Review of Quality of Life

Introduction

`Street-Art` or vandalism, call it what you will, graffiti is endemic. It`s perhaps a little passé now as real life graffiti artists like `Banksy`, once prolific and notorious, are now mainstream. In `Quality of Life` Mikey (Lane Smith) works for his pop as a painter and decorator, painting walls white during the day, but `tagging` them at night with his friend Curtis (Brian Burnam), whilst dodging the police.

Even when they are caught, sentenced to a week in jail and given community service and a suspended sentence, they continue to practise their graffiti as a police investigation closes in on them and Curtis` behaviour starts spiralling out of control.

This is the debut film by Benjamin Morgan, who co-wrote the screenplay with former graffiti artist Brian Burnam.

Video

Shot in an almost documentary style, the film is intentionally grainy but there are some problems with definition in dark scenes.

Audio

A perfectly reasonable Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo soundtrack with `street` music accompanying the spray-painting scenes.

The film is subtitled in English, French, Spanish and German - I watched it with the English subtitles. People really should proofread these things, as I noticed several errors: `wayand` instead of `way and`; `chinese` and `korean` uncapitalised and `sqaushed` instead of `squashed`.

Features

New unreleased scenes - two deleted scenes that were left out for pacing reasons; I quite liked the first one, where Mikey`s Grandma tells him a joke.

Director`s commentary - Benjamin Morgan is joined by producer Brant Smith for a yak track. They chat about locations, filming without a permit, casting and filming on a tiny budget. This is actually quite enjoyable and revealing.

Behind the scenes documentary - split into four chapters and an epilogue, these can be played individually, or by using the `play all` function. These are presented in the fullscreen 1.33:1 aspect ratio.

There is the theatrical trailer for `Quality of Life` and trailers for other graffiti-themed films: `Piece by Piece`, `Writers` and `Dirty Hands`.

The photo slideshow (2:41) runs automatically and is accompanied by a rap song.

There is also a bonus "Quality of Life" track by rapper TOPR and an Easter Egg of the director break dancing at high school in 1985.

Conclusion

This is one of those difficult reviews to write, as I didn`t love the film, didn`t hate it or feel strongly about it in any way. I guess I`m not in the target audience, but then I`m not sure who is. Imagine `8 Mile` without Eminem and you have some idea of the attraction of `Quality of Life` - if there was a big name then there would be a selling point, but there isn`t.

Sadly, none of the main characters evoked any empathy apart from Lisa, Curtis` long-suffering girlfriend, who tries to leave him, but can`t because her son likes him, saying "He`s the best daddy I ever had". Curtis is a loser who seems destined for jail and is unable to apply himself to anything apart from graffiti. Mikey is the most likeable of the characters, but that`s only because the competition is not exactly fierce.

Benjamin Morgan shows some skill in handling a non-actor, a child actor and an inexperienced actor, coaxing decent performances from each, especially Brian Burnam, who only came on board as an advisor, but stepped in to play Curtis when the original actor dropped out. Technically, the film is competent, but it neither works as a character piece, nor as a social commentary.

I thought this would be an interesting insight into the graffiti scene in San Francisco, but it`s not.