Life Begins at 3am

To prepare myself for this film I watched the director's previous effort, 'Swingers', and found it to be a tiresome and uninspired talkfest. In 'Swingers' the director makes some obvious and purposeful references to Quentin Tarrentino's 'Reservior Dogs', and in this film he moves into 'Pulp Fiction' territory - multiple, interlinking storylines told from different perspectives. The movie starts by introducing the main characters at an LA supermarket and then splits into three interconnected stories following these characters on a less than ordinary night in their lives. It's a night that starts with a drug deal going wrong, and then things get worse with the night's dramas including drugs, a dance party, hit and run driving, tantric sex, poisoned shrimp, gambling, arson, grand theft auto, strippers, shootings, car chases, revenge, lust, coffee, alcohol, the naïve, the desperate and the criminal.

The different perspectives are well scripted, acted and filmed, they overlap, interconnect and collide quite ingeniously and rewardingly. The moments of realisation, when situations are explained, are well executed and there are some clever plot twists which are truly surprising. Here is a movie that doesn't always telegraph what is going to happen in upcoming scenes. The characters are believable and stereotypes are used for their comedic value. It is not often I can complement a film on it's story, acting and technical quality, so I was impressed.

This film is not groundbreaking or brilliant, but it managed several clever ideas in its 100 minutes and didn't bog down with unnessecary subplots or gratuitous establishing shots - it maintained its pace through character interplay, direction and editing. It also managed to blend the comedy, action, suspense and the crime genres together uncompromisingly, which usually doesn't work. Normally one genre is sacrificed for another, or comedy is forcibly interjected into a scene that doesn't warrant it. The actors can take a lot of credit for this and they had the opportunity to display quite a range of personas as the script had their emotions rollercoastering from despair to ectasy and all stops inbetween.

The audience even applauded several scenes and I always find it impressive when that happens in a cinema.

sebastian niemand
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