Krasnoludek

A record-keeping bureaucrat has a peculiar hobby of collecting information on those rare people who share his birthday, February 29th. One day, just before he is supposed to leave on a train, he adds another person to his records and discovers he already has a person with that name... and birthdate.. and birth parents. Yet these are two different people! Perplexed, he starts casually investigating, only to be murdered that very night. And so begins a sequence of events that broadens into a wider and wider conspiracy. The plot of this film follows an extremely Hitchcockian development, where an innocent action entangles an everyman into a deep conspiracy. However, whereas Hitchcock would then use this kind of plot to squeeze out lots of suspense, the direction and screen writing in this film squander some potentially thrilling moments of deception. Without the suspense, this film feels overlong and lacking much danger -- a tamer version of the noirs and thrillers coming out of America, England and France at the same time. It's too bad, because in the right hands this could have been quite a fun film to watch.

This film was done on a small budget and with actors that were clearly nonprofessional and probably just friends of the filmmakers. That alone does not condemn a movie to being bad; in fact, quite a few great movies came about in that kind of a setting (e.g. "Night of the Living Dead"). What matters is the story and the skill with which the filmmakers transform their simple surroundings into something interesting. Unfortunately, you don't get that in Towar.

The story deals with some petty criminals involved in sex trafficking and theft. They pose and act tough and try to have witty conversations in the chatty style of Quentin Tarantino or similar filmmakers with a preference for criminals. These depictions of the criminals all come across as individual imitations of other films strung together with little direction or attention to keeping audience interest. In imitating, the filmmakers tried to mimic physical executions of the scenes, thinking that would evoke the qualities they liked. But they failed to observe the purpose of adjacent scenes in these other films, which were important for setting mood, character development, tension, etc.

The camera-work and editing follow a similar sequence of flaws. Many initial shots in the scenes were clearly set up in imitation of shots from popular films (e.g. low angle shot of a car pulling up, stopping right in front of the camera), but the interesting camera angles don't persist past this initial conceit in the scene. Another imitation came through the use of CGI to zoom from one shot to another, which served no purpose other than to show off someone's graphics skills. And please, somebody inform these filmmakers that there are other ways to transition between scenes than a fade to black!

All together it's a poorly executed storyline by people who know which scenes they like in movies but don't understand why they like them. There's no horribly obvious flaws here, yet the movie still fails miserably at keeping the audience interested. The film collapses under the cumulative weight of the multiple amateurish mistakes. The inexperience shows through the inability to keep pacing or create any tension or cohesion. Best avoid this film.

Matt Garraway, an unscrupulous salmon fisher tries to hatch a scheme in Sitka to fish past season using a loophole for Native Americans. He gathers a group of accomplices, including two Native Americans and sets to work. His plan faces some grudging opposition from his brother with a conscience and his oblivious fiancée, who comes up from Seattle to take care of him after he's injured. In short, there's more than one reason to find this guy to be a total scuzzbag and you don't feel bad when some problems begin with his operation and his personal life.

The plot is fairly standard for the decade, even with the exotic Alaskan setting. And boy do they make use of the setting: there's so much filler about the salmon industry and the salmon life-cycle, you half wonder if some real salmon cannery hadn't sponsored the movie. Unfortunately, another typical aspect from the era is racist jokes at the expense of Native American people, and this movie has its share. At least they're counterbalanced with the interesting character of Jane, the "half-breed", played by a fairly young Lorna Gray. She's full of conviction and has that spark of fire that makes her worth watching, and she performs the two most singularly interesting acts in the movie. It's because of her that I've given this movie an extra point above a pleasantly forgettable 6/10.