Adhering to the maxim to write what one knows,
writer-director James Westby’s Film
Geek is born of a lifetime love of movies and a dozen years of
grueling, videostore-fed experience. Rather than turn that catalogue of
knowledge into a recapitulation or homage, though, 2004’s Film Geek focuses instead on
its hapless, socially inept title character — the wounded, insecure inner child
of every cinephile — and his fumblings toward more normalized human communication
and interaction.
 lives by himself in<br />
near-hermetic fashion, and works at a videostore, where he drives customers and<br />
coworkers alike crazy with chirpy protestations against non-letterboxed titles<br />
and all manner of rambling, digressive monologues. He also runs an online blog<br />
that no one visits, where he posts sprawling essays on a variety of subjects,<br />
including why John Carpenter’s <i style=)
The
Thing should be classified as classic sci-fi and not horror. When
he’s fired from his job, Scotty is devastated. One day, though, he meets pretty
downtown hipster Niko (Tyler Gannon), and begins an awkward crawl out of his introverted
shell. Granted, she’s the requisite arty chick with the jerky ex-boyfriend, and
she pulls Scotty in without even trying, so unmindful is he of dismissive lines
like, “I guess that’s one thing I like about you — you’re obviously not out to
impress anyone with appearance.”
Personally, even as a big film fan, I find the
set-up of such movie nerd stuff almost always painful, not just in Film Geek but in other movies
too, like Rolfe Kanefsky’s Tomorrow
By Midnight or the documentary Cinemania. It’s not necessarily that such material hits
too close to home (I swear, I love comedy of self-evisceration far too much). It’s just that
it’s boring. In order for the minutiae to be realistic and the story to
establish a sense of convincing gravitas or comedy, a good bit of the
references have to be suitably arcane and/or irrelevant, which rather quickly
leads to tedium. Once you get that stuff out of the way here, though, there’s rather
a lot to like about the pleasantly low-budget Film Geek, including Malkasian’s performance, which, in
its nasally loquaciousness, really nails the way socially inelegant people
invite uncomfortableness in others through their own nattering obliviousness. (One
big qualm, though: if Scotty’s such a stickler for the preservation of
directorial intent and presentation of image, why is his apartment littered
with videos
instead of DVDs?) When it comes time for Scotty to really articulate the escape
of film — and hence his obsession — you feel both his pain and his pleasure.
Packaged in a regular Amray case, Film Geek is presented
(ironically) in a full-screen format. Included as supplemental extras are a
photo gallery, Westby’s short film The
Auteur, cast and crew biographies, outtakes and a four-minute
making-of featurette which includes interviews with Westby, producer Byrd
McDonald and frequent Westby collaborator Malkasian, who comes off as weird and
distant. Art imitating life or life imitating art — who’s to say? B (Movie)
B- (Disc)
