I really wish I could have enjoyed Jacob Bilinski’s short film about reality shifting and perceptions of romance in the end, but with the run time and premise often foggy both in its intent and ability to deliver its hook, “Obsolescence” often feels instead like a practice in monologue reading than it does an actual short film. From minute one I found myself fairly unimpressed by the line reading that occurs as “Obsolescence” is much more focused on the hook that leads in to the final confrontations than it does actually telling its story about a romance that may or may not have been pre-orchestrated to fit a goal for its characters to focus on.
In the past three years there has been a boom in versus films. And that’s primarily attributed to the boom of the direct to DVD industry that relies solely on gimmicks and plagiarism to fuel its economy and one of the primary cash cows of the market is the versus gimmick. We’ve seen every monster fight every warrior this side of folklore and what we see with “Battle Los Angeles” is pretty much soldiers versus aliens. In fact with less money and star power, Jonathan Liebesman’s film could very well have been titled “Aliens vs. Soldiers,” a roughneck balls to the wall action science fiction film that just doesn’t try too hard to bring us in close to its characters.
Robert is a tire. Robert is in the ground. Robert gains a consciousness and decides he doesn’t want to be rubble. Robert gets up and starts rolling down the road. He blows things up with its will. It squashes bugs. Now that it’s caught the eye (?) of a gorgeous young traveler, Robert is rolling down after her and is intent on garnering her attention.
Before “South Park” and before “Jackass” Beavis and Butt Head treaded ground, first. They had commentary about aimlessness of our American educational system, they had gimmicks that made them iconic cartoon characters, and surely enough they indulged in pranks that were often so grotesque they should have been their own show. But most importantly they were funny and if you were around during the nineties, you can fondly remember seeing Beavis and Butthead everywhere. They were the source of all evil in the world next to Bart Simpson, and threatened to turn children in to raping thieving morons who would destroy the world. And while they were half right, Beavis and Butt head were stereotyped mainly because they were animated characters.