horsebeaverfoxman

I like Jennette McCurdy and Nathan Kress. But God almighty is this awful. A newlywed couple runs someone over by accident and decides to bury the body and tell nobody. Like.... okay. On paper that's stupid. And if you give it five seconds of thought that's stupid. But in practice... it's really stupid. They then go from one social encounter to the next, meet someone who immediately clocks that they're murderers, and then they kill that person. It's not interesting. It's not funny. It's just Terrence Malick's "Badlands" with more blood and it's only 14 minutes long.

Jennette McCurdy is a great performer here, but overall there's just no tone struck here, no style, only empty flourishes like shocking jump cuts, a murder counter on the screen, lots of spraying blood, and intense sound effects.

It's a disgustingly L. A. movie too. And I love that they go to Zion but clearly are just in the wood somewhere in Griffith Park or whatever. At the end of the movie, it's like, this sucked, but at least it has nothing to say and is boring as hell.

An experimental exploration of the world of textiles, their manufacturing, their sale, and their consumption. It's not really worth sitting down, having a tea, and paying close attention to, because that's not the sort of purpose experimental docs like this serve. "The Grand Bizarre" is best suited for a screening room in a museum, where its 61 delightfully frizzy epileptic minutes can run on loop for days on end, where you can pop in, sit down, watch a few minutes of it until you get the point, and then leave. It's a diversion of a film, but in that context, it's really tremendous.

Especially because it's basically a music video that goes on for an hour. Put this on at a house party and dance around to it. The music slaps.

A couple of highlights:

• A surprise swastika! Formed by textiles tied to the ends of the blades of a ceiling fan in motion.
• Surprise "Rhythm of the Night," continuing the trend of "Rhythm of the Night" appearing in every movie in the late 2010s.
• The only film I've seen that ends with a sneeze, cut to black.

None of these are spoilers. This is an experimental documentary, not "Inception."

The mark of a comedy is the six-laugh rule. For a short, if it gets two laughs, I think it's done its job. "Five Minutes" has wonderful performances from Rob Benedict and Bre Blair, but the material veers more toward cringe than proper comedy.

Cringe comedy is the most subjective form of an already subjective mode of storytelling. It plays directly off our personal experiences. Anyone can watch Buster Keaton and get the jokes, but a significant chunk of people who might watch "Bridesmaids" or any Judd Apatow production won't laugh because they lack the experience to relate to the awkward situations. This is the central issue of "Five Minutes" -- I know the short is comedic, but it didn't make me laugh.

Justine Bateman's short truly looks good, and she gets good performances from her cast. But I'm not a parent -- the material doesn't do it for me. I understand WHY someone might think the film is funny, but to me, it isn't. I appreciate it more for its subtext about sensitivity and modern attitudes toward censorship, and most of all for its indictment of adults who don't know how to listen.