Blogalorus

Cucalorus

So I didn’t make it down to the festival for two events, but I did go to one. I went to see the film The Toe Tactic. I have to say for all the great screenings that I wanted to check out, I really had trouble finding the time between school and work. That and I felt like absolute shat last week because of this head cold.
I can’t even say I really had interest in seeing the film I watched, more that it was the most convenient block for me to get to. Anyway, I guess I’ll give a brief summary and review of the film…

The Toe Tactic

The film takes place in New York and it is presumably modern day. The film’s main character, Mona Peek, is a girl who is between jobs, and lost in the wake of her father’s untimely death. The film uses animation to convey a story of the perfectly abnormal cause and effect scenarios that we, in the real world, wish could explain everything that happens to us: good or bad.

This was Emily Hubley’s, the animator, feature film debut. I have no real connection to her work and I don’t know if I’ve seen it in the past, but it was pretty interesting. It has that kind of third-grade kid doodling on notebook paper look to it.

In the animated realm a game was occurring between some dogs. It was basically a card matching game and once they had a match they could interact with Mona’s world, which effects the outcome of each event that happens in the film. Sometimes the dogs helped in her journey towards reconciliation with the memory of her father, sometimes they didn’t; in one scene a dog possesses (yes they are able to possess people when they get a card match) a homeless man and tries to mug Mona in order to get a bone from her. The bone is actually a surviving fragment from when they cremated her father… Pretty odd thing to carry around.

The story seemed a bit bipolar on if it was going to take a positive route or a negative one, and it basically ended right in the middle. Each character was a bit too complacent to offer up any sort of existential sentence they could. A couple of the dog scenes were particularly annoying, because they seemed to talk in circles around the audience (or maybe it was just me.) Some of it just seemed like hosh-posh nonsense for the sake of sounding smart and contemplative. Nawmean?

I’m not saying it was horrible, it just didn’t make much sense to me. The acting was mediocre and a bit strange or random at times, but again I think the film was reaching for something beyond my personal scope of enjoyment. In the end, Mona had to basically explain the plot in a dialogue, for me to get it; apparently she was forgetting what her dad was like when he was alive. We get a gushy crying scene as she admits this to her mom, the dogs say “good game” and the bird, who hosted the entire game, possesses an old man and waves to Mona as her and her mother drive off into the future.

This is completely off that topic, but I caught the Yes Men on CNN (I think it was CNN) this past weekend. It seems that they completely fabricated a false edition of the New York Times and it’s headline read “Iraq War Ends.” I forget exactly how many copies are in circulation, but I would love to get my hands on one and read some of the gag articles. Some linkage http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117995917.html?categoryId=2526&cs=1