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June 18, 2015
Review: Uncle Kent 2

UncleKent2_Still02The charge against our culture of sequels is usually that it’s cravenly commercial and leads to derivative rehashes of popular films. But what if you took a film that wasn’t popular in the first place, gave it to another director, took little beyond the lead actor and made a film so stunningly strange and indescribable that it can hardly be called the same genre as the original? Director Todd Rohal and writer/star Kent Osborne did just that, and fans of seriously strange cinematic oddities can rejoice.

The film is Uncle Kent 2 and its pedigree adds another veneer of weirdness. The first Uncle Kent, directed by Joe Swanberg in 2011 and starring Osborne as a close-to-life version of himself; an animator who stumbles through an awkward weekend with a girl he met on Chatroulette. The first 12 minutes of Uncle Kent 2, also directed by Swanberg, follow the same mumblecore aesthetic as Osborne goes to a party at Swanberg’s to pitch him a sequel idea, which Swanberg lacks interest in but encourages Osborne to pursue on his own. Once home again, with exhilarating silliness, the music changes, animated titles appear (from Pendleton Ward of Adventure Time, which Osborne also writes for), and Osborne looks into the camera with a demented grin and jiggles his shirtless chest. Director Todd Rohal has just taken the reins of the film, determined to dynamite the conventions of Swanberg’s often dull naturalism. After an ominous trip to the doctor that calls his sanity into question, Osborne takes a trip to Comic-Con, the heart of American unreality. Amidst the legions of cosplayers, including one woman wearing the unlikely costume of Osborne’s creation Cat Agent, Osborne starts to lose his mind even more than the other festival attendees.

Hallucinations, people with bush-baby eyes, a possible apocalypse, disappearing indie filmmakers, masturbation induced levitation, an earworm of cheesy 80’s classic Breakout, recurring mentions of Kurzweil’s Singularity Theory, Weird Al Yankovich – Rohal throws all this and more into the brief (73 minute) film, making for as surprising and disorienting an experience as anything out there. It’s too random to really cohere into anything meaningful, but it’s hard not to respect Rohal’s commitment to balls-out insanity. People familiar with Swanberg’s original and the microbudget film community it arose from will probably enjoy the satire of Uncle Kent 2 the most, but it will also appeal to fans of Adult Swim style surrealism and anyone looking for a movie that’s unburdened with any concerns of plot or character and thus free to be as unpredictable and bizarre as possible.

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Written by: Joe Blessing
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