Jim Jarmusch is one of my favorite directors and one of his regular character actors was New York native, Rockets Redglare. Rockets was a criminal a drug addict and at times weighed more than 600 pounds… he was also adored by many, many people. His friend Luis Fernandez de la Reguera decided to make a documentary about his life called, strangely enough, Rockets Redglare!. The movie mostly consists of Rockets telling insane, fucked up and mostly horribly upsetting stories about his life and interviews with his friends talking about how much they love him and how much they worry about him. Rockets had many many problems, but was also very talented and it killed his friends to see him throw his life away on drugs and alcohol. I think most of us can relate to this story. I have a number of close friends who have wasted their talents because of some sort of addiction. The film is wonderful but pretty hard to get a hold of. The movie was released in 2003 but was not properly distributed which led to a law suit which de la Reguera and Steve Buscemi recently won. De la Reguera died in a motorcycle accident before the suit was settled, but I have heard that Buscemi is going to use the 1.75 million dollar settlement to promote and rerelease the film. If you get a chance to see it, I highly recommend it. It is pretty fucking unbelievable.

To get the trailer below to play, click on it and press the space bar.  Press space again to pause.

[quicktime]http://www.rocketsredglare.tv/rockets.mov[/quicktime]

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