Author: Allie Loukas

Samuel Kihagi’s “The Blue” follows Francois (Lee Bingham) living a life of solitude as a filmmaker and screenwriter who spends most of his days procrastinating. He lounges around, eats, watches TV and internet porn and slowly sinks further into a state of depression. The film quickly becomes almost unbearable to watch as Francois wastes away in his daily routine.

The sadness in his mundane existence reminded of Ellen Burstyn’s character in “Requiem for a Dream” (Darren Aronofsky, 2000) where the audience can literally seek no shelter, and are forced to watch a rapid downhill spiral. Kihagi’s use of inserts and jump cuts were reminiscent of Aronofsky’s editing style, the addition of these visual jolts not only increase the discomfort in watching the film; but, also pop the audience back into engagement when it all becomes too mundane to watch.

As a viewer and filmmaker myself, I could really empathize with a lot of what Francois was going through, which made me squeamish in remembering my own past of staring at a partially blank script. In watching Francois, though, I had hoped that this story would have a bright ending.

About halfway throughout the film I believe I let out an audible sigh of relief when a random stranger came to Francois’s door. I was glad to not only see him interact with someone, but also to give the film some much needed dialogue exchange. The random stranger was Dora, (Kayla Morales,) who showed up to check his water meter and teach him about water conservation.

Dora was peppy and upbeat, the polar opposite of Francois, yet somehow found a way to give him tough love as she helped him look inward and see that the change he was really seeking started from within. Though an interesting dichotomy was apparent from their first meeting, they were gravitationally pulled together by a shared sadness I thought was truly unique. On the surface Dora appeared to be blissfully happy, but we quickly discovered she was suffering from her own thoughts of inadequacy and internal struggles, and that the two were actually not all that different.

The standout in this film for me was Lee Bingham as Francois. Appearing alone on screen for over an hour is a difficult task, he really understood the rhythm of the character, and played Francois with a subtle sadness that came across incredibly realistic. I hope he continues his film work, he would pair well with Spike Jonze or Spike Lee in the future. 

Although this piece is interesting for a critical review I cannot recommend it to a mainstream audience. The cinematography leaves something to be desired and there are flaws in the sound design, but I cannot really blame the budgetary constraints for this film having a frustrating experience. It is very plodding and methodical, and getting through a piece like this is really for a more seasoned indie film viewer.

That being said, I have a huge admiration for Kihagi and I think he has massive potential given the right exposure and additional funding. There’s a lot of discomfort to digest here, but it is brimming with artistic vision and showed a bright future for Kihagi.

“Relaxer” is a dark comedy, semi-dystopian film from Joel Potrykus. The film follows an unhygienic, unkept slacker named Abbie (Joshua Burge.) The year is 1999, Abbie accepts a challenge from his callous older brother Cam (David Dastmalchian) to beat the mysterious and believed to be unbeatable level 256 in Pac-Man, but, there is a catch, Abbie cannot move from the couch and has only until Y2K, New Year’s Day 2000, to complete the challenge. If he does, Cam will give him 100,000 dollars.

When I use the word bizarre to describe this film, I mean bizarre. Audiences watching this piece may see similarities to “Slacker” (1990, Richard Linklater,) and there are, but I saw something much more disturbing. When I was watching this film I was reminded of “Room” (2015.) Not entirely due to the setting never changing from Abbie’s living room, but more due to the fact that his brother Cam almost felt like a sadistic kidnapper.

From the beginning we see Cam abusing Abbie both mentally and physically, in one instance forcing him to drink copious amounts of milk until he vomits, a scene so gross and disturbing it reminded me of “A Clockwork Orange” (1971.) In that way I began to empathize with Abbie, this wasn’t just some burnout or stoner film, this character was actually being abused by most of the people around him.

Abuse can do strange things to people. It can isolate them, either voluntarily or involuntarily, make them completely lose their sense of self and rely on their abuser for any shred of self-worth, and even cause them completely retreat from society. In Abbie’s case, he completely shuts himself off from the outside world in order to play video games. In this sense the film is deeply dark and depressing. A portrait of a guy who most people would just refer to as a loser is actually a suffering, lost soul with no direction or hope.

Potrykus effectively used the only space he had, the suburban Michigan living room, and made the film’s cinematography and singular location work. DP Adam J. Minnick did well with using slow pans and subtle camera movements to widen the space, additionally, the clever use of sound design and foley brought the outside inside so we feel like more than one thing is happening.

Joshua Burge really holds the film together and does an excellent job acting from the same spot, not an easy task. His character is gross, repulsive, and you can almost smell him through the screen. He embraces the stench and crafts a great performance, I could see him working with someone like Jody Hill in the future.

Much of the dialogue, written by Potrykus, was perhaps darkly funny, but the entire thing was so abrasive that I did find it hard to watch. It felt like a marathon to see if I could make it through this film and get to the payoff at the end, which did come but only lasted about 10 minutes. That being said, if Potrykus ever does go mainstream I can see his films being darkly funny and sinister, hopefully expanding their breadth to include a wider audience.

