Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Movie Chat: The Puffy Chair

The Puffy Chair

I saw this after Funny Ha Ha, which I liked more but related to less. In fact, some of my hedging on this one has to do with my suspicion that I like this movie for basically narcissistic reasons: it featured lots of moments, exchanges, scenarios that I could recognize from my own life (as opposed to Funny Ha Ha which featured moments, etc. that I could recognize as being part of the lives of other people that I know). The quest structure/symbolic level is a little bit too overt (even though the movie explicitly acknowledges this), but there are lots of great little bits of business that make up for it. The actors generally do a good job of putting the material over. My favorite exchange: "What are you doing?" "You have my Peter Gabriel CDs." In context, it's pretty funny.

I was kind of disappointed at all the negative customer reviews for this at Netflix. Netflix members seemed to groove on Funny Ha Ha, but the handheld camerawork on display here really turned a lot of people off.

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