Stand Up Guy (Short)
Angelo (Joseph A. Halsey) has risen in the ranks of a New York crime family in the years since Roman (Michael Riccio) went to jail. Now, he’s diversifying the business to include music production, and it’s not long before we see him negotiating radio play for artists he is brought in. In the first scene, he is confronted by an FBI agent (Russ Camarda) who has tried to nab him for years, and implies that maybe he’ll be able to get an associate of Angelo’s to cooperate. Angelo thinks he knows his people better than that, but as we’ll see when Roman is released from prison, how well do we really know the people in our lives?
Lee Kolinsky has been apart of many of the films I’ve screened over the years as a writer, including shorts (“Junkie Heaven” and “Bullified”) and features (“Send No Flowers”), but this is his first time directing, and it feels like he’s learned a lot from the directors he’s encountered to allow him to tell the story himself. It’s a straightforward narrative and visual film, but it’s a tightly paced piece of storytelling that does has some style in terms of it’s rhythm and musical score, and well performed. Really, that’s all you need to make a good film, and Kolinsky has made a very good one, indeed.