I can’t exactly recommend this for that wide audience Potrykus will hopefully capture in the future, as it is more of an indie think piece. If you can sit and watch someone play a video game on a 1999 couch covered in sweat and spoiled milk for 91 minutes and try to gather a deeper meaning of isolation and social regression, it may be for you. There is a lot of meaning here, but it is a tough one to digest.

“Chained For Life,” written and directed by Aaron Schimberg, challenges notions we have surrounding people, beauty, filmmaking, the way audiences visually consume films, and the blurred lines between fantasy and reality.

In the film Mabel (played by Jess Weixler,) is a movie star in a low-budget horror film directed by a German man nicknamed “Herr Director,” (Charlie Korsmo,) the fun and playful use of heavy German accents reminded of “Inglorious Basterds” (2009.) Mabel’s on screen love interest, Rosenthal (Adam Pearson) is severely disfigured due to a condition called neurofibromatosis that causes tumors to form along the body’s nerve tissue, yet despite their obvious physical differences they connect emotionally and form a relationship with one another.

We can see this from the beginning of the film when Mabel offers to help Rosenthal run his lines, and Rosenthal asks her to show him how she expresses herself emotionally for scenes. He gives her an instruction, such as “show me empathy” and, Mabel, practically breaking the fourth wall, shows with facial expression the emotion, something Rosenthal, due to his disfigurement, obviously can’t do.

This was really where the movie began to raise some important questions. We choose to watch beautiful people portrayed on screen because they’re nice to look at and we, as audiences, are almost transfixed by their faces. As a filmmaker myself I have always called this unexplainable phenomenon “some kind of gravitas.” You either have it or you don’t.

It’s not something that can be manufactured or borrowed; an interesting and expressive face that tells a story. This film shows us that sadly not everyone can express and emote facially, but does that make their story any less important to be shown on screen? Can we chalk this up to just being a part of human nature that we cannot fight, the desire to watch beauty as an expression, or can we blame society and culture for conditioning us this way?

Although this film raised some very important topics, it continued on its journey as a self-reflexive movie within a movie. Independently, this is an interesting risk to take; though I, personally, struggle with these types of films. It can be hard to separate the reality of what is happening to the characters from the movie version of what is happening to them.

In general these types of films tend to be very hard for audiences to consume, and, as a result, they typically seem more offbeat and funky to the filmmakers than to the audience who just end up confused, which is basically what happened to me while watching the film.

The choice did distract from the true meaning of the film, and separated this piece from being truly unique to something that was just kind of flimsy story wise, but I digress. It sent an important message overall, but could have done with better formatting.

Chained for Life is out now on VOD and Blu-ray with loads of extras.

Set largely in a New York hotel room in 2016, “The Misogynists,” from filmmaker Onur Turkel, follows people on various ends of the political spectrum on election night. The film focuses mainly on Trump supporter Cameron (Dylan Baker) a depraved, prostitute loving money man living in a 15,000 dollar a month hotel room post divorce, and his co-worker Baxter (Lou Jay Taylor) who has a liberal wife, Alice (Christine Campbell,) whom he is tempted to cheat on, and two young daughters.

The film is almost a marriage of the work of Aaron Sorkin, David Mamet’s famed “Glen Garry Glen Ross,” and Neil LaBute’s “In The Company of Men;” but it unfortunately never quite reaches the notes of anything as memorable or groundbreaking as the aforementioned.

Though Turkel cleverly crafts small pop-in characters that include feminist sex workers, a Mexican hotel worker with a penchant for cocaine, a slightly racist African-American hotel guest, and some additional obnoxious wealthy businessmen, they never really amount to much, and I never quite grasped what the film was ultimately trying to say other than “Trump is trying to ruin the world,” or “Trump supporters are crazy.”

The lone visual symbolism I noticed was Cameron’s TV playing everything in reverse, which I believe was the filmmakers’ way of showing us what he thought to be a political walk back that took place post 2016 election, erasing the progress liberals had made up until that point.

In the film, the reverse image on the TV transfixed anyone who looked at it, to me this also seemed to be a commentary on who Donald Trump is, a mesmerizing figure; though I’m unsure if this was the intent. American’s either loved or hated the polarizing candidate, Trump, but neither the lovers or the haters could look away from him.

It reminded me of when Joe Scarborough made a Trump bashing song in 2016 while he still thought Trump was a joke candidate; despite his effort to vilify him, he shone an accidental light on him, like all mainstream media did, inadvertently causing the mockery to work in reverse. Their efforts ultimately ended up making a spectacle of Trump, leading to his election in 2016, and subsequent inauguration in 2017.

I understand this film’s attempt to paint the large divide between Trump supporters and liberals, but it seemed one-sided, as most films with a political slant tend to be. Cameron’s creepy, misogynistic behavior says more about him as a person, and not much about him as a “typical Trump supporter,” which is what I think the film was trying to portray.

The habits and unhealthy behaviors of wealthy, obnoxious Caucasian business men are nothing new, and did not draw a congruent line between Cameron’s character and his political beliefs, so that angle, for me, ultimately fell flat. I asked myself, if the film is trying to show the new Trump political spectrum as dangerous, narcissistic, sociopathic, drug addled money men the script needed to dig deeper and explore a new framework.

Maybe the setting needed to move more out of the hotel room to get a point across that never came. This one may work as a stage play, but struggled as a feature.

Rating 2/5