Noir gets good when it pulls us into new psychological wreckage. When it holds us down and reteaches us sadness, some of us lose our shirts.
I’ve screened over three hundred films this year, and FLOST does nearly everything contemporary and classic cinema can do for audiences, and it does it with higher visual appeal, deeper character development and better quality acting than a large portion of what Hollywood is able to deliver.
It’s an incredible feat for a storyteller or filmmaker to offer heart and soul in the same breath as amorality and nihilism. When it’s right, real noir is one of the most complex art forms alive. It’s the backward look at redemption, a little Christianity told in reverse, where a blue bathroom lap dance is the form’s answer to the Ascension. And in a film that honors noir as the tragedy it is, all things become equal. Love is as necessary to Benji as it is for you and me. Salvation means the same, whether given or withheld. And when the film ends, we’re left seduced, warmed, a little shamed and, in the case of us and FLOST, shirtless.
—PV
(Read the original, more comprehensive ManArchy review of F*ckload of Scotch Tape by Robb Olson here. Thanks to Booked Podcast and Jed Ayres for helping bring this film to our attention)
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Aforementioned brilliant acting by Graham Jenkins and a fantastic supporting cast.
