Street Music

In the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, an old residential hotel (ironically named 'The Victory') is scheduled for demolition. Will the residents (most of them elderly) accept their fate or become politicised in the struggle to defend their collective home? You guessed it. If only Bowen, writer/director of this independent feature (her first), had risked making the old folk the protagonists, instead of focusing on a dumb street singer and her boorish bus driver boyfriend, she might have overcome the cuteness that undercuts the movie's humanist pleading.