Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
What do you say to a 4-Armed Gorilla that breaks into your Lab and wants to publish a review?
"Would you like the text in bold print, or plain?"
Dude...dear God, that article you wrote on the LOTR footage brought a tear to my eye.
I saw a little film last week called "Kill me Later." This is an independent film directed, co-written, and co-produced by Dana Lustig, who is an absolute babe and responsible for "Wedding Bell Blues." I've never seen that, I have no idea what it's about, but apparently it's in heavy rotation on the Lifetime Network.
Black Comedy is a tough genre. It's very easy to overdo the comedy or the darkness and end up with something that is twisted, vaguely amusing, but ultimately a resident of that boring gray area where films that try too hard go to retire. KML doesn't fall for this.
Selma Blair plays Shawn, a depressed young woman who wants to commit suicide. Life hasn't exactly turned out like she thought it would, and death just seems like a great relief. Max Beesley, who is soon to be in a sure-fire Oscar winner called, ahem...Glitter..., is a member of a group of bank robbers who rob the bank where Shawn is trying to throw herself off a roof. Charlie (Beesley's character) interrupts her and takes her hostage, and hilarity ensues.
For about ten minutes.
You see, KML is smart. It knows when to put the jokes aside and get to the real matter of the film: life. Life against all odds. Life as it should be lived, with open eyes and open heart, not through a perpetual, self-inflicted gloom. Well, mostly self-inflicted. Lustig doesn't cheat her characters. They have real problems, real enough to evoke our sympathies and recognition, but they also come to realize that they have control over those problems.
Thrown into the mix is Brendan Fehr (Roswell) as Charlie's simple-minded friend, and a couple FBI agents with a decent talent for comedic dialogue. The cast puts out a nice effort, and the script is good enough to reward those efforts. Of course, then the weird stuff hits.
The weird stuff, in this case, is the editing. Lustig and editor Gabriel Wrye went a little wild in the cutting room. The film is full of bizarre conversations that place each line in a different scene, sometimes in locations that appear out of chronological order. I'll see if I can describe it: one person will ask a question inside a bank, and that question will be answered outside at a later time, and then the conversation jumps back into the bank for the next line, then back outside for the next. Time sometimes runs backwards. Dark scenes end up being seen in predator heat-vision mode. It's really pretty fun.
When combined with a shattering rock soundtrack that is very heavy on the drum kit, you end up with what at times feel like a very frantic music video. It's ok though...the urgency works where it is used. As Lustig put it, the pacing forces the characters, as well as the audience, to keep up with the beat of life running throughout the film.
No film is perfect. The acting was a little over-the-top by some minor characters, and the ending was just silly. Not a bad ending...just too goofy for the rest of the film. I can confindently give this four bananas out of five, and I encourage people to check it out when it hits LA and NY on September 14th.
The 4-armed Gorilla
