With another dispatch from the Tribeca Film Festival here's Jason on a new lo-fi comedy.
I can remember it taking me halfway through writer-director Onur Tukel's previous outing, the hipster-vampire sex-comedy Summer of Blood (which showed at last year's festival; he's becoming a annual TFF figure), to find myself slipping over from a sort of sneering distaste for him as an on-screen presence - ahh yes, he plays his own main characters too! - to actually vibing on what he was doing: thankfully he does seem to get that he's the most annoying man in the room at any given time.
With his new movie Applesauce (and I'll be damned if I know why it's called Applesauce, even after actively spending some time trying to suss out the title) it was like starting over from Square One again - am I gonna find my way to the joke again?...
Is he in on it, or is he yanking all of our chains? Okay okay yeah there it is, he gets it, I get it, we're all getting it, phew.
What I'm saying is his movies require some patience. Maybe one day we'll understand him as a Woody Allen type of figure, with the expected repeat posturing of what that character means, but we're not quite there yet. He's working on it though! He likes what he is selling, and I have to say after two movies that've eventually - eventually - found their way to my funny bone, I'm starting to like it to.
Applesauce is set in a slightly more grounded reality than Summer of Blood was - instead of marauding packs of Brooklynite bloodsuckers what we've got here is the simple tale of hipster self-amusement run amok. Tukel's playing with how we've decided we're open and honest to the entire world about every damn thought we have nowadays, and gives us a mad chain of events that spins off of that narcissistic tendency. Humor's wrung from marital infidelity and severed body parts alike - good luck eating Lo Mein while watching this movie. Anyway it's all very dark and very weird, which is a fine wheelhouse to be in. Probably by the time Tukel's next movie comes around I'll be looking forward to the experience, even.