WATCH NOW
At the beginning of this year, I was reached out to by independent filmmaker Michael Jason Allen to scrutinize his second movie, The Coldest Kiss. Like most low-budget productions, the film had its flaws. However, I found areas of scoring and cinematography that were impressive and stunning, and portions of the script, as well as the performances, were solid. For these reasons, I can recommend the film overall. Ultimately, Allen’s skills and talent were magnified by the minuscule budget, and his skills shone through the film.
After viewing Alan’s third project, Stealing Sunrise I am pleased to share that this film is much better than his second one, and to a large extent. I would not even need a disclaimer to mention the budget for this movie, which is likely minute. The film is just good, and while it does have a few shortcomings, its best moments are almost excellent. In the same manner, as the previous review posted on this blog, I will keep from discussing the entire plot of the movie simply because I do not want to spam the wonders of this cinematic piece. As a general observation, casual moviegoers tend to prefer pieces of art with clickbait elements, and I genuinely wish to inspire viewers and cinephiles alike to support Allen’s productions.
Let me proceed logically through the script and address the criticisms first. The negative comments first stem from the fact that the movie opened and progressed at a nonsensical rate. Before jumping right into the main content, there is a two-and-a-half-minute-long pre-credits opening scene. This single scene serves no purpose because all necessary information is provided throughout the film. In execution, this single scene serves no purpose because it is poorly constructed. The choreography is robotic, as well as the antagonists in the single scene. What we are looking at is one of the four main characters walking along an overpass. What is really ‘shocking’ is that the character turns out to be a black ‘gangster’ Dallas and he also turns out to be one of the main protagonists. Following the monstrosity of a movie, a larger, tougher, black ‘thug’ gangster turns up behind Dallas throughout the segment. Because Dallas is caged between both Thugs, he is powerless. Thug One clearly appears to be the muscle and Thug 2 seems like a loan shark. What happens is that two idiots start attacking Dallas but they clearly miss him by a mile.
Dallas raises his knife-shaped gun, igniting it, and shooting towards Thug 1’s neck and chest. While he does so, Thug 2 seems to be just standing there, waiting without any purpose. He may be dumbfounded by the ponytail that keeps dancing around Dallas’s head. This bit of distraction allows Dallas to mercilessly stab Thug 2 as if he were gutting a giant catfish.
This all happens at night but in full view of a busy highway, and neither thug bothers to even bring a gun. ‘Oh yeah,’ not believable at all. Dallas turns to flee, cue credits, and we are done with this. This opening scene is, thankfully, anomalous to the rest of the picture, and it astonishes me Allen kept it in because, as we soon learn, that ‘setup’ is recapitulated in a conversation at a bar where Dallas and his sister Lisa (DeAnna Cali) meet, and we learn that they are petty crooks who are in league with Eddie, played by Andrew DeCarlo who had a minor role in The Coldest Kiss, their de facto minor league criminal gang leader who is in stir and entrusted Dallas with 15,000 dollars worth of loot he squandered, thus prompting Dallas to likely turn to the black thugs we scope out as probable loan sharks. But again, any sane person could simply sit down and watch the film starting from post-credits and get all this, as Allen writes a very good scene filled with realistic dialogue, heightened by the siblings’ subjective POVs whose comments make the techno-trash music blaring behind them lessen.
Clearly, Allen did not self-edit at the beginning of the screenplay, which is very unlike him.
Now, let us discuss the fourth and last of the lead characters which is the video game-obsessed Harold (Rhett Crosby who acted as the playboy Howie in The Coldest Kiss and was, arguably, that film’s finest actor), Eddie’s younger but bulkier brother. Dallas, Lisa, and Harold form a trio who have sophisticated ploys to meet Eddie so that they can capture him off of the highway once he is released, completely forgetting the fact that Dallas and Eddie nearly came to blows on the freeway with Eddie punching Dallas for the extremely ridiculous reason of Dallas’s $15,000 worth of booty squandered. Regardless, they decide to execute a more reasonable plan of traveling close to the California coast to supposedly wait for the ‘watch sunrises’ which is slightly mocking of the disappearance of the criminals who are under the impression that the sun rises in the west. Their plan is to locate some backwater town filled with foolish rich people in need of a good robbing. In a way, the four are what one would expect in a crime or heist film, and each plays their part firmly and all fit well together in an incredible way.
I do not wish to elaborate so much on the number of schemes to not ‘spoil’ the ending of the film, but while the secondary and tertiary roles may have some wooden acting, the four leads give a performance that makes me believe there was some level of acting quality and onscreen chemistry that was missing in The Coldest Kiss. Allen has the weakest performance but, in his defense, he is solid. Once again, the best of the four performances goes to Rhett Crosby. In this role, he seems to possess the most range and reminds of the physical presence and acting intensity of Vincent D’Onofrio’s Private Pyle in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, or Michael Shannon in The Iceman or Werner Herzog’s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? as well as the reminiscences of Lennie Small from John Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men.
It reminds me of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in that, like in that film, this film has a main antagonist who is not actually a villain and we learn this through a doublecross (spoiled only by a fight scene which is almost as wooden and silly as the one in the opening sequence of the film. Thankfully, the film does recover from this issue.)
