Bloody Nose Empty Pockets Is Like Nothing You’ve Seen before

Bloody  Nose Empty  Pockets

Directed  by  Bill  Ross 1V  , Turner  Ross

Rating: ** ½

Partly  documentary,  partly fiction  Bloody Nose Empty Pockets  is wholly confounding.  To say that we haven’t seen anything like this  would be an  understatement. Of course we  haven’t. But would we want  to see something like this again? I doubt it.

 This is a  bizarre  blend of booze and backchat  which cinephiles would  refer  back to as  How Original Can Cinema  Get Without Toppling Over?  And  the  kind of cinema that incites endless discussion on  the function and frontiers  of  filmmaking.Filmed entirely in a  bar in Las Vegas called the Roaring 20s, the  clients at  this  booze binge  have  seen better  days. They are  almost all above 70  and lower than  90 but they are heavy drinkers in this heavy-lifting  exercise  in documentary fictioneering. 

The “characters”—and I use the word with strict reservations since  most  of the barflies are  non-actors who are made  to act—mingle as if the camera  isn’t there? Didn’t get  it? These are all slosh junkies who have  been handpicked to act as slosh junkies who have  hung around together  for decades and now  when the bar is about to close, they  don’t  want the night to end. They  have nowhere else to  go.

These  night owls, I suspect, have no family. They   project the foul  decadent  aura of  abandoned derelicts drowning their desolation in drinks  and  useless talk.  While the characters  may  not  exactly  make  an impression, except one  guy with  long silver  hair who  gets  more space  and  talk time than the rest and  who also does this  very lengthy embarrassing  monologue towards the end  about  not being able to  do in  life what he has set  out to . The silvery haired man with a hawk-like face and that annoying bearing of being overbearing that  alcoholics  carry around, keeps smothering a  younger man while doing the  monologue while the  younger man looks like he would rather be anywhere else.

This feeling came to me many times. For someone who doesn’t  know what alcohol  tastes like, spending 90 minutes with  this lush  crowd  could  get  very  oppressive. But not in bad way. Bloody Nose Empty Pockets weaves a fascinating if somewhat  infuriating mix of  documentary and  fiction. Its one-location  bacchanalia  begins to  get repetitive after   point. And the  blend  of booze and  talk  is tedious. But  the  work’s uniqueness in the  space  of world cinema cannot be  denied.