RJ Collins ‘ CRESCENT CITY stars Alec Baldwin, Terrance Howard, Esai Morales in a twisty tale of cops after a serial killer
RJ Collins ‘CRESCENT CITY stars Alec Baldwin, Terrance Howard, Esai Morales in a twisty tale of cops after a serial killer
Summary: In RJ Collins’ Crescent City, two cops in Arkansas search for a serial killer in their small Arkansas town as they must face suspicion of themselves, twists and turns, PTSD, Internal Affairs, and a boss (played by Alec Baldwin) who is on their ass to bring results.
Review: Brian Sutter (played by Terrence Howard) and Luke Carson (played by Esai Morales) search for a serial killer in a small, country town in Arkansas with a surprising lack of rednecks but a large presence of Satanism.
Sponsored Ad:
Find great indie films available to watch now on Amazon Prime:
Click here to browse indie film libraries
The serial killer uses mannequins as props with the victims who are left for the cops to find. Brain and Luke are pretty stoic and calm as their investigation has a predictable end in the movie world. I mean, within the first few scenes, it’s pretty obvious the serial killer is one of the two detectives.
The question throughout the film is whether it’s Brian or Luke.
But.. keep in mind that the only movies that were really unpredictable to me were The Sixth Sense (1999), Save The Green Planet (2003), and The Mist (2007). So, the lay audience who this movie is really for may not find it that predictable.
Two really cool things I really appreciated about Crescent City
There were two really cool things I really appreciated about Crescent City: the music and the lack of obvious buildup.
I will explain.
The Music. Besides the ominous tones that played a very few times, the one song at the beginning and the one song at the end, and the songs during the sex scenes, there was no music. No OST. No original song. The cops never listened to music in their car. There were a lot of scenes where I would expect music (and some slow motion), but the pacing kept the same and the silence remained. As an aspiring screenwriter, I am always aware of the power of music for a scene.
Of course, I have no control over the music played in any movie that I write, but I can still let scenes flow with music in my head as I write them. I can imagine. Crescent City and its minimalist choice with music, I was reminded of Cast Away (2000).
Its minimalist choice with music
For the whole time Chuck Noland (played by Tom Hanks) was stranded on the island, there was no music, which put an interesting feeling to the island scenes. There’s also No Country For Old Men (2007), which has no traditional soundtrack.
Oh, and Bubba Ho-Tep (2002), which included Elvis (played by Bruce Campbell) but had no music by Elvis at all. I know the reason was that the producers couldn’t get any rights or permissions to use his music, but it still made the movie quite odd and unique.
With Crescent City, the background noise common in a lot of small southern towns was also absent. The cries of cicadas, the buzzing of mosquitoes, the songs of crickets and grasshoppers, and rhythms that form as all these insects come together in a chorus is all around you when you live in the south. The silence that filled the absence of background noise and music gave the movie an eerie quality to it.
This viewer found quite nostalgic
Combine this with the stoicism of the characters and the slower pacing, and Crescent City became reminiscent of straight-to-video releases from the 90’s, which was this viewer found quite nostalgic.
There was also the lack of obvious buildup for certain events, twists, and scenes. When watching a movie – especially a Whodunnit or serial killer movie – music, slow motion effects, scene setups, etc will bring buildup so that the viewer will know that something important or big is coming in the next few seconds.
Crescent City didn’t have any of them.
The twists and turns and whatnot just came on the scene. There was no obvious leading of the audience to expect anything. And, oh, there were a lot of twists and turns throughout the movie.
Oh, he did! No he didn’t… but, that other guy did it! Wait… maybe not.
You watch all these twists and turns
You watch all these twists and turns and you can’t really expect certain things because they just pop on the screen like popcorn jumping out of the pan, so you forget, at times, what you knew at the beginning: Brian or Luke is the serial killer.
For example, there’s a scene where Luke and Brian sit in a van parked a little ways away from where Jaclyn (played by Nicky Whelan) is with a suspect. Within the span of a few scenes, Jaclyn’s wire gets discovered, she gets hit, the cops come upon the scene, the suspect runs off, and Brian has a PTSD flashback and can’t subdue the suspect. There is no music to lead the audience into a certain feeling or expectation, and the different elements just… well… happen.
Overall, Crescent City is worth watching as a…
Overall, Crescent City is worth watching as a one-time-see movie that you turn on and just zone out to. It reminded me of Reindeer Games (2000), Hangman (2017), Striking Distance (1993), Ground Control (1998), and Passenger 57 (1992). Each were films that have some things going for them and maybe others not, but whenever I’ve met someone else who has seen any of them, a good conversation seems to always arise.
Personally, there are some things about Crescent City that are rather inspiring to me in terms of my screenwriting.
It goes to show that only watching the greatest movies out there is not the only path to learn how to write better screenplays. There are some scenes that are very well framed, and there are very genre oriented elements done differently than one would expect. I’ve always wanted to do a movie based on Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, which is a story about a guy who walks through a small town graveyard and has a poem arise from all the different tombstones he comes across.
Crescent City has the pacing and style I see Spoon River Anthology imitating.
If a director asked me how I saw that screenplay adaptation on screen, I would point to Crescent City.