Tag Archives: Kentucker Audley

Saturday Matinee: Sylvio

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By Bill Arceneaux

Source: Film Threat

Perhaps doomed to go unnoticed on first viewing, there are lovely and thoughtful moments strung throughout Sylvio, made up of slow gazes and floating / falling particles. Dust in the sun light, bubbles in a fish tank and snow on a street corner provide temporary reprieve from reality and unexpected bursts of clarity for lead gorilla Sylvio (played by himself) and new friend Al (co-director Kentucker Audley). These short bits of time are first used to express the doldrums of unfulfilled life – via a water cooler and kitschy toys first – but as the scenarios shift, so go these bits, matching emotion for emotion. Most impressive and done with little to no dialogue at all, we gather what we need to know and ought to feel about a stone faced gorilla and his exhausted buddy.

Movies like Sylvio are, in their own way, slapstick. Not in the traditional Three Stooges manner, mind you, but in a more subdued way. A more atmospheric and emotional way. Silently slapstick, I’d say, in the way that I consider Alex Ross Perry’s The Color Wheel a little slapstick. In that film, this goof genre is mostly rude, crude and blunt. For Sylvio, which wears its heart on its sleeve, the funny is not when our hero breaks stuff on cue, but when the absurdly silly meets the dramatically genuine. It’s an almost tragi-comedy of over exaggerated clumsy like circumstances. It reminds me of (despite the stone face reference made a paragraph ago) Harold Lloyd, the everyman involved in the impossible. Our lovable and heartfelt gorilla matches the man with the glasses by being a hopeless romantic who is sensitive and capable of anything. A double bill with Grandma’s Boy might be in the cards.

The plot is, to boil it down, UHF from the point of view of an office clerk version of Stanley Spadowski. Which is, to boil it down again, brilliant. The World’s Greatest Janitor and TV Star trophy holder isn’t as disillusioned when we first meet him in the Weird Al movie, and is certainly more flat out ridiculous than Sylvio’s Sylvio, but he’s just as childlike and fantastical. Being a gorilla, living alone and greeted after work by depressing microwavable dinners, Sylvio’s one outlet of release comes in the form of his puppet show short films, The Quiet Times with Herbert Herpels. This is no Spadowski’s Clubhouse – more “Moral Orel” and Anomalisa. His shows are hilarious on one hand, giving us an inner id that we wouldn’t expect from an everyday working animal. On the other hand, these segments provide terrifically innocent insight into Sylvio’s background, his hopes, his dreams and his worries. They’re enough to bring about teary eyes.

I was at first concerned that, given the nature of Kentucker Audley’s video essays for The Talkhouse (which are great), Sylvio may be some sort of joke or prank, poking fun at the themes within and the audience without. An Andy Kaufman routine, essentially. But, thinking on it, I came to the conclusion that this doesn’t matter. Kaufman’s comedy was outlandish and utilized trickery for sure, but also came from true places deep inside of himself. He meant no ill will. I don’t believe this movie is a play on our minds, but even if it were, it comes from a good place and would only enrich our collective experience. Yes, it’s a film based on a Vine act. Yes, an app famous gorilla can make do more than perform tricks. No, the slight of hand here is not at our expense nor is it exploiting anyone. Sylvio is hilarious and deeply kind, granting us an adaptation more depthful than expected from internet stardom.     

We could all stand to have the kind of spaced out observational moments of self reflection that Sylvio so nicely performs. Be it stars or rain drops, zoning out American Beauty style, even for a few seconds, might be enough to make one appreciate the little things. Or the bigger thing… am I spinning out of my head? Could Sylvio be such a perfectly constructed trick on critics like me, making us miss the forest for the trees? DID Andy Kaufman fake his own death? Nah. Perception is reality, and intent is usually irrelevant. No matter what, Sylvio gave me belly laughs and evocative feels. Thus far, it is my favorite film of the year. A most disturbing year, but still.

