December 2010: “If there is one moment when the 1995 film adaptation of ‘The Basketball Diaries’ manages to come alive, it occurs when the preening, miscast Leonardo DiCaprio—playing the teen-age Jim Carroll—gets nearly as wet as he soon will in ‘Titanic.’ Carroll and his buddies are shooting baskets in a Manhattan playground after having attended the funeral of their pal Bobby, who has died of leukemia at the age of sixteen. The skies suddenly open, but the boys play on through a rain-lashed catharsis. As DiCaprio hangs by his arms from the basketball hoop, soaked and giddy with rage and release, the soundtrack delivers Carroll’s most famous song, a blasting, propulsive necrology called ‘People Who Died’: Teddy’s sniffing glue, he was 12 years old / He fell from the roof on East Two Nine / Cathy was eleven when she pulled the plug / On 26 reds and a bottle of wine. . . .Those are people who died, who died / Those are people who died, who died / They were all my friends, and they just died. ...”
2009 September: Jim Carroll, 2014 October: Catholic Boy (1980)
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