Alongside Night

Knowing something about the difficulties in the making of this movie, I sat in genuine open-mouthed awe.

Author, producer, and director J. Neil Schulman just died a couple nights ago, as I type, and I have cried buckets already. Watching this astonishingly good movie, I have cried even more: What an extraordinary talent we have lost.

J. Neil and I never met, but we exchanged many communications. I felt we were more than acquaintances, and we were certainly allies.

I have been impressed by his writings for decades now, and recently I discovered his short posts on Facebook were often hilarious.

J. Neil was an advocate of human liberty. I notice many of the negative reviewers here dislike that concept. They prefer authoritarianism, or even tyranny, judging by their words. Of course they won't like this movie.

But it is so good, it has such an engrossing story, and it is so well acted, so well directed, so well photographed, one need not be in philosophical agreement to appreciate, admire, and like "Alongside Night."

Of course I was predisposed to like it, but what I saw just overwhelmed me with its inventiveness and great production values, and even a good score.

My only complaint, and I am crying as I type this, is that I didn't see and review this excellent creation so J. Neil could know how much more I admire him, how much more I marvel at his talent, after watching "Alongside Night."

I do highly recommend this movie, and hope millions of people will buy a copy. It won't help J. Neil now, and he desperately needed the money in his last years, but it will be a tribute to him, a small way to say "J. Neil Schulman, R.I.P."

The Libertarian view of the future is explored in this film Alongside nights which shows the USA approximately 10 to 15 years from now where we have bankrupted ourselves and our citizens with worthless paper money. So when Pat Boone tells you to buy gold, you'd better rush out and get a hunk of that stuff, preferably in Krugerrand form.

Warning all of this impending calamity is Nobel Prize winning economist Kevin Sorbo who's seen as a threat to the government which is as full of intrigue as any government in the Mid East now. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is now our secret police and they keep a lot of their own secrets. No mention is made of the FBI, Secret Service or the CIA, wonder where they all went. Our Armed Forces are useless, they're actually unionized and on strike.

Sorbo's precocious kid Christian Kramme an economics major and guerrilla fighter is the key player in this film. This is one badly directed, badly acted film by some players like Star Trek Voyager refugees Tim Russ and Garrett Wang who've seen better days.

So folks, stockpile your weapons and get your Krugerrands while you may.

I could really identify with the female character 'Lorimar'. She is independent, intelligent and is able to handle a firearm. Honestly, I had to watch this movie about three times in order to really 'get it'. he script is complex and covers a lot of material but at about the third viewing you can readily see the merit of this film. I think that a lot of the negative reviews come from people that don't want to be lectured or taught free-market principles. Moreover, when you consider that this film was produced on a budget of less that $1,000,000 the production value is absolutely astounding!

Jeez Louise, where do I even start? Calling this movie a "train wreck" would be an insult to train wrecks. I doubt any train wreck could ever be as abominable as this movie is. Heck, I would rather be in a train wreck than watch this again. I've seen better acting in home movies (better production values, too). The dialogue is laughably bad. The pace is leaden. It's so torturously slow that it makes The Blair Witch Project look like a Road Runner cartoon. On paper, it sounds like a "so-bad-it's-fun" movie, but it's not. It's really not.

Imagine watching a grainy recording of paint drying, played in super slow motion, narrated by Gilbert Gottfried. Imagine further that you are being tickle tortured, having toothpicks stuck under your fingernails, and having teeth extracted without anesthesia all at the same time. Imagine further still that you are being force fed the contents of a septic tank while all this is happening.

If you can imagine all of this, then you have a pretty good idea of what watching this is like.

My Movie Review of "Alongside Night"

A little long in running time but ultimately worth watching. Destined to become a Libertarian Cult (In A Good Way) Classic. The opening music and title animations first grabbed me. I couldn't help thinking of James Bond film style theme music which the director/writer/producer J. Neil Schulman might have been aiming for. For a relative insider to the Libertarian movement since the early 1980's, the film was a banquet of Movement Munchies and inside insights. Liberty Movement outsiders can expect to find themselves a little disoriented at times (but hey, what good is Artistic License if you can't or don't use it?) Production values were 80-90% up to big screen snuff but nonetheless impressive considering the lower end budget. Major character acting was mostly tightly delivered and mostly believable, but maybe around one line in twenty would tend to come off with a self-conscious or slightly awkward dialogue feel. Consistent Universe Issue: For a Country supposedly on the verge of Massive Civil Unrest and The Next Great Depression, the movie scarcely manages to convincingly depict this, save for well-groomed mobs moving through well-maintained streets. But I can give that a pass because of the budgetary limitations. Plot elements and devices sometimes fluctuated between cleverish and near-cartoonish, but not quite severely enough to demolish the consistency of the Film's Universe. There remained a tone of unkillable optimism mingled with deja vu familiarity that seduced me into this adventurous future next door. Then Global Climate Science Denial gets a gratuitous groan of a cameo. Dammit. A cheap shot, a buzz kill and an intellectual fractional reserve. This seriously undermines the films value as an infomercial for the Liberty Movement. Libertarians are usually supportive of empirically derived evidence and nominally pro-science. (I don't think NASA scientist James Hansen had a Marxist wealth redistribution scheme in mind when he first correlated Venusian climate facts with implications for our own planet.) Big Corporate Fossil Fuel and people who uncritically sign on with the profit-motivated "Merchants Of Doubt" (see the excellent book) PR Fraudsters are only hurting the validity of their causes. (Exxon knew what it was attempting to bury in the early 1970's even before Hansons work.) A better, fresher air debate is certainly desirable and possible, but "Information Should Not Be Subject to A (Hard Party Line) Vote. A more Libertarian economy will value rational economic decisions including "True Cost Pricing" of so-called economic "Externalities." All in all though, I'll give "Alongside Night" 3.5 stars out of 5. Schulman stakes out valuable artistic territory by calling attention to the risks for Statecraft to shipwreck all we value about free human civilization and "Alongside Night" (mostly) convincingly conveys it with the Gravitas it deserves.