As these things go, I was poking around, looking for something to watch, trying not to bother anyone and came across this thing about some girl who finds her dead dad’s audio tapes and goes about saving the world from something. The trailer looked cool and the setting looked nice (I’ve actually been there [Leadville, Colorado]) and the chick looked like the lead in one of my favorite end of the world [maybe] things called Coherence so I figured I wouldn’t get in anyone’s way or pester them if I gave it a look, so I did. This thing started off and I thought it was going to be pretty fucking awesome and the chick goes to her dead dad’s apartment and whoever did the set made it look like I lived there – what with the ephemera everywhere and the things set just right and in place and arranged and then she even looked through a telescope and peeped on some folks doing The Sex and something weird was going on on some beach and then this guy had no face and I was totally fucking hooked and figured I would come out and report how much I loved it and we’d sit around the campfire and share a few doobs and talk about it and get Rocky Mountain High {Leadville, Colorado] and then one day I will die and people can look through my own ephemera and witness the things I’ve saved and –

then it turns out that it was NOT her dead dad but her hipster, Millennial girl friend who must have somehow been collecting and saving things in this small town in the Colorado mountains for any number of years and that really kind of —- **** —- ^^^^ — |||| —-> gave me a long face and a sour puss. But, being the stellar type of person that I am, I got over that and pressed on and then it turned out that it was NOT her dead dad’s audio tapes of his calming voice from beyond the grave but some hipster mixtapes her girl friend recorded on an old tape recording device and then hid at various locations around town, like the one in the grocery store. I don’t know about where you live but if I were to follow her nicely drawn out map and find the grocery store in the snow covered town and start looking for a cassette tape, it might take me ten years and not several minutes. Oh, and she was wearing a dead bear skin, complete with bear skull (I guess to keep warm). And carrying around a living turtle.

But still I pressed on further, thinking that one day, these notes will somehow appear among my ephemera and my fucking OCD said “You will finish what you started, you fucking son of a bitch.” So, amid the nonsensical artistic moves in animated sequences, curious CGI aliens (?) from another dimension and irritating (to me) music from local bands who probably have city tours in or around Leadville, Colorado, they actually did something kind of neat

Here I’ll take a break and give you some lovely Film Miasma reconnaissance (and no, I would never be able to free-hand spell that).

A few years ago I read a book that I absolutely loved called The People of Paper by a person named Salvador Plascencia. In it, the author is having a hard time in life and writing about these people who begin to realize that they are characters in his novel and eventually rebel against him. I thought it was incredibly creative, I loved it, like I just said, and one day I went out looking to see if he’d written anything else yet. In doing so, I discovered that this was not the first time this type of narrative construction had been done so I again – had a sour puss but still stand by it to this day.

Here’s a plug for his book and that’s not just a drawing of me and my fucking balding head. To note, it would also be unlikely for someone to draw me to be holding a child.

The blathering point of all of that shit is that – if there’s one cool thing in here (while also not something completely new) there’s a sequence in here where, our heroin, after somehow finding an audio tape in an abandoned library, is listening to the strange and mysterious signal when it causes her to travel outside of the movie and into the movie production. It’s not really that long of an event and would have made me happier if they had explored that a little more but – I didn’t make this goddammed thing so who am I to talk.

I suppose, if you’re super curious you can go read all of those impressive IMDB reviews of this and supposed talks with the director of this thing and his melancholic journey to make a film for him if you really wanted to. Why not? If you want to spend people’s money and make a movie about things that only you get and makes you happy, go for it, bro. As for me, I think I outgrew this movie about 25 years ago.

Filed under: AT LEAST THEY TRIED