Three stars. Rated R, for profanity and sexual candor
By Derrick Bang
John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon
collaborated on a 16mm short film initially called Planetfall while students at USC’s film school in the early 1970s;
it was expanded for theatrical release in 1974, now titled Dark Star, and quickly became a cult classic. Carpenter went on to
a lucrative career highlighted by Halloween
and Escape from New York; O’Bannon
made his bones as a screenwriter, notably with Alien and many other horror and sci-fi projects.
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| On the sad day that Donna (Jenny Slate) packs up books — her final act as clerk of a bookstore forced to close — she gets a surprise visit from Max (Jake Lacy), who manages to bring a smile to her face. Whether she'll agree to his gentle push for an actual date, however, is another matter. |
A few years earlier, in 1967,
George Lucas made a 15-minute short titled THX
1138 4EB, also while a student at USC’s film school. It, too, was expanded
to feature length with a slightly shorter title — THX 1138 — and was released commercially in 1971, now starring
Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasence, and became both a cult classic and Lucas’
first directorial credit. He went on to make American Graffiti and, well, a certain sci-fi epic that took place
in a galaxy far, far away.
Obvious Child began life in 2009, as a
23-minute short film written by Anna Bean, Karen Maine and Gillian Robespierre,
and directed by Robespierre. Encouraging reviews at various film festivals
encouraged Robespierre and star Jenny Slate to re-make the film for feature
release, with an expanded cast and running time. A Kickstarter campaign raised
the funds to get it placed at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year,
where indie distributor A24 picked it up and now has brought it to a theater
near you.
Its occasional merits aside,
however, I rather doubt Robespierre will go on to the sort of career enjoyed by
Carpenter, O’Bannon and Lucas.
Slate, however, should get a
pretty good bump. She’s been all over TV for the past five years, from Saturday Night Live and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, to House of Lies and Parks and Recreation. She capably handles a big-screen starring
role here, establishing a warm and delectably snarky persona.
Moving forward, though, she needs
better material.
The major problem is that Obvious Child still feels like a
23-minute film, albeit one that has been padded with a lot of extraneous “stuff”
in order to beef it up into an 84-minute feature. Several sequences do little
but fill time, to the detriment of the story being told, and at least one
sidebar is completely pointless.
And since Robespierre now has
taken the primary scripting credit for this longer version, she’s clearly the
one to blame. Perhaps she shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss Maine and
Bean (although Maine and newcomer Elisabeth Holm do share a “story by” credit
here).
