A cornucopia of what I call "folding."
Here is the setup: we have our standard inner representative, a detective. He is obsessed with understanding the world, so as to understand the "Darwin Effect:" people who do stuff so dumb they kill themselves, thereby taking themselves out of the gene pool. In basic shape, it is the standard noir form.
As the story proceeds, he becomes himself one of these folk, providing some amusing episodes. By my count, that is two folds. Along the way, he is accompanied by a woman: part buddy, part love interest and part person-to-explain-to.
Not content to stop there, this filmmaker piles it on and on.
The thing is framed as a documentary. There is a film student making his thesis film by following our hero. He is acknowledged frequently, but at the end the film slides into the disembodied camera we are used to seeing outside of the story. We often have the situation of the film we see, that has the camera within it, watching our guy watch things on the web.
The detective has a second obsession: to catch a serial killer loose in San Francisco. This folds in an entirely different direction. The killer is a frustrated beat poet, so has confabulated a life as killer, "writing" on his acts. This actually makes sense. We have Lawrence Ferlinghetti appearing on screen as part of the detecting! The motive of the killer is teased out from a beat philosophy in an amazingly literate way.
But the folding doesn't even stop there!
Some of these Darwin Award episodes are possible urban legends; a key attraction of the Darwin awards website is that they verify (from news accounts) that the episodes really happened. A TeeVee show, mythbusters, checks others in dramatic ways to see if they were physically possible. The mythbusters hosts appear here as characters.
One final neat fold. Our detective has a theory that the Darwin award candidates are that way because they are second children, and that they are trying to better their older sibling. This is elaborated a bit as the award candidates are proposed not as merely lethally stupid, but as living life to the fullest. There is an earnestness in the second child syndrome that the actor playing our detective has. He actually gets this across.
But he is played by a man who has a much more successful older brother. A surprising number of the other important characters are also played by actors in an identical situation. Its pretty cool, but has been overlooked and not mentioned in any remarks I have read on this film.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
Here is the setup: we have our standard inner representative, a detective. He is obsessed with understanding the world, so as to understand the "Darwin Effect:" people who do stuff so dumb they kill themselves, thereby taking themselves out of the gene pool. In basic shape, it is the standard noir form.
As the story proceeds, he becomes himself one of these folk, providing some amusing episodes. By my count, that is two folds. Along the way, he is accompanied by a woman: part buddy, part love interest and part person-to-explain-to.
Not content to stop there, this filmmaker piles it on and on.
The thing is framed as a documentary. There is a film student making his thesis film by following our hero. He is acknowledged frequently, but at the end the film slides into the disembodied camera we are used to seeing outside of the story. We often have the situation of the film we see, that has the camera within it, watching our guy watch things on the web.
The detective has a second obsession: to catch a serial killer loose in San Francisco. This folds in an entirely different direction. The killer is a frustrated beat poet, so has confabulated a life as killer, "writing" on his acts. This actually makes sense. We have Lawrence Ferlinghetti appearing on screen as part of the detecting! The motive of the killer is teased out from a beat philosophy in an amazingly literate way.
But the folding doesn't even stop there!
Some of these Darwin Award episodes are possible urban legends; a key attraction of the Darwin awards website is that they verify (from news accounts) that the episodes really happened. A TeeVee show, mythbusters, checks others in dramatic ways to see if they were physically possible. The mythbusters hosts appear here as characters.
One final neat fold. Our detective has a theory that the Darwin award candidates are that way because they are second children, and that they are trying to better their older sibling. This is elaborated a bit as the award candidates are proposed not as merely lethally stupid, but as living life to the fullest. There is an earnestness in the second child syndrome that the actor playing our detective has. He actually gets this across.
But he is played by a man who has a much more successful older brother. A surprising number of the other important characters are also played by actors in an identical situation. Its pretty cool, but has been overlooked and not mentioned in any remarks I have read on this film.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.