Two roommates in San Francisco spy on their neighbor’s bizarre method of cleaning up after his pet.
Content Warning: This short contains gross scatological humor and strong language.
Tag Archives: 2022
CAPSULE: VIDE NOIR (2022)
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Vide Noir is currently available for VOD rental or purchase.
DIRECTED BY: Ariel Vida
FEATURING: Victor Mascitelli, Ashleigh Cummings, Todd Stashwick
PLOT: When his fiancée leaves him for a mysterious music promoter, Buck leaves his hometown in an effort to get her back.
COMMENTS: From what I’ve read, “Vide Noir” is a Lynchian-cool jazz-lounge space album that was quite well received. From what I’ve seen, I am unsurprised that Ariel Vida, director of Vide Noir, is a professional music video director. From what’s on the internet, the little consensus there is about this film can be summarized thusly: Golly if it doesn’t look good, but what’s up with the hazy story and crummy performances?
A hazy story is not a problem—not for 366 at any rate. But something has bothered me since I watched the eighth chapter of this film, which covers the closing twenty minutes. Until this “Z’oiseau” segment (preceded by others titled “the Emerald Star”, “Whispering Pines”, and so on, depending upon the locale/character/artifact focused upon), I really didn’t care what was happening. Everything looked neat, if a little over-edited for the purposes of a motion picture (90+ minutes of music video-esque shot blending is a little distracting); the sound design was adequate (all the little scrapes, plinks, and peripheral noises fleshed things out nicely); and the plot was clear enough. The title, and main narrative hook, “vide noir” refers to an hallucinogen that, as explained by one of the dead characters (this was an added ambiguity that was neither explained nor pertinent), “comparing ‘Vide Noir’ to LSD is like comparing a space shuttle to a Greyhound Bus.”
The Z’oiseau character is referenced throughout in hushed, often frightened tones. He is Vide Noir‘s “Mister Big”, and he does not disappoint: calmly suave, marvelously mustachioed, and endowed with an erudition Buck lacks. That might be part of the problem, come to think of it. Buck is determined, and modestly resourceful, but, for whatever reason, he oozes corn-fed “charm,” despite being a Detroit native. Which finally brings to mind Vide Noir‘s primary problem: the heroine-femme-fatale-mystical-beauty. As heavy a weight of mystery and charisma is laid on Z’oiseau, a far greater weight of sheer mythic wonderment is laid on Lee, the fiancée. Buck is obsessed with and smitten by her, which might be excusable considering his simple nature. What makes less sense is the Lee-adoration from the incidental characters Buck encounters, and it makes even less sense from the villain of the piece. Lee’s reputation for desirability cannot merely be stated ad nauseum—the audience needs to see it (and believe) themselves.
On the topic of this noir femme, a second element (just barely) saves this film from any withering flippancy I would have otherwise been tempted into. As flawed (or, more accurately, pointless) as the opening and middle might be, the ending is refreshingly unexpected. Buck spends days-to-weeks pursuing the girl. He suffers humiliations, encounters ghosts, endures violence, and barely survives one nasty-looking overdose on his quest to find her and take her home. But the poor bastard never considered for a moment that he was not the hero of Lee’s story. While Ariel Vida would have done well to have kept her mysteries mysterious, Buck would be better off had he spent more time thinking through his own motives.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
366 UNDERGROUND: KING JUDITH (2022)
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King Judith can be rented or purchased on-demand.
DIRECTED BY: Richard Bailey
FEATURING: Nicole Fancher, Joanna Schellenberg, Jenny Ledel, Emily Ernst, Rhonda Boutte
PLOT: A police detective investigates a car crash which ends the lives of three women and triggers the disappearance of a fourth.
COMMENTS: Viewer discretion is advised: this film is best viewed as a treatise on American feminist folklore. The plot’s threads remain unwoven until a quiet reveal at the finish, and even then the pervasive mystery is not put to rest. This method of storytelling is in keeping with the Southern Gothic style, relying heavily on ambience and spirituality—both religious and otherwise. The ethereal-but-anchored tone also echoes the subject matter: ghosts, memories, and revenants. And despite the sun-infused imagery and wispy, often (overly) poetical dialogue, there is a sense of unspecifiable loss wrapped around the ambiguous happenings.
