeping up to a parked car with a gun in his hand, he's realized that matters have slipped far beyond his control.

The film's title refers to the fact that Bobby really can't swim, even though he lives on an island just a few blocks from the Hudson River. But one of Bobby's cronies insists that every animal can swim if it has to, and the obvious metaphor is whether Bobby can keep his head above water long enough to get out of the deep end into which he's been thrown. As with many such stories, luck and fate intertwine in unexpected ways. While you may feel the resolution coming, writer-director-star Montias has paced the film effectively, and the entire cast is so natural, that the conclusion lands just as it should, with that sense of satisfaction that the Greeks called "catharsis". (It's not an accident that theater people have always been drawn to Hell's Kitchen.)

Bobby G. Can't Swim Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

In a word, appalling. The moment you switch from the 1080p menu to the film - which reads as 1080i but does not appear to be anything better than 480p quality - you know you've left the world of hi-def. The letters of the opening titles are blurry and soft with indistinct edges, and the black background is shifting and unstable, frequently streaking to gray. Once the titles are past, the image is muddy, soft and indistinct throughout the running time, with no detail, weak colors and occasional instances of aliasing. Perhaps the only advantage of the image's poor quality is that it makes less noticeable the abundant dirt and print damage that occur throughout the feature. The film has been AVC-encoded; so compression does not appear to be the culprit. Good encoding can't improve on poor source material.

The aspect ratio measures out at the unusual number of 1.73:1, but something is wrong with the framing. Heads of principal characters are routinely cut off, not just at the eyes, but sometimes as far down as the chin. Unless the director was trying for an extremely odd effect or the cameraman was unusually inept, one must conclude that the matting was wrongly positioned during the transfer. Given the atrocious quality of every other aspect of the image on this disc, that comes as no surprise.

Bobby G. Can't Swim Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The disc has a single PCM 2.0 soundtrack, which sounds decent when played back through ProLogic IIx processing. Dialogue is generally clear and intelligible, except for a few passages that drop out inexplicably, as if the microphone had suddenly cut out and ADR wasn't affordable (though the credits list numerous personnel for post-production sound). The score, which is credited to Ed Tomney, a composer for Nova and for Todd Haynes's Safe, has a pleasant tonality but won't place any great demand on your system. Essential sound effects accompany the action, but even gunshots are muted.

Bobby G. Can't Swim Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (SD; 1.85:1, non-enhanced; 1:27): An effective summary of the film's premise.



• TV Spot (SD; 1.33:1; 0:31): A shorter version of the trailer.

Bobby G. Can't Swim Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The overall rating for Bobby G. Can't Swim reflects the fact that the film itself is worthwhile. Otherwise it would be rock bottom. I refuse to associate the word "recommended" with this disc, even when preceded by "not". The appropriate judgment is: return to sender.