Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020)

Jack and I really enjoyed what we thought was a documentary about the final night of The Roaring 20s, a Las Vegas dive bar in late 2016. It looks like a documentary. The nominations and wins piling up call it a documentary. We disagree, though we like it no less. That said, the characters do get drunk during the shoot. The more I read about it, the stranger it gets. 

According to the site founded by the late Roger Ebert, directors/cinematographers/editors Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross assembled a group of barflies (recruited from various locations) at The Roaring 20s bar––in New Orleans––and then shot some exteriors in Vegas. The televisions in the bar show election news stories and Jeopardy, among others, but we didn't notice any local news to tip us off to the artifice of the project. The LA Times says that the programmers at Sundance "petitioned" them to include the movie in the nonfiction section.

Michael Martin (arguably the lead character), Peter Elwell, and Shay Walker are the only professional actors listed on imdb, playing themselves. We also appreciated the antics of the bearded bartender (New Orleans musician Marc Paradis), Lowell Landes (with the longest gray hair), and the Black Vietnam vet Bruce Hadnot. It took a little work to find their names.

It's great fun to be the fly on the wall with these folks, not having to smell their cigarettes and who knows what else.

None of the players has appeared in my blog before, though Landes played a role in Beasts of the Southern Wild and the Ross brothers have several actual documentaries under their belts.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics are, like us, not put off by the conceit, averaging 93%, but its audiences, at 72, are leaving their hands in their pockets.

You can rent it on Amazon Prime for 99¢.