The Good

Stacy Peralta does his best to tell this story.

The Bad

The visual style of this movie is ultimately what gets in its way.Crips and Bloods: Made In America attempts to tell the story of these two notorious gangs that inhabit South Central Los Angeles. In attempting to tell the story of these rival factions, director Stacy Peralta also does his best to document the conditions that created them. Thirty years ago, when Los Angeles moved a lot of its industry out of the city and into places where they could get cheaper labor, a void of jobs was created. This void led to the formation of gangs to look after groups people and help the community. Slowly, this idea got corrupted, members in one area had problems with members in another area and from there things got more and more elevated to the often tragic situation we have today.

While there are times when Peralta's visual style sort of gets in the way of the story he is telling, all in all Crips and Bloods: Made In America is a nice addition to documentary films about the gang world.

Features

Making Of

Stacy Peralta takes us through the process of making this film. From getting his interview subjects, to how he manipulates images in the post production process, this featurette plays as an almost "How to" of filmmaking. I really found this featurette to be engaging and I would recommend it to anybody interested in making a film. Peralta certainly had a lot of obstacles in his way when telling this story, but that never deterred him from turning his camera on his subjects.

Interviews with Lil Wayne and Snoop Dog

Deleted Scenes

I usually don't review deleted scenes, especially in a documentary films, mainly because they seem almost extraneous to the proceedings. However, since I was so bothered by how things looked visually, I wanted to see if these scenes had gone through the same process. Well, I wasn't surprised to find out that the deleted scenes from this movie looked like this film, but I will say that Peralta really went out of his way to try and tell the story of the Crips and Bloods from both sides.

Video

While it isn't listed out in the packaging what the technical specifics of this movie are, the picture looks really solid here. The problem is that there is so much movement between the pictures and the footage, it becomes almost hard to follow the story and watch the film. Things are always moving here and it reaches a point where, it seems, if Peralta would have strove for more of a clarity of presentation that that could have helped his cause.

Audio

Dolby Digital. Stereo 5.1 Surround. The audio on this film was really good. Now, I did watch it on a friend's 55" TV that has an incredible sound system, so maybe that was a little too much power for this doc, but overall I think the fact that this release kept up with that sound system is saying something.

Package

A red bandana is intertwined with a blue bandana on this mostly black cover. Around the title of this film there is blood oozing down the front of it. The back gives us a well written description of this movie, 4 images from this film, a Special Features listing, a credits list and technical specs.

Final Word

I think what I found the most hard to take about this film was the visual style. This is a good movie. It is enjoyable, it tells a great story, and it takes us into a world and shows us people that we would most likely not ever see. That said, Crips and Bloods: Made In America is just very herky jerky in terms of how it tells its story. A lot of the film feels like it's constantly about to end, or it's just beginning and because of that it never really allows itself to get going.

Certainly see Crips and Bloods: Made In America, I just don't know that it belongs in your DVD collection.

Crips and Bloods: Made in America was released January 1, 2008.