5/10
Cute but unfortunately not viable.
21 March 2010
Usually I'm very wary and skeptical towards these pseudo-artistic and experimental new cult movies, but this thing played at a local film festival and was scheduled in between two other movies I really wanted to see, so I just had to hold my seat. It's not like I regret this or anything, because "The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle" is an occasionally very fresh and charmingly creative Indie Sci-Fi/comedy, but it's unmemorable. Writer/director David Russo clearly bursts with brilliant and innovative ideas, but so far he still lacks experience, support and craftsmanship. You can tell straight away that that Russo prefers putting time in crazy gimmicks and eccentric visual effects rather than properly developing the story and characters. The opening credits sequence for example, depicting the long journey of a message in a bottle through the seas & rivers, is truly beautiful but irrelevant. It almost feels as if David Russo had a handful of innovative and elaborated artsy scenes in his head and then just quickly built a full feature length movie around them. That's a shame, because also the main plot outline shows great potential but remains largely unexplored. Dory, a young data accountant with a strange passion for studying the different religions, has a very bad day at the office and loses his job after a verbal outburst against a female colleague. He then accepts a low-profile janitor job in the office building of a marketing research company, working with a bunch of unconventional colleagues, like the toilet-art obsessed musician OC and the nymphomaniac couple Ethyl and Methyl. They are unaware that the sneaky marketing lady Tracy and her sleazy CEO are using the janitors as guinea pigs to test a new type of addictive cookies, which they leave lying around after office closing hours. The cookies quickly cause the janitors to suffer from outrageous hallucinations and stomach pains, but for the men there's another awkward little side effect. They're "impregnated" and rectally deliver some sort of bright blue fish-critter with a very short life-expectancy. The film is at least ten times weirder than the plot sounds already, but I personally would have preferred a more detailed exploration of the interesting themes like male pregnancy and unauthorized testing. "The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle" is full of redundant and delirious computer effects, like accelerated images and colorful hallucinations, and although they are neatly accomplished and nice to look at, they don't form an added value and eventually just gave me a headache. It's an interesting film, and David Russo is definitely a guy to keep an eye on, but sadly this isn't the alternative festival sleeper hit it could have been. The wide variety in musical is great, however, and the cast members (including a few familiar faces like Natasha Lyonne and Vince Vieluf) give away plausible and very dedicated performances.
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