Nighthawks

This movie reminded me a lot of Neon Demon and Euphoria and Assassination Nation the way it was shot. And it does play toward/against that same millennial crowd. I thought they executed everything in a unique way. Also reminded me of Eyes Wide Shut.

You have never seen Chace Crawford do such a fantastic job acting. In addition to him, the performances by Blue Kimble and a select few others make for one of the great ensemble cast films of recent years.

This is one of a legion of today's cheap-but-still-pretty-enough-to-watch movies we see today, thanks completely to the most affordable video and computer production technology in the history of cinema.

It COULD have been so many things, including a major hollywood film. All it needed was better writing, better direction, better pacing through editing, much better acting, more money to use more cameras to capture more coverage.

I say that because this has many half-buried nuggets of quality -- in the dialogue, in the setups, even in the plot ideas. But none of them pay off. Only one actor can act well -- the lead actor. But in the bigger world, he's nothing more than a pretty face in a sea of pretty faces with bodies of underwear models.

Dialog bounces between the vocabulary of the educated to the heavy expository that screams, "We're so smart we have to say it all again at a second grade reading level so all the idiots in the audience will understand." When the dialog switches to narrative from expository it is unnatural, boring, stiff, despite trying to make it flow like genuine conversations that have curiosity and care.

The acting is just as pretentious. The characters are generic stereotypes. No one character really breaks into the dynamic, making them stalely familiar caricatures of what we've seen in pop-television for decades. While the actors try to bring life to the cardboard standees they have been hired to play, they could have been replaced with household utensils or LEGO bricks and the film would have accomplished the same effect.

It doesn't take long for the film to devolve into clear expression of the writer's views of Hollywood culture and elitism in filmmaking with a kind of bait and switch plot device that ultimately fails to bring anything of substance or intrigue to the film.

I'm rather convinced the writer of this film heralds themselves as the next Tarantino or Cohen Bro with a Shakespearean twist, and unfortunately they are not.

The one interesting aspect of the film is the use of color pallets. In all the flashback narrative nonsense the narrator is shrouded in the same color lighting as he is in the present narrative of the film, while the other characters are not. It's a nice touch. So props for that.

This movie starts off, purposefully playing itself as a usual "night out on the town movie," but takes a surprising turn and goes down an unexpected road. Recommend!