Fantasia 09 Review: THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION OF LITTLE DIZZLE
[Our thanks to Matthew Grinshpun for the following review.]
On paper, David Russo's The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle comes off as a cult classic in the making. A comedy about the waylaid lives of a motley crew of building custodians pregnant with a Day-Glo blue "semi-animate mound," it bears the hallmark absurdity of many of the Fantasia Film Festival's greatest triumphs. But a sterile sense of humor and sloppy story-telling make for a film that never lives up to on its promise. In the end, where Dizzle should dazzle it dawdles and fizzles.
Dory (Marshall Allman) is a recently fired Seattle IT professional whose career crisis is compounded by a spell of religious confusion. In need of a steady paycheck but allergic to his former working conditions ("No Internet!" he stammers at a friend who comes to his aid), he dons the brown collar and joins Spiffy Jiffy, a team of young, hearty-partying janitors. While his fellow caretakers burn through their work in a psychotropic haze, occasionally documenting the gastrointestinal catastrophes they encounter on the job, Dory abstracts himself in a quest for spiritual fulfillment, showing up for work in a keffiyeh and a "Don't Panic, I'm Islamic" t-shirt one week and a yarmulke the next.
Just as Dory gets into the groove of his new profession, wasting away the days philosophizing with his glib mentor in the janitorial arts, O.C. (Vince Vieluf, in a preening performance that could well have been the film's saving grace), the team happens upon a treasure trove of mysterious, self-heating cookies. Within days, they're hooked, signing up for cookie research focus groups and upending garbage cans in a mad rush for their next fix. Naturally, the snacks set off bouts of hallucinogenic confusion featuring some impressive pyrotechnics from Dizzle's special effects team. But the real payoff comes later, when the bewitching biscuits summon forth, in the bellies of their male consumers, a neon blue fish struggling to escape by the only possible route.
It all sounds very novel, but Russo fails to extend his originality beyond his central conceit. Watching his film, I was left with the feeling that I'd seen it all before--the stereotyped cast of jaded Seattleite slackers and their streams of grunge tropes, the continuous, desperate resorts to potty humor, the religion jokes so achingly dull that you'd think they were passed as a congressional resolution. Dizzle seems to have emerged, floundering, from that hot, sweet crotch of the 90s when flannel ruled the roost, "independent film" was a hot new thing, and Clinton had yet to spooge all over the American presidency.
That would be forgiveable, though, if it weren't for the film's chronic lack of direction. Dizzle's story, paced like a drunken stumble, seems just as lost as its characters. By the time Russo establishes a central conflict--an underdeveloped showdown between our perilously preggers heroes and the shadowy forces that put them in their situation--the film has nearly run its course, squandering its runtime on a brutally stale subplot in which O.C. becomes an experimental artist. Toilets are his medium.
It's rarely easy to describe where a comedy goes wrong. Often, the best you can do is shrug and say that it missed its mark. In this case, though, the problem is clear. Little Dizzle is anything but immaculately conceived.
Review by Matthew Grinshpun.
