After reading a lot of the other reviews, I realized that the context in which this film was reviewed was rather skewed. This film is not like your normal Hollywood film, and yes, I must admit that the plot leads up to a not very exciting climactic ending... but this depends on how you view the film. Growing up in working class resident of Northeast, Minneapolis, I see the struggle and lives of these people daily. I see poverty on the cities north side and I see the dramatic effects of the cities North side. This film was very inspiring to me because it documented these lives in a very emotional way. The film was scattered, unorganized and confused... but the film is beautifully shot and the raw emotions and life stories of the characters mirror the typical members of my community as well as many communities like mine. If you understand that this film is not your typical Hollywood flick and if you just open yourself up for 80 minutes to celebrate the lives of these characters and their story then this film will enrich your life. Watch this film and analyze the lives introduced, set aside your film 101 ego and just learn something. It is a film which documents how these characters come together in a struggle. You cannot critique the beauty of knowledge being documented in this film. So relax, watch, then walk around your community and reflect.

If you are watching this movie and thinking that perhaps these disparate, banal, meaningless , ordinary threads of interaction are going to lead somewhere into a plot or storyline of some kind, they do so only slightly in the end. About two-thirds of the way through the movie, all I had to do was check the year this movie came out (2009) to confirm my suspicion of what this movie is about: a foil for universal health-care. This script of this movie could have been written in a day. It is utterly blasé, predictable, and uninciteful, unless you think that social network message that infected the mind-numb robots of this summer "No one should die because they cannot afford health care" is genius.

Beautiful and thought provoking film. Me and my boyfriend loved it. The director/writer did a wonderful job. Not sure what he's done before. I guess I can check him out on IMDb. We highly recommend it. Great mosaic of characters and colors. Performances are lovely and powerful. It was nice to see Rosario Dawson play something completely different. And she is so beautiful. Paul Dano blew us away with his performance of a young man who is at the bottom and who's only dream will never happened . We are sad to hear the movie is leaving the theaters this week already and that we won't be able to recommend it to our friends until it comes out on DVD. Great find.

I heard so much good things about these but then I saw it and I must say i was not impressed. I thought it was very formulaic and jarring. The characters were indie film cardboard cutouts. None of the performances stood out despite a strong cast but you couldn't blame them as the dialogue was trite and uneventful. This was a standard crash-esquire drama with a decent message that was told more vividly at the Q & A by the director Mark Webber than was portrayed in the film. Sorry, wanted to like it but it just didn't mesh or flow. But I must say a good chunk of the audience members enjoyed it, as it seemed to move them. But as an avid film lover, i was not engrossed in any of the characters(I just wanted the movie to end) It felt like a hallmark special movie albeit with good, urban score that was frankly the best part of the film. The film is way over saturated but I know that's what the director intended.