Calling all fans of comedy, skateboarding, and independent film! You need to clear your schedule on Wednesday night and head on down to Gallery 5, where they'll be showing Machotaildrop. Written and directed by Corey Adams and Alex Craig, this film was created as a result of the filmmaker's winning Fuel TV's The Fuel Experiment contest. Adams and Craig received the grand prize--a $1 million budget with which to create an "action sports feature." The result was Machotaildrop, a skateboarding-themed comedy filmed in Budapest, Hungary. Detailing the exploits of a skateboarding slacker with delusions of grandeur, the film shows us what happens when the protagonist gets an endorsement from his favorite skateboard company, only to get far more than he bargained for when he travels to their base of operations. Machotaildrop premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2009, and has been touring the independent film circuit ever since. Now, for one night only, it will be shown at Gallery 5! This is a rare opportunity to see it on a big screen, so come check it out!
WHAT: Machotaildrop Comes To RVA!
WHERE: Gallery 5, 200 W. Marshall St.
WHEN: Wednesday, October 17, Doors open at 8 PM
ADMISSION: $5
Machotaildrop - Trailer from Alex Craig on Vimeo.
About the film:
Meet teenaged layabout Walter Rhum, who wants nothing more than to become a skateboarding star like his idol, Blair Stanley. His plan? Submit a video of his bag of tricks to legendary conglomerate Machotaildrop, then kick back and coast. When his presence is requested at the company's remote, mysterious fortress, he thinks he's got it made, but Walter is about to find out that fame, fortune and even skateboarding can be way totally fraught with complications.
Equal parts surreal comedy, fable and indictment of our co-opting, logo-glutted culture – and 110 per cent just plain weird – Corey Adams and Alex Craig's slyly funny Machotaildrop is only tangentially related to other skateboarding movies. In fact, it has far more in common with Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Zéro de conduite than Dogtown and Z-Boys. (Many of the principal performers and most of the extras can barely stay upright on their boards.)
The film is populated with all manner of eccentrics and obsessives, including Machotaildrop's owner, the Baron, a grandiloquent former high-wire acrobat now confined to a wheelchair; the sinister Dr. Manfred; the Baron's creepy majordomo, Perkins; the Librarian, the only girl in the compound; assorted “stars” like the permanently embittered Blair Stanley; and a screeching, often indecipherable martinet, who's the ostensible leader of a gang of skateboarding anarchists known as the Manwolfs.
Machotaildrop backs up its loopy, idiosyncratic indictment of our consumerist culture on the most basic level.There's a decidedly second-hand look to the proceedings – a Value Village aesthetic. Everything in the movie seems to have been made in the eighties or earlier and rescued from somebody's attic.
This thrift-shop principle is evident in the film's distinctive sensibility, which is simpatico with the work of Canadian mavericks like John Paizs and Guy Maddin, while invoking Jean Vigo and head movies (one of the performers seems to have escaped from El Topo). Yet for all that, the film seems completely unselfconscious, devoid of overt influence and defiantly singular. It is definitely something new (and strange) under the sun.
-Steve Gravestock