Supelice Dreadfully Boring

Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.

Ogosmith Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Edwin The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

kia-hutchens Prof. Cordova UPP 101 October 24, 2014In The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, director Chad Freidrichs, gives viewers an in-depth look at the Pruitt-Igoe project, one of St. Louis' failed attempts to urbanize the city. In this documentary, Freidrichs focuses on dispelling the myths that surround the project by interviewing past residents and establishing the real cause of why projects Pruitt-Igoe failed. In addition, this documentary sheds light on the bigger issue, of why housing projects in general fail in America.The main argument of the film is built to dispel the myths about housing projects, that Pruitt-Igoe fueled. When most people think about housing project and why they fail, they blame violence, crime, drugs, and poverty. While these things are commonly found in housing projects, they are not to blame. To prove this, Friedrichs starts by discussing the beginning of urban renewal. In 1949 the Housing Act was passed. Legalized and funded, St. Louis started urban renewal by clearing the slums and building new public housing units, Pruitt Igoe. Pruitt-Igoe was conceived to replace the tenement homes of poor residents throughout the St. Louis. The idea was to replace the slums with new high-rises, and this would solve the issue of poor neighborhoods. However this would not work out in the end. As I previously mentioned when people think of housing projects they think of crime as the root of their problem. This was not the case for Pruitt Igoe. Friedrichs points to a lack of funding as the cause of Pruitt Igoes failure in the documentary. The documentary looks in-depth at how a lack of funding led to the deterioration of Pruitt Igoe. They say the project was doomed from the beginning because the city did not have a solid plan on how to continue to fund Pruitt Igoe. When the planning for the building started, the city wrote in the plans that the rent residents would pay would never increase. As the years went on funding dwindled and the buildings deteriorated. The documentary interviewed some past residents and they told stories of how the grounds keepers stopped taking care of the building, no repairs or updates were made to the buildings, and how basically their was no one to take care of Pruitt Igoe. Another argument the documentary made was that people who live in housing projects have a community there. Many of the interviews shown in the documentary support this. Everyone they interviewed had positive happy memories of living in Pruitt Igoe despite poor conditions toward the end. They boasted of growing up there as children and always having someone to play with. The apartment styled building made it so everyone knew each other. Friedrichs use of interviews took the focus off of Pruitt Igoe being a failure and focused on the community aspect. Overall, this documentary dispels a lot of myths that surround housing projects. The documentary takes a look at a controversial aspect of urban planning over a course of decades in Pruitt Igoe. Many people put housing projects to the back of their mind or look at them as negatives blaming their problems on the residents that inhabit them. As a person who was grown and raised in St. Louis, I didn't even know that Pruitt Igoe existed as it has since been torn down. I would recommend this documentary, as I think it shows an important part of our history and portraits Pruitt Igoe in a positive light which it and its' residents deserve.