The facts at hand are scant. Known: three women died in a car crash while en route to a “macabre literary festival.” Known: the sudden appearance on the road of a fourth woman, recently evicted from her tent-home of twenty years, triggered the crash; this woman’s whereabouts are unknown. Known: this tragedy is followed by a series of deaths-of-despair on the parts of several ostensible witnesses. Through the detective’s interviews with the victims’ friends and associates, and obliquely pertinent poems sent to her by an unknown observer, the meandering turns of events are uncovered. But what it all adds up to remains opaque, both for the film’s protagonist and for the audience.
While enduring the first third of the movie, I felt a growing apprehension—the bad kind. I feared I would have to spend an entire review dumping on an unlucky indie filmmaker. The opening mystery-tedium and the lead actress’ unconvincing performance (imagine a keen twelve-year-old girl attempting to come across as a thirty-something “seen-it-all” kind of cop) nearly sunk it. To my relief, King Judith manages to transcend both the sum of its parts and its myriad flaws. (As with anything “Southern” or “Gothic”, patience pays off, in this case handsomely.) The second act opens with a bar scene in which writer/director Bailey at last finds his storytelling voice. What follows is an encounter where an awkward fellow beautifully regales a childhood ghost experience, and the young woman he’s speaking with (one of the three car-crash victims) in turn share the amusing story of the “Mounted Aristotle” caper from Alexandrian times.
King Judith never fully shakes off its pretensions; there are too many random shots of poetical movement in front of poetical backdrops, plenty of “quirky” artist characters, and dialogue of the “…reckless urges to climb celestial trellises, and slide down them” variety by the bucketful. The grandiloquence is heading somewhere, however, and its meandering way covers interesting intersections of folklore and psyche, feminist and otherwise. And Richard Bailey’s detective-story frame is apt. In the world of memory, tales, history, the supernatural, and the hereafter, there are “no answers to our questions, only rewards—fascinating details, luminous things; on and on it goes: the work of gathering clues.”
Kind Judith is currently streaming for free on Tubi.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
SATURDAY SHORT: MOSHARI (2022)
Two sisters sleep under a mosquito net to keep out the vampires that come at night.
CAPSULE: THEY CRAWL BENEATH (2022)
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DIRECTED BY: Dale Fabrigar
FEATURING: Joseph Almani, Karlee Eldridge, Michael Paré
PLOT: A series of earthquakes has unleashed deadly nematodes, and Danny is forced to confront his lineage while awaiting rescue from this wormy menace.
COMMENTS: Upon finishing They Crawl Beneath, I discovered a message on my answering machine regarding a matter that required prompt attention. This effort took approximately eighty minutes to bring it—not quite—to a close. During my various intervals of being put on hold while I was shuffled around between departments, an unfortunate thought occurred: I was finding this mundane tedium far more satisfying than Dale Fabrigar’s film.
They Crawl Beneath has no respect for the audience’s attention, or intelligence. And a creature feature has no business being this slow, much less waiting until the midpoint (the first half ranking among the least pleasant 40 minutes I’ve endured in a movie) for the crawlers in question to fully mount their offensive. And speaking of offensive, I was nearly tickled with dismay at the character Doctor Wu, a definitely-Asian scientist who somehow has all the answers and, somehow, meets an off-screen death mentioned in one of the throwiest-away of throwaway lines I’ve ever heard. But I get ahead of myself: Jimmy the Cop is a good guy with a bad uncle and a dead dad, who gets trapped under a vintage car in a garage geographically situated in an earthquake-prone part of the world. He faces some worms and familial demons while his girlfriend hovers in the periphery—usually delivering lines in a monotone trance.
Sound cues do all the work for you, be they declarations of “Here there be melodrama!” or of “Here there be scary!” The heavy-handedness of the score bordered on ridiculous, but unfortunately maintained a heartfelt dalliance with boring bombast. Whatever they paid the actors, it was too much—and even more so, the screenwriter. It’d take someone with the B-movie charm of ten Bruce Campbells to compellingly deliver lines like, “Gwen, listen to me: I want to live. For you, and our baby” (oh yes, I had forgotten they threw in a truly random pregnancy to ratchet up the… something), or what I can only presume was an attempt at comedy, “I am definitely hallucinating.”
The movie did nothing well—my time could hardly be described as valuable, but even I felt insulted by this rotten attempt at storytelling. And though my game of phone-tag and being put on hold is, alas, not quite complete, I take considerable comfort in the fact that at least my experience with They Crawl Beneath is over with.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: