The Plan

A beautiful one. For story and for the feeling, for a moment, to be posible for you. A slice of middle - age crisis - sure, the actor is younger. For the dialogue and for the end. A man and his new start moment in life. And a new chance. The white-black image is the lead source of charme. And, sure, the simplicity of story. So, a real nice sketch about beginning.

A young man decides that he needs to change his life so he leaves his girlfriend and heads out to Vegas to put all his money on red.

This is quite a cute film, indeed it is almost cute enough to make it work despite the lead character being a difficult-to-like chap who comes over a little up himself within a very short period of time. There is an element of me disliking this type of person in that comment, so I'll try and get passed it here like I did in the film itself. In terms of how it is put together it is actually pretty good and it has the structure of a film that is nailing the tone of "indie cool" that it is going for. Sadly the material isn't there to complete the look and it is only really here where it falls down.

Lots of films have self-obsessed characters with no self-awareness who maybe try too hard to be counter-culture and odd, lots of films do and they make it work. This short film shows that it isn't easy to do that because you really have to get the charm just right to make the viewer see the cool romance aspect and not the annoying aspect. Unfortunately here I didn't get won over by the charm because the characters and the dialogue really hurt this part of it. Shame because I thought that everything else Kalish did was good, he just really needed to polish that material and work harder on a couple of small moments to add that spark and charm needed to complete the film.

The film begins with a young man impulsively coming up with a rather crazy plan. He's quit his job, has only packed a few essentials and has just broken up with his girlfriend. His plan is to take his money and go to Vegas--putting it all on RED in roulette. This is probably NOT one of the better plans in human history, but at least his odds of winning are close to 50% so things can't go that much astray...or can they? Along the way, he meets a very strange person and you'll just have to see what happens from there.

This is a surprisingly fresh and interesting short from Matthew Kalish who seemed to do about everything in this film except act. Considering his very limited experience in the film industry (according to IMDb), he showed a deftness and style that seems to belong to someone with considerably more experience. What I particularly liked about the film was that although the story was very simple, he was able to put some unusual twists into it and I truly can't remember seeing a film like this that just seemed so different...and in a good way.

By the way, this setup would be a great beginning to a full-length film.