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5.0 out of 5 stars
demo noir, June 21, 2009
This review is from: GRRF: The Sound of Suicide Postponement (DVD)
I have seen them do a different performance live. It had lego video game characters on a floating island with a gas station, extremely funny. This one is from a different script but the same approach, doing a written play in front of an audience that
1) looks exactly like a software demo from a guest lecturer, but is crafted to go really badly
2) the auditorium of college students isn't told that it's fake
That description doesn't give you the full picture though. My favortie play is Glengarry Glen Ross, about the desperate office guys trying to sell real estate over the phone. If you can picture what it would be like to do Glengarry Glen Ross in a real office filled with other employees and not tell those other employees that you are faking, that's what this is like. Like the other reviewer said, that hoax part makes it like Borat and Bruno so if you like those you might also like this. The writing here is better, IMO. Don't get me wrong, the guy who does Borat is an amazing actor. This is much more of a dramatic hoax. Like a long bank heist, done for real. I agree that nothing else is similar. If the creator of GRRF ever reads this, dude, your puppet videos rock, keep doing more bizarre Dobo stuff. People doing puppet videos these days either take them too seriously or make them annoyingly stupid. You have got the gift of being both hilarious and serious with a puppet at the same time.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Intense and totally unique, June 15, 2009
This review is from: GRRF: The Sound of Suicide Postponement (DVD)
Imagine an intense, bizarre, puppet-filled (more on that later) existential theater piece taking place in front of a bunch of jaded college students. Now imagine that the students have NO CLUE that it's a theater piece, and they think it's real. And the theater piece is constructed to put them through a slow-roasting hell of confusion. This movie revolves around the actual footage of this stealth theater piece taking place (they filmed it live in a classroom, telling the students they were "documenting" it for a campus budget review something-something). Then they begin with statistics of student deaths-by-automobile on campus, and present a proposal for mandatory student GPS tracking. Where it goes from there is just insane, insane, insane, but done totally deadpan. As a result, the students in the classroom totally believe this is a real guest lecture from a real software engineer. There is nothing else like this. The only thing that is similar is perhaps the Sacha Baron Cohen stuff, but that's for laughs. This is done for audience....cognitive dissonance? Or maybe imagine "The Yes Men" if their hoaxes were written for them by an intense playwright, like David Mamet. It ends up being funny, mostly because the ultra-serious lead guy keeps lacing the performance with puppet videos from his laptop (in order to "give everyone something to watch" while they untangle the fake "tech problems"), which definitely pushes it all into some kind of absurdist realm that hoaxing has never been before. The bonus clips on the DVD show how crazy these performances have gotten (professor eruptions, students in horror, et cetera). The fictional movie part that leads up to the live performance is good (3.5 stars), but not as good as the performance itself (5 stars). The bonus vids on the DVD (puppet shorts plus previous performances) push this into 5-star territory.
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