Sword of Digestive Calmness (2009)
Running time: 108 minutes. Written, produced and directed by Tristan Newcomb. Executive Producers: John Battin and Cy Cary. Associate Producers: Simon Quiroz, Roberto Rosales and Michael Trigillio. Cast: Tristan Newcomb (as all the puppets), Chester Sharit, Andrew Wilkes, Sarah Sharit, Simon Quiroz, Roberto Rosales, Max Bunker, Sarah Esper, Christopher Kong Lam.
Where to get it: Amazon DVD / Amazon Video-On-Demand
How to even begin to untangle this cinematic puppet slaw? The plot(s): Skiddles, the doggie puppet host of a cable TV sex advice show from 2005, Live Hot Puppet Chat, who is almost entirely food-allergic and obsessed with dietary purity, decides to finally act on his dream of making a new movie version of the King Arthur legend because, in his view, all the ones that have been made so far are too noisy, with too much clanging of metal things – a sound which is clearly not soothing to one’s digestion. So he wants to make the first digestion-friendly version.
Alas, he has no money to do this, and the only way he can get any funding at all for this project is to cast the other puppet members of that once-popular sex advice cable show in his King Arthur epic – making his project, in a sense, the first Live Hot Puppet Chat movie. However, even with that compromise, the amount of funding he gets is so small, he can’t even afford to bring the whole cast together to one location. The only way he can get them to participate is to have them do all their separate movie parts in front of green screens at their various locations, hoping it can all be stitched together in post-production.
He has sent each of these puppets a copy of the script – but these other puppets end up generally ignoring or subverting the script, doing the movie the way they want to do it – which sometimes, evidently, is a different movie idea altogether.
It gets worse. Skiddles doesn’t even have the money to hire a real video editor. He has each cast member send the tape of their green-screened performance directly to a post-production house in rural China; it’s the only way he can afford to have the movie completed. Skiddles also sends these Chinese video editors a ton of written instructions as to what gets put where and in what order, but tries to do this mostly with drawings, numbers and arrows, since it seems somewhat unclear whether or not any of the folks putting his movie together understand much (if any) English. In fact, Skiddles tries to cover for this possibility by lacing his own lead role in the movie with numerous apologies and desperate justifications of his production woes right into the camera. As such, this movie might contain more direct apologies to the audience than any other feature-length cinema property in the history of filmmaking.
Sword of Digestive Calmness is the “completed” movie that Skiddles receives in the mail from China. When you watch it, you’re watching the movie he saw fresh from the padded envelope.
Now – can something this dysfunctional be funny, if so many layers of self-subversion are sliding over and across each other at once? Why even subject an audience to such an enigmatic labyrinth of comedic wreckage?
*cough* The usual route for comedy movies to take – when they’re hijacking characters from a TV show – is to have the characters expound their trademark catchphrases and wackiness in a nauseatingly-bland movie format structure. To put it more plainly, look at all the clever little character sketches on SNL over the years – and all the times they took those characters onto the big screen, stuffing and scrunching and stretching that once-likable comedy nugget from TV into an overblown, utterly stupid, gotta-save-the-hospital-or-stop-the-wedding-or-win-the-talent-contest movie heap, with E-Z-Cheez plot devices fresh from Hollywood’s hinder. Those characters might have been so damned interesting and subversive if taken to their outer limits – but instead, they chained them to the manure pile with those braindead Robert McKee manacles of paint-by-numbers script structure and “gotta have easily understood conflict” and “gotta have simple human interest” and all the other cineplex cheat-sheet bullet-points that made the SNL movies genetically identical to nearly everything else the studios make, i.e. pools of insultingly stupid and overly familiar goo for the “average ticket buyer” to go squat themselves in after they set the DVR for Jersey Shore and the latest Jim Belushi sitcom. Bitter? Damn right Lumalin is bitter…
So, partly to avoid falling into that same crater and landing on top of all those SNL corpses, and partly to see how far the conventions of comedy could be stretched, Sword of Digestive Calmness has a movie premise that would guarantee Lumalin’s first feature-length puppet movie would not only be inherently surreal and one-of-a-kind (in a disastrous sort of way), but would also NOT run the risk of being misidentified as just another damned Muppets/Sesame Street spoof.
A final bit of advice: love it or loathe it, keep watching until the last eighteen minutes. The final puppet contributor, Dobo, has a very different movie up his sleeve – something like a self-obsessed stream-of-consciousness Twilight Zone episode. It became a rather prophetic eighteen minutes of cinema, too, because, little did we suspect…that same wide-eyed Dobo would become the inimitable, anxious, hallucinated childhood anti-celebrity of Lumalin’s next two flicks.
