A Bona-Fide Film Review!

My friend John came over to visit Red and I the other night. He walked into the apartment, sidled up to the bar, and quickly poured himself a tall scotch, which he downed. As he poured another, he said, “Help yourself. You’re going to need a drink.”

I found this odd, as it is my bar, but John is not one to question when he is visibly shaken, so I simply muttered, “Thanks,” and filled my glass. “What’s up?” I asked, dreading the answer like a 16 year old virgin dreads prom-night.

“This,” he said as he slid a DVD across the bar.

I glanced down, fearful that I was, once again, about to be exposed to homosexual otter porn. I was pleasantly surprised, however, when the cover of the DVD did not reveal photographs of colossal and hirsute members, but was flat black with a title written in white letters.

Rejected

I put it in, pressed play, and the following words flashed across my screen:

In the spring of 1999, the Family Learning Channel commissioned animator Don Hertzfeldt to produce promotional segments for their network. The cartoons were completed in five weeks. The Family Learning Channel rejected all of them upon review, and they were never aired...

Then I found myself face to face with a cute little guy, unblinkingly holding a spoon twice his size and standing in front of a very small bowl of something. Just as I started to think, "Poor guy, his spoon is too big!” he announced to the world at large, “My spoon is too big!”

I took a drink of scotch.

After a giant banana walked on-screen and, just to make sure I knew, said “I am a banana!” I finished my glass and had to pause the film in order to get a refill.

Just to recap, we’re now 30 seconds into the film and I am halfway to getting sauced simply through drinking as a means of escape and self-preservation. I imagine that the urge to drink generated by this cartoon is strong enough that, if I had been unlucky enough to be holding a bottle of liquid Drain-o when the film started, I would not be with you here today.

I don’t want to ruin the cartoon for you, gentle reader, so I will stop telling you anything more about the, for lack of a better word, plot and simply give you the statistics that I calculated upon the films completion:

Running time: Less than 10 minutes
Number of laughs: 97
Number of wide-eyed stares where I had no idea how to react: 4,230,911
Volume of scotch consumed while viewing: 32 oz.
Number of times I laughed so hard that scotch came out my nose: 1 (once is enough)
Number of times I have repeated lines from the film since I saw it Monday night: 208
Number of times Red has said “Quit saying that” after I’ve repeated a line: 207
Number of times I have looked at her like she had maggots crawling out of her eyeballs and said the line again: 1 (once is enough on this one, too)
Number of times I have watched the film since the original viewing: 4
Number of times I have pleasured myself while watching the film: 0
What you should do RIGHT NOW: Go buy it, rent it, borrow it, steal it, anything you have to in order to watch it. NOW!

I am a consumer whore.