There is a vaping crisis taking over a small college campus in Bradley Rabinowitz’s short film RA Noir. Adrian Chromstone (Bradley Rabinowitz) isn’t your typical Resident Advisor. He’s a Private RA — a campus gumshoe operating in the shadowy corridors of student housing. He’s part hall monitor and part detective. After a long day on the beat, he’s taking a well-earned break when RC Clive Robertson (Aidan Kushner) pulls him back in. There is a JUUL ring on campus that’s disrupting the school year, and Robertson needs Adrian on the case before it gets out of hand.
His first stop is the Commons, where he crosses paths with Bubsy Ecklehart (Emerick Taber), who is hanging outside, vaping without a care in the world. That’s when Hayden Prescott (John Warren) shows up, a low-level JUUL dealer. He says there’s a kingpin who controls the entire vaping supply chain on campus, but he doesn’t know who it is. Hayden knows there’s only one person he can trust to help him crack it — Nikki Donovan (Lily Wolpert), whose “beauty is worth a million flex points” and whose instincts are sharper than anyone in the quad.
Adrian Chromstone consults with Nikki Donovan in a tense scene from RA Noir.
“He’s a Private RA — a campus gumshoe operating in the shadowy corridors of student housing.”
RA Noir is the brainchild of comedian/filmmaker Bradley Rabinowitz and his SUNY Purchase College sketch comedy group, Purchase Late Night. RA Noir blends noir genre filmmaking with the humor of college campus life.
As a noir, it has all the trappings: the shadowy intrigue, the femme fatale, the small-time dealer who’s clearly just a pawn. It’s all set in the seedy underbelly that is dorm life. The film itself is super low-budget (or high budget for college students) — just a camera and a bunch of friends wanting to make a movie.
The laughs are a bit hit-or-miss — not surprising for a college production — but a great deal of effort was put into making RA Noir feel like a noir. It’s all shot in black and white and given a super-grainy film-like appearance. In the end, I admire RA Noir and its filmmaker, Bradley Rabinowitz, because, quite frankly, I’m jealous. This is something I wish I had done when I was in college.
RA Noir can be streamed on YouTube.
"…A great deal of effort was put into making RA Noir feel like a noir."