celr This is a fascinating and excellent documentary about the collapse of a public housing high-rise project in St. Louis, MO. Pruitt-Igo, a massive block of high-rise apartments was supposed to offer hope to the poor living in dismal slums. It was typical of similar disasters in other cities, for example Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor in Chicago and ones in the Bronx. At first the residents were happy to be able to move out of the slums which were being torn down and into the modern, clear, cheerful apartments of Pruitt-Igoe. Former residents who were there at the beginning in the 1950's remember with nostalgia being able to live for the first time in a clean, bright apartments. Evidently at the beginning the residents got along splendidly. The architecture of these high-rises has been criticized for being inhuman and blamed for causing the monstrous social problems which ensued, but evidently at first the architecture didn't effect people that way. Children played safely in the halls and moms communicated freely between apartments.There were from the beginning some rather annoying glitches, the biggest of which was a rule that men couldn't live in the apartments. This meant that husbands had to either live apart from their wives and children or stow away in their wives' apartments. It's hard to see why rules like this were created, but easy to see what the ultimate effect would be. Poor families would be split up and an epidemic of out-of-wedlock births would follow. But that would be farther down the road and there are numerous other forces contributing to the epidemic of out-of-wedlock births.Another short-sighted rule was a law that forbid increases in rent. Since rent went to maintenance there wasn't enough money to maintain those huge high-rises. Elevators jammed, the stairwells became toilets. Jobs left the city and population left at the same time. Whites fled to the suburbs leaving Pruitt-Igoe almost entirely black. The towers became shabby and dilapidated. Vandals and criminals moved in and in a couple of decades what started out as a bright and noble crusade to help the needy crashed to the ground in flames. The film wants to blame the particular conditions of St. Louis at the time for the destruction of Pruitt-Igoe, but although those conditions were the proximate cause of the catastrophe, the entire plan was built on quicksand from the beginning. Because it was a huge government project which required huge amounts of money to maintain there was no way that such a project could be successfully centrally planned and still function. It was just too big, there were just to many false assumptions, and just too many political considerations at work.This is true for public housing everywhere. Almost anywhere you go you'll find that public housing, whereas it might not be as bad as Pruitt-Igoe, is still a breeding ground for crime and social dysfunction. Though the film makers try to deny the obvious, government attempts at social engineering are doomed to fail by their very nature. Lumbering government bureaucracies can't adapt to changing conditions. Rules and regulations created by bureaucrats look good in theory but are unworkable in practice. The idea that an entire dependent class might be created as a result of the best of intentions was never considered by the planners. In some cities, like Chicago, the black out-of-wedlock birthrate is now approaching 85%. Some could argue, with just cause, that it is the nanny state programs of the Great Society that are directly responsible. Only a liberal big-government project could fail in such a spectacular way.

Chase McCants The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is a documentary that tries to zero in on just why the massive public project went so quickly from being an modern masterpiece to an absolute hell in such a short amount of time. Architects, urban planers, sociologist, and politicians have all weighed in on why the housing project failed, but no one can pin point the exact problem. This documentary aims to step back from the project and look at the city of St. Louis as a whole. Urban Flight and the lack of jobs and support from the city are pointed to instead.The Pruitt-Igoe Myth means well. All too often, the reason for the project's demise is pointed to the poor that lived that. That they couldn't have nice things and keep up with them. The documentary, however, gives those people a voice. Throughout the film, people who lived in the community speak highly of their time there during what seemed to be golden years. Stories of love, union, and community run rampant. But that almost comes to the film's fault. We know whose side the film makers are on. And we only get the human story and not the other things that lead to the end. We aren't told about the skip-stop elevators, the condensing of physical space, or the fight for mixed housing. We hear a majority of human stories.Luckily, the interviewees paint a terrific and chilling picture of their experiences in the community. Even years later, a woman is brought to tears recounting how the people of the projects were viewed. Also a bonus are the massive amounts of pictures and videos looking back to a time we've all forgotten.The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is a great documentary that feels incomplete. Like having pancakes without bacon and eggs, what you get out of the movie is delicious...but you feel like you're missing something.

akeason1 The Pruitt-Igoe housing projects are currently remembered as one of the worst disasters in federal housing history. There has been ample debate among academics as to why, ranging from architectural problems to poor planning to demographic shifts in the city of St. Louis. This new documentary mostly looks at the latter two ideas and does not interview architects but rather former residents of the projects. Their stories vary from uplifting to tragic and detail the many problems with Pruitt-Igoe. Mostly the film suggests that the depopulation of the city following the explosion of suburban society in the 1950s is to blame for the project's failure. With fewer people there was less of a need for the massive buildings and with a smaller tax base it was impossible to maintain the expensive structures. What the film does show is that most of the people who lived there were decent folks hoping to make a new life, and that it was mostly the outside world that undermined the projects. The director uses several excellent shots including the image of the collapsing towers (they were demolished in the 1970s). Overall he does a superb job of telling a very intriguing and moving story while stimulating a debate on the future of federal housing.