Paul Krik’s low-budget indie thriller Able Danger is nicely shot in tinted b&w hi-def video, slickly mixed, scored and edited almost to the point of being indistinguishable from this or that Bruckheimer TV show. And Krik is a keen film student: Many of the film’s images recall Welles, Lang, Fuller, Mann, Kubrick, Frankenheimer– you name it. Hipster-geek lead Adam Nee, as a conspiracy theory blogger convinced that 9/11 was an inside job, shows subtle, offbeat charm. Young film majors curious about how to pull off a polished look on a shoestring may want to check it out. Krik gets a lot of mileage out of color correction software, real Brooklyn locations and one beat-up mountain bike.
Most memorably Krik also shows an eye for cute European and American hipster chicks in dark femme fatale dresses, retro skirts and, most memorably, panties. …Read more
A hit at the most recent Rotterdam Film Festival, Paul Krik’s feature debut Able Danger is a Flatbush, Brooklyn set post 9/11 conspiracy tale that hinges its low budget thrills directly to a studied pastiche of classic film noir and a healthy cynicism of our government’s possible role in the events of 9/11 and the subsequent dive into a state of perpetual middle eastern war in the name of defending freedom. Krik, who occasionally goes by the name Dave Herman, has the hip threads and thousand yard stare that are par for the course for Brooklyn conspiracy theorists, but he also has sure handed feel for cinema. With deftness he milks paranoia out of his crisp, hi-def B&W images and creates an altogether plausible conspiracy that barely name checks the controlled demolition theory, but nonetheless synthesizes large quantities of suspicious information from that sunny tuesday morning seven years ago. On the eve of his film’s NYC release at the Pioneer later this week, we caught up with Paul to talk about––what else?–– Entourage, Atlas Shrugged, the desire to work with Cate Blanchett and Greek versus German philosophy.
At this point in the festival, it’s hard for me to make room in my schedule for films screening purely in the market when there’s competition stuff to see at the same time (although I did see Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours today, and that was totally worth it––more later). And so on Thursday morning, I’ll be watching Philippe Garrel’s Frontier of Dawn during the sole screening of Able Danger, a neo-noir “spoof” of 9/11 conspiracy theorists. We turn, once again, to the official Marche du Film guide for a synopsis:
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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A hit at the most recent Rotterdam Film Festival, Paul Krik’s feature debut Able Danger is a Flatbush, Brooklyn set post 9/11 conspiracy tale that hinges its low budget thrills directly to a studied pastiche of classic film noir and a healthy cynicism of our government’s possible role in the events of 9/11 and the subsequent dive into a state of perpetual middle eastern war in the name of defending freedom. Krik, who occasionally goes by the name Dave Herman, has the hip threads and thousand yard stare that are par for the course for Brooklyn conspiracy theorists, but he also has sure handed feel for cinema. With deftness he milks paranoia out of his crisp, hi-def B&W images and creates an altogether plausible conspiracy that barely name checks the controlled demolition theory, but nonetheless synthesizes large quantities of suspicious information from that sunny tuesday morning seven years ago. On the eve of his film’s NYC release at the Pioneer later this week, we caught up with Paul to talk about––what else?–– Entourage, Atlas Shrugged, the desire to work with Cate Blanchett and Greek versus German philosophy.
