[imagesource: Utopia]

I know it’s hard to believe, but there was once a time when you could gather with friends in public, drink recklessly, and wake up the next day with deep pangs of regret and a black hole where your short-term memory used to be.

You can still wake up with memory loss, and a healthy dose of regret, but if you’re playing by the rules that will take place in your own bed, with strangers none the wiser to your poor decision-making and slurred speech.

Perhaps the lack of reckless public drinking has played a part in why Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets has been so warmly received, with the documentary focusing on The Roaring 20s, a dive bar in Las Vegas en route to shutting down.

The Guardian, calling it an “unconventional semi-constructed documentary”, says it impressed audiences at Sundance, and is about as close as we may come to public intoxication for a while:

…the motley patrons find profundity in beer, whiskey, gin, rum, vodka – really everything except wine, come to think of it…

The dingy, Christmas-light-lit interior contains a social ecosystem bustling with energy, and because the film has pulled up a seat at The Roaring 20s on its last day of operation, there’s a sense of the elegiac as well.

In the most unassuming location, we watch life and death pass us by. We watch that, and in a more immediate sense, we watch everyone getting good and plastered.

Come on, what’s not to love?

Pull up a chair:

I can smell the whiskey (or whisky) breath from here.

Not to spoil the fun entirely, but not everything that happens in the doccie is 100% true.

Yes, it’s unscripted, and those featured (bar one) are not actors, and the drinks and joints and acid tabs are real, but The Roaring 20s bar isn’t actually in Vegas, and hasn’t actually closed.

Here’s the director’s response when pressed on why that’s not so important:

“The best conversation I’ve had with someone who was a bit disgruntled in that way went, ‘Wow, that movie was great, but that wasn’t real?’ And I told him, ‘Of course it’s real. Did you have a response to the film? That response is real.’ This resonates with viewers just like it resonated with the people in the film. Their reactions are genuine, even within the paradigm we set for them.”

Read more on the story behind the doccie here.

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is out in the US on July 10.

[source:guardian]