Sunday, February 21, 2016

Spaghetti Man (2015) Oxford Film festival

SPAGHETTI MAN would have been a great sketch on SNL or some other comedy show, but as a feature film it is pushing it. Actually it would have been a better film had the main character been a less of a douchebag slacker jerk, but that’s not my call.

The most basic of plots has our hero fumbling to find a job. He’s fired from a pizza job because he eats the pizza on the way, he can’t get a job because his resume is written on torn out page of a spiral notebook in bright blue marker. When he eats a bowl of spaghetti that was microwaved oddly he is suddenly able to throw spaghetti from his hands like Spiderman flings webs. (He also pees spaghetti but that’s a stupid joke that dies on the vine.) After a trip to the doctors prove useless he stumbles upon the idea of becoming a masked crime fighter for hire.

And that’s about it. We get some variations on the theme and there are some plot twists but it never really rises above that level. I just watched the film and stared at the screen for an hour and occasionally doodled in my notebook. I say I watched it for an hour because an hour in the screener I was given stopped working. After failing to get it to work I started to email about getting a new screener---and then I realized two things: first I didn’t have it in me to watch the film over again from the beginning but secondly and more importantly I really care what happened in the remaining half hour. As it was I was only watching the film out of reviewers obligation, Had I been doing it on my own time I would have shut it off fifteen minutes in and never mentioned it.

I know it sounds like I hate the film, I don’t. Its reasonably well made, it has some good performances. It has some good stuff in it- but over all it’s just meh. This is the sort of film that you’d watch on a night where there was nothing you’d want to watch and you’d begrudging watch it until to you found something else to watch and never come back to it.

Now that I’ve reviewed it I never have to come back to it

For tickets and more information go here

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