BLONDE PURPLE
Directed by: Marcus Flemmings
Starring: Julian Moore-Cook, Jennifer Lee Moon, Jess Radomska, Adam J Bernard, Ellie Bindman
When a bank heist goes horribly wrong, an inexperienced and naïve criminal finds himself trapped inside the bank with a young hostage and a sarcastic negotiator on the other end of the phone…
Quentin Tarantino is a maverick director who freely admits that he stands on the shoulders of giants. He watched over and over the films of French New Wave, japanese gangster movies, Hong Kong Herois Bloodshed, spaghetti westerns and horror movies, and took elements from them to blend into the mixtapes that are his films. Despite his influences, which this films wear on their sleeves, his films are unique with their sense of characters and dialogue.
It is very apparent that there is a whole generation of filmmakers who cannot see the wood for the trees, and have only studied as far back as Tarantino.
Blonde Purple does get credit for not relying on in media res to kick off its narrative. Even though we join the story after the robbery and once our protagonist is in deep trouble, this is the present, not a future event we need to catch up with. The film does however spend as much time in the past as it does in the present, but these are interspersed through the film.
There are, however, numerous problems here. One of which is the fact that a lot of the characters are "film literate" and like to tell us that they are aware of the genre's conventions and "real life" isn't like that. Our protagonist berates the hostage negotiator because he's not trying to de-escalate the situation like in the movies, while the negotiator retorts that he's not going to act like in the movies. Except, he does, as the film progresses he falls back into the time-honoured conventions.
The film's narrative structure is also very annoying. One scene in particular, when our protagonist goes to get a gun from his parole officer, is plain stupid In that it destroys audience sympathy by revealing our anti-hero is already a murderer before he even entered the bank. Regardless of what his current circumstance is and whether the cards are stacked against him, as a viewer I have no reason to care.
THE VERDICT
The narrative structure, the dialogue, the characters are so painfully inspired by Tarantino it Is impossible to see past that. From a technical point of view the film is very well made with special care taken with the cinematography but overall I felt I was watching a film student project than a film to be taken seriously on its own merits.