Alright! This was what I wanted to see! An independent voice that I had never heard of... making a movie so wonderfully goddamn quirky and fun and infused at every level with heaps of good honest to goodness geekiness at a level equatible to that of the great geek filmmakers. Turns out that the film is PROMEDIO ROJO from Chile... and the filmmaker is a 21 year old masturbation addicted blessed savior from seriousness... Nicolas Lopez!
This is the first film at SXSW that I'll gladly show to anyone, once I have it on DVD, as a test in regards to them being "cool" in my estimation. You can tell that Lopez wears his influences on his hefty shoulders. Like he said at the Q&A afterwards the film was entirely inspired by CITY OF GOD and MARIA FULL OF GRACE. Before cackling like a maniac. You see, Nicolas Lopez... he's there to entertain. He was born in 1983 and all the best movies he got to see in Chile at those young impressionable years had a number after it. The film he saw that made him want to make films? BACK TO THE FUTURE 2. And when he saw it, he had no idea there was a "prequel". He grew up with the great Spanish comedies like Santiago Segura's TORRENTE films and Alex de la Iglesia's DIA DE LA BESTIA, LA COMMUNIDAD, PERDITA DURANGO... all the way up to films like 800 BALAS. He's wildly irreverant and his film is everybit a piece of him.
The film is a story about a socially inept geek in high school that loves movies and comics, but has chosen comics to be his life's work. He will write and illustrate his comic about his enormously grotesque self-effacing fatass superhero who fights evil bastards like GYM MAN that tries to turn women into anorexic skeletons that a real man like me would break in a midnight roll. The film has the geek honesty of a Kevin Smith film, but with the cinematic tour de force of an Alex De La Iglesia. You'll have scenes that make you want to piss yourself followed by scenes of brutal humiliation and degradation that moves past laughs to emphatic trauma, but all with heart.
It's wild and broad! There's masturbation, virgin deflowering, Boba Fett making out with a TIE-Bomber, Superheroes, sadomasachistic nurse fixation, geek humiliation, angry mobs, attempted death by toilet, the most tender romantic scene put to film in the midst of dry-heaving and hurling, soccer, comic book guy, comic pop-art sensibilities, retarded fey boy named after potatoes as a tie-in opportunity for his Dad's Asian market trading corporation, really hot teenage asses and tits, cum-shots... and then there's all the funny stuff! This movie has everything a growing disenfranchised whiney geek would know from personal trauma! It's fantastic!
Now - for you Austinites - there's one more screening of the film at 6pm today at the Alamo Drafthouse South! I can not possibly recommend this film enough. The director is one of the most genuinely hilarious madmen I've ever seen at the Drafthouse. During the Q&A - a Chilean Austinite began speaking to him in Spanish. Here was his translation: "Ok folks, ok. She is saying that there is a bomb in the theater. That soon you will all die. Something about Long Life To Al Qaeda! Ok everyone, there is a policeman in the theater! Sir - Arrest those two. She is a terrorist and has been molesting the boy sitting next to her!" Now - first off, imagine that being said by a man that at the start of the evening asked everyone that hates the film to spit on him, especially his balls. He was quite disappointed by the lack of spit on his balls, because he must lose weight before he can do it on his own.
On top of being a hilarious filmmaker, he had the audience crying laughing before, during and after the film. Here's the poster I saw that made me go see the film. Check out the quote from Guillermo Del Toro! To see trailers and more go to PromedioRojo.Com!