Sylvio (2017): Directors: Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley / Writers: Albert Birney, Kentucker Audley and Meghan Doherty / Stars: Sylvio Bernardi (as himself), Kentucker Audley, Tallie Medel

Watch Sylvio on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/watch/video/16458238

Saturday Matinee: Strawberry Mansion

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2021’s “Strawberry Mansion” & The Life-Stealing Future Becoming Real: Film Review

By Caleb R. Newton

Source: Captured Howls

“Strawberry Mansion,” a film both written and directed by Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley that had its world premiere in 2021, delivers a rich, poignant, and gripping perspective on what it actually means to live in a world like we’ve constructed for ourselves in this age.

The movie is set in the near future, but everything seems designed in such a way to highlight a continuity with the present — and the past. Although here, the government imposes taxes on items the mind creates in dreams, the world doesn’t look like a dystopian hellscape. It pretty much just resembles the exact environment in which humanity can be found now — though I’ve yet to see a chicken shake offered for sale anywhere and might recoil if I did.

James Preble, a main character in “Strawberry Mansion” who was portrayed by Audley, dresses in a fashion evocative of past styles. Viewing dreams had by another main character, we often see that other figure — Arabella Isadora, played by Penny Fuller — as a substantially younger version of herself, captured instead by actress Grace Glowicki. (To accommodate the tax regime, dreams are recorded.)

Does Advertising Care About Us?

And then we get to “Buddy.” Linas Phillips’s Buddy, as he’s known, appears time and again in dreams had by Audley’s character, and this initially unexplained figure is often, quite simply, hawking wares. In a later scene in which Preble and the younger Isadora are trying to escape Buddy’s presence in a dream world, which follows a revelation that Buddy is essentially serving as an avatar for the in-dream advertising ambitions of major corporations, he starts multiplying, appearing again and again alongside himself in a scene that actually captures with startling precision what it’s like to live here.

Think about it. How many ads do you see on a daily basis? On the internet, where reliance on such an advertising presence has been made mandatory in some cases for financial survival, or on television, where it’s much the same, these ads persist. Head outside, and you might see a billboard (or five). While New York City has a lot to offer, one of the tourist traps is Times Square, and if you actually look around in that area of Manhattan, it’s ad after ad after ad.

While it would be ignorant to categorically dismiss advertising as immoral, it would also be ignorant to simply gloss over its effects and the possibility for nefarious manipulation. It’s a massive global industry. How does it actually affect us? Actual human desire, meaning the things that might emerge from nothing but individual ambition — is there a danger of that simply being squelched?

It was compelling when, later in the movie, Buddy simply watches as Preble is slowly smothered and faces potential death. The locus of interest for so many of these advertising ambitions is not making you a better person. It’s making money. While this feels straightforward, how many people don’t have quite the same level of media literacy and might be more easily duped by these efforts?

Finding a Place to Live

“Strawberry Mansion” doesn’t simply moralize. It’s also a touching story, as Preble and Isadora connect. In dream sequences early in the film, the audience sees the younger Isadora partly with the aid of low-angle shots that give her an almost-angelic air, which connects with how Preble himself will eventually see her (and be helped by her). (She’s also dressed in white.) The physicality with which Audley portrays Preble seems to gradually loosen up as he realizes the truth of the system in which he’s been working and the connection he has with the woman he’s met both in her older and younger versions.

In totality, “Strawberry Mansion” feels inspiring in a very direct sense. Whether it’s in the self-directed dream logic of key plot points or the explicit statements in dialogue about making your own personal choice (rather than what’s being pushed by “Buddy’s” handlers), you can find your own path. After searching for the younger Bella in a dream world, the reunited Preble then sets himself down a similarly epic, sweeping quest to reconnect with his own body and life in general before it’s too late. (There’s a time crunch.) “Strawberry Mansion” highlights the opportunity for a gentle embrace of life amid utter absurdity.