What is most remarkable about the screenplay of “Stealing Sunrise” is that while it is understood that Hitchcock revealed that his villain is not the actual villain about 20 percent in Psycho, Allen makes the switch unceremoniously, let alone unexpectedly, at what is closer to the 70 percent mark. And unlike Psycho, the incessantly crying child of this film does not get to reap the rewards of the utterance-switch narrative. more astonishing, of course, is that it works mostly. Where it fails is the revelation scene. Like the final death scene in The Coldest Kiss, it goes on and on. It could have been cut from 17 minutes to maybe a third of that, perhaps less. She suffers from what is known as Evil Gloating tropes.
The direction alone speaks volumes about his talent and his excellence during the faux ’80s musical. The soundtrack already contains half of his work and is made up of work from other musicians too. The film was well done by Allen and James Kelley, especially the segment of the musical montage that finishes a third into the movie at the Grand Canyon. The framing and compositions are not too showy like the previous film’s shots, but even though it may be less impressive, it does look more natural. Since Stealing Sunrise is better acted and scripted, this is definitely a tradeoff that is worth it. Some included 80s-era paraphernalia are Eddie’s walk under a bridge with a train, the cassette sportscar, and the tape deck in Dallas. These portray the motif of lostness that is highly used in 80s movies.
Some noteworthy moments are in the last scene where Dallas and Lisa rob an old pawnshop owner of $8000 (Graham Mackie who pees his pants in fear), and Dallas purposefully deceives him by saying they will be going back to Tulsa, Oklahoma. There are also good shots that capture a lot of the characters and are largely unrelated to the film’s action portion which indicates Allen’s rising maturity as a film director in knowing that the plot develops from character and little moments that develop character help create the bigger moments of the plot even if there could be more and deeper moments and conversations. Some of the most memorable moments include Harold picking his nose and wiping it on his shirt when Eddie and Lisa are making out, Harold making his game noises and Lisa filing her nails while Dallas is trying to sleep.
Like all the leading roles, the actors playing the supporting roles performed well and better than most, particularly, Rhett Crosby, who had the biggest role to shoulder and managed well, even when his character was constantly asked what he could do to help, and the answer is always ‘nothing.’ Out of the minor parts, Sheriff Pat Porter portrayed by Rob Edwards has a few good performances that are well naturized, as well as certain badly performed parts, which usually consisted of some of the most awful wrote in the movie through his near moron like incapacity to put the pieces of the ongoing crime spree together. When he does, an unconvincing moment occurs when the sheriff decides to go and confront the criminals in their motel room, without any deputies, only the thick clientele of the motel and a single firearm. An improvement is before the film comes to an end when, with the other real villain of the film, in a narrative feint, the sheriff starts wondering whether the crooks or the townsfolk of Bunch are the worst evil in which unfortunately, Edwards remains stagnant in the rest of the action which is otherwise performed well.
However, a few of the film’s scenes were canceled out due to continuity errors that seem to have passed the attention of Allen, who wore many more hats than just grip, gaffer best boy, and caterer. One such scene was a cut from light glaring through a window in the sheriff’s office to a parallel scene in the gang’s motel room which is marked by deep night.
One of the dullest moments of the film is during the jewelry store heist, where the gang captures a staggering one-hundred thousand dollars their biggest target, before hitting a grandiose quarter of a million dollar jackpot towards the end of the film. Joe, (Britain Bhatton) is an overly flamboyant gay jewelry salesman who tries to infuse humor onto the scene and fails miserably to add a different kind of annoyance during the store heist. Kat, (Cat Roberts), a more subtle female employee, is exceptional. On the other hand, Vera Dell plays the wealthy widow and is mediocre, at best, while Brian Adel, as a shameless prison guard, evokes Plan 9 From Outer Space level emoting in his elm-like one line performance as Eddie is released. Regardless, scenes like the above-mentioned, and the film’s opening, should just cease to exist in any subsequent films.
Another source of power loss is not so much a continuity error as a lack of internal logic realism, such as when in this film set in 1986, a character unplugs a telephone jack from a wall in the motel room. During that period, the phone jacks did not exist, and phone lines had to be pulled out with a lot of effort. Another incongruity finishes the film, where the actual bad guy tries to escape with the 358,000 dollar bounty, but in order to do so he needs to deposit a check made out to him, which is very easy to trace and capture him.
That said, these are imperfections that can be addressed, and they are minor in the scope of the film’s entirety. Character realism could be much better, but if Allen’s next film outshines this one as dramatically as Stealing Sunrise does to The Coldest Kiss, then this will be irrelevant. In the end, Michael Jason Allen’s latest film shows great improvement from his previous film and, quite frankly, it is about time some independent investors start noticing the artistic and financial potential that exists in his work. All Allen needs is wider distribution, and invitations to more renowned film festivals, and his films will start captivating investors, which, in turn, will lift the constraints set by the micro budgets he works with, especially in terms of hiring better-known actors. For the audience, enjoy this film, and look forward to Allen’s next, and hopefully his even better fourth film.
To watch more movies like Stealing Sunrise (2015) visit 123movies
Also Watch for more movies like:
