American Animal
Critically ill, eccentric Jimmy (Matt D'Elia) makes a complete break from reality upon learning that his roommate James (Brendan Fletcher) is about to start a new job. Jimmy and James are not just roommates, but best friends as well. They share a trendy loft in downtown Los Angeles, and frivolously pass the days away drinking, doing drugs, having one-night stands, and playing board games. For Jimmy, it's the perfect way of life. But James craves structure, and in the morning he will start a new job. To Jimmy, it's the ultimate betrayal. Now, as the two close-knit roommates enter into a hysterical battle of wills while sharing their last day of freedom in the company of two beautiful women (Mircea Monroe and Angela Sarafyan), Jimmy becomes swept up in a complex vortex of emotions that push him ever closer to the brink of total insanity.
Director: Matt D'Elia
Starring: Matt D'Elia, Brendan Fletcher, Mircea Monroe, Angela Sarafyan, Billie
American Animal is a wildly experimental debut for D'Elia, who uses hand-held digital cameras and lots of jump cuts. It is well-acted and features witty repartee.
Bizarre, off-putting, and finally demanding of rubberneck respect, this fish-tank indie never leaves a rather lovely duplex apartment, occupied by an unemployed Everyman (Brendan Fletcher) and his roommate, Jimmy (director Matt D'Elia).
While American Animal's finely tuned filmmaking is leagues above the usual Indiewood sloppiness, all the movie-quoting manic episodes feel like empty grandstanding; it's hard to tell where D'Elia's own psychotic cinephilia ends and the character's begins.
At first American Animal has a mysterious unreality to it, a strange diorama about easy leisure's emptiness. But when James admits he's taken a job - upending the roomies' slacker utopia - American Animal becomes a philosophically strident evening of speechifying local theater (topic: human evolution).
Seen as some kind of absurdist, meta-textual horror story, American Animal almost works. In every other way? It's fuckin' poopy-loopy.
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