Craig Dowd, Indie Spotlight: Gimme the Loot, Asbury Pulp, April 15, 2013 “Gimme the Loot, Adam Leon’s debut film about a pair of young graffiti writers from the Bronx, is too abbreviated, too breezy to be considered one of those epic love letters to another sweltering summer in New York, like Spike Lee’s Crooklyn and Peter Sollet’s Raising Victor Vargas, with whose crumpled pages of longing and dysfunction we are so achingly familiar. Leon’s suite of urban misadventures is more like a brief memo issued to his home city, a rectangular sticker slapped against the glass casing of a forgotten phone booth, ironed flat with a sweaty palm, exclaiming in a forest of wild-style font, I’m Here! Which is, quite suitably, an appropriate battle cry for graffiti writers, too, if there ever was one. If Gimme the Loot has anything to actually say, however, is another matter entirely, although its lack of content ultimately bears little influence on its overall appeal as a charming, beautifully shot film about friendship, big dreams and small time schemes, and how they blossom, or wilt, over the course of two manic days in the Big Apple. For so fresh and composed is Leon’s direction, one can hear the vociferous squeak of his magic marker sketching obstacles onto that majestic if impossibly disorienting borderland between adolescence and adulthood, a purgatory his characters negotiate with typical self absorption, rage and a degree of innocence refreshingly unmarred by the class and cultural disparities to which they’re routinely subjected.” Craig Dowd, Indie Spotlight: Gimme the Loot, Asbury Pulp, April 15, 2013

Craig Dowd, Indie Spotlight: Gimme the Loot, Asbury Pulp, April 15, 2013

“Gimme the Loot, Adam Leon’s debut film about a pair of young graffiti writers from the Bronx, is too abbreviated, too breezy to be considered one of those epic love letters to another sweltering summer in New York, like Spike Lee’s Crooklyn and Peter Sollet’s Raising Victor Vargas, with whose crumpled pages of longing and dysfunction we are so achingly familiar. Leon’s suite of urban misadventures is more like a brief memo issued to his home city, a rectangular sticker slapped against the glass casing of a forgotten phone booth, ironed flat with a sweaty palm, exclaiming in a forest of wild-style font, I’m Here! Which is, quite suitably, an appropriate battle cry for graffiti writers, too, if there ever was one.

If Gimme the Loot has anything to actually say, however, is another matter entirely, although its lack of content ultimately bears little influence on its overall appeal as a charming, beautifully shot film about friendship, big dreams and small time schemes, and how they blossom, or wilt, over the course of two manic days in the Big Apple. For so fresh and composed is Leon’s direction, one can hear the vociferous squeak of his magic marker sketching obstacles onto that majestic if impossibly disorienting borderland between adolescence and adulthood, a purgatory his characters negotiate with typical self absorption, rage and a degree of innocence refreshingly unmarred by the class and cultural disparities to which they’re routinely subjected.”

Craig Dowd, Indie Spotlight: Gimme the Loot, Asbury Pulp, April 15, 2013

May. 18 2013