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Capsule review: ‘Little Fish, Strange Pond’
Matthew Modine and Collum Blue (“Smallville”) are the protagonists in this toxic dark comedy, and they are very bad men. They are also loquacious to the point of logorrheic. Strolling the vivid neighborhoods of Los Angeles, they spew rippling streamers of allusive, quasi-philosophical banter about life, death, the nature of good and evil and the like. They are the Socratic colloquies of sick minds.
Or make that mind. Because Modine’s dapper fellow, Mr. Jack, is really the embodied conscience of Blue’s character, a psychopathic murderer who goes by Sweet Stephen. Mr. Jack is there to mull Stephen’s repugnant moral choices, lend an ear and some intellectual perspective. The duo, tangled in endless gab, seems to be equally modeled on “Waiting for Godot’s” Vladmir and Estragon and “Pulp Fiction’s” Jules and Vincent.
But the comparisons are much too flattering. This garbled mess — directed with an eye for the arch by Gregory Dark and written with an ear for the pretentious by Robert Dean Klein — is too smug and unfunny to meet its outsize ambitions.
It wants to be a high-minded promenade, leavened by bizarre laughs and violent shocks, taking place in an equilibrium-rattling alternate universe that includes wacky porn shops, a Jerry Springer-like tabloid show and a pathological cop (Adam Baldwin). But it can’t digest it all. The result is sour incoherence.
“Little Fish, Strange Pond” screens at 10:30 p.m. Saturday at Texas Spirit Theater and at 7 p.m. Monday at Alamo Lake Creek.
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By Phil
February 6, 2011 10:09 AM | Link to this
The bait and switch marketing was, of course, a despicable thing to pull. But that should clue you in on what a stinker this film is. They knew this film was so terrible, they didn’t release it until they figured they could trick people looking for another funny Zack G movie. All that aside, and putting away my disappointment hoping for a funny film, let me say that I actually do enjoy a good thought provoking dark indie film. But while this show tries to be… it isn’t. It’s slow, drawn out, and it makes you fall asleep. I’m floored by the good reviews I’ve seen on this utter piece of garbage. Obviously the good reviews are by pretentious twits with inflated egos that always think they’re the only ones that “get it.” There’s nothing artsy or enjoyable in this film at all. It’s a total waste of time.