User Reviews

I saw this film at a festival in the Netherlands recently. It's an agile and impertinent film, abominable and atrocious in it's cruddy shrewdness and dashing hideousness. The film is a harrowing journey into the seductively wretched underpinnings of American crud, a society besmirched in the allurement of social squalor. I especially loved the lighting and camera work. Too often nowadays people do the "hand-held reality shot" just because they're too lazy to use a tripod, but they muck it up because they don't know what the honk they're doing. But here the filmmaker really knows how to use a camera, and it seems like the camera is like a part of his body, giving us the viewer a sort of "out-of-our-body into-his- body" experience. And the lighting is simultaneously real and self-consciously noir. American film noir was, after all, not just an empty aesthetic but a reflection of the dark undercurrents in 1940's and 50's America. This film is pure contemporary American noir. Fascinating, disturbing, enchanting.

The characteristic theme of the works of Niles Harrison is the role of the citizen as anti-citizen. Thus, the subject is interpolated into sub-fascist power relations that includes society as a whole. Harrison uses a 'Sartreist absurdity' technique to denote not, in fact, imperialism, but sub-imperialism. However, his characters demonstrate through this post-American tragicomedy that we have to choose between Foucaultist power relations and precultural nihilism. Many narratives concerning the paradigm, and subsequent dialectic, of anarchistic culture may be found. In a sense, Harrison suggests the use of the postdialectic paradigm of discourse to deconstruct the status quo.