Manhattan Folds

As the credits for this seemingly concept-based little short rolled, I was scratching my head. Not at the plot, the premise, or anything about the movie. I was trying to figure out why JP thought it was so awful. Fresh off of one viewing, I couldn't tell you a single character's name, but slowly, as the ending played out, it all clicked in my head and I understood how all these snippets of character profiles came together. It's an extremely complex story told in an extremely fragmented way, and by God, it works.

In a longer, more developed film, I would have considered the cinematography and editing choices poorly done. The angles are shot in such a way that it's like you're viewing the whole world with your head tilted 75 degrees and squinting your eyes. The colors are drab and while the whole thing is very sleek and professional-looking, there's nothing visually appealing onscreen most of the time. The tiny bits of character development we get are fenced off from each other by black screens narrated over by the next chunk of story. Some stories go by so quickly it's easy to get frustrated with the whole thing -- I can easily see how JP could have hated the final version, now that I think about it. Voice acting and music are excellent by any standards, of course. It plays like an experimental short indie film where we're given a few pieces of a puzzle and have to race to put them together as the film starts to end, and something about the final TV broadcast just cracked me up, as I started to understand everything while the guy yells, "That's....that's incredible!"

It begins with a short news broadcast telling us about an up-and-coming recording artist who's been murdered in an apartment. We flash to a man in a confession booth telling a preacher about what is apparently the same murder. We then move to two other side stories about a man who abuses his wife and two hitmen out on a job, one of whom isn't handling his job so well. Obviously, these stories will collide in the end, and they do; there's a really subtle twist at the end when you consider the way one of the hitmen and the murderer each deal with the guilt of what they do, and what inevitably happens to them, and a wrapping up of some of the darker plot points ("Was there anyone else in the car with you?") that become clearer in retrospect. It ends on a comedic note that might have felt forced if I'd disliked the movie, but really made me smile since I was just starting to get it.

Whether you consider it a brilliant experiment, an interesting failure, or a complete train wreck of side plots, it'll definitely make you scratch your head and think about it for a few moments afterwards. I really enjoyed it, and even if pushes fragmented storytelling to the breaking point, it's an eyebrow-raiser, and that's always good in my book. Whether you raise both eyebrows or just one depends on your own preference for storytelling, I suppose.

Critical Score: 76/100.
Personal Score: 92/100.