Monday - May 05, 2008
Latest review
Here's a copy of our latest review, courtesy of Indie Express. Minor spoilers ahead! You've been warned. ---------------------- Hoyle's eyes relax and close as she wanders into a dream state, slipping into her sub-conscious, drenched in soothing black and white. She lies on her therapist's couch; in the middle of her session she admits that she is afraid. "What are you afraid of?" She sees a woman in her dreams; someone that is haunting her. "Someone is here… she wants help." This is the opening scene to Yesterday Was a Lie, a crime drama taken right out of the film noir genre, with a very textbook approach. Kipleigh Brown plays the lovely and fashionable blonde, detective Hoyle -- a woman with smarts and savvy who selects bourbon as her choice poison. She is on a case -- but we are not quite sure what that case is, because at the beginning of the story details are clouded in ambiguity. Yet the appropriate and familiar setting of an empty, dark, secluded warehouse is where Hoyle and her associates converge. Hoyle and her loyal partner enter a trap door, one of many metaphorical symbols that are laced throughout the film. As they proceed down a long, dark hallway, Hoyle realizes this is a passageway into a surreal realm of her past. Who or what they are after has eluded them. The objective of their pursuit quickly ends as they find their suspect lying dead in a damp alleyway. Oddly enough, a book of T.S. Eliot poems is laying next to him with a page opened to a phrase: "Through the unknown, unremembered gate." The Pigeon Hole (clever name for a bar) is the local lounge, and in a scene out of David Lynch's Blue Velvet we find our protagonist at the bar, muddling over the case. However, she is more disturbed by an ominous figure from the past. Meanwhile, our attention is gravitated to the beautiful singing chanteuse played by Chase Masterson. After her sultry little set, she pulls a stool next to Hoyle. "What are you working on?" "It's complicated" "You know what the secret is to a good Manhattan? Balance." A few nights later Hoyle is attending an art opening. Clues to her case are to be found somewhere within the exhibit. As fate would have it, the Singer walks into the room with the same femme fatale outfit as Hoyle: skin-tight black dress with a V-neck to the abdomen; cleavage abounds. Here the two find mysteries and clues in a Salvador Dali painting, while they engage in a deep metaphysical discussion relating to perceived reality and linear facades. Hoyle and the Singer continue their mysterious endeavor as they pursue a scientific genius and a notebook that includes his formulas. Yet Hoyle loses herself into the realms of linear time, cognitive dissociation, and the confused state of reality and non-reality as she grapples with a broken past. Yesterday Was a Lie is a film that runs the gamut between Blade Runner, The Twilight Zone, and one of those Humphrey Bogart crime films. It's a film that presents itself in the noir style of the 40s or 50s; a soft and rich palate of black and white that enriches the well-photographed production. There are plenty of those Hollywood taxicab scenes that are dark and foggy, adding to the misty and mysterious tone of the story. And while the storyline seems to be set in the middle of the century, there are odds and ends that would lead you to believe otherwise. For example, some of the Singer's wardrobe appears to be right out of Old Navy, and I don't think they had Apple Macs in the 1940s. But then again this is a film that deals with the present and the past. Shot in about 24 days, Yesterday Was a Lie is more of a puzzle and a search for truth that relies heavily on quantum mechanical theories and spiritual and psychological journeys about people who are stuck in the past. It is an interesting low-budget indie that one must be attentive to, because beyond its tones of dark and light there is a world of distorted reality where "the most powerful force in the universe lies within the depths of the human heart." -Rowan Harrison, Indie Express