(Potential Spoilers Ahead.)
One of the things that the Atlantic Film Festival offers as part of it's activities is a retrospective of certain filmmaking genres, or the films of certain filmmakers for free. Basically it's a chance to see free older films. This year the theme is the coen brothers, and they began the retrospective with their first film Blood Simple. I am a huge coen brothers fan, but I've never seen Blood Simple.......until now. As always, plot summary, pros and cons, final score. Let's do it.
Plot Summary
Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya) hires private investigator Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) to see if his wife Abby (Frances McDormand) is having an affair with his bartender Ray (Ray Getz). Upon confirming his suspicions, he then asks Loren to kill them both. That's it. It's a 99 long minute movie and it really doesn't get too complex.
Pros - Frances McDormand is awesome as always, and the film does look like a neo noir style of film for the most part.
Cons - The pacing is awful. If feels slow even at 99 minutes, and there's this long kid of awkward scene with no dialogue whatsoever. Now I'm not saying no dialogue is bad, but one of the Coen Brothers strengths in later films is their great dialogue. As for the acting, the only other person who seems to not be phoning it in slightly is M. Emmet but everyone else seems like they took a zoloft. Also the story is kind of simplistic, but they try to shake it up a bit but it mostly doesn't work or it's kind of dull.
Final Score - 6/10
You shouldn't be having pacing problems at 99 minutes. Frances McDormand is the only reason this film doesn't get a 5, but I'm also not in a real hurry to watch it again any time soon.
I know this is a shorter review, but if you want to read more, why not check out some of my other articles on the side of the page. It's a shameless self promotion I know but I'm trying to get my view numbers up, so why not help out? Also, I plan on putting up a few more festival reviews, so keep an eye out for those.
Until next time, I'll see you folks at the movies.
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