Once I saw it Bullets of Justice and I thought I had reached the pinnacle of Monte Demenza (Football). Grufing sentient mutant pigs dominating the world, defeated by incestuous Bulgarian-Kazakh moustachioed brothers. I was convinced that the entropic deficiency of a film written with a random idiot generator programmed with Google Translate could represent the definitive standard of the genre. How naive. More: what a tortellino! To delude myself that the Avesani archetype – the entropy that incarnates in someone or something transforming them into Satan but with an uncomfortable sense of humor instead of human sacrifices – was not capable of evolving, growing, improving itself more and more , every day in the trenches fighting with the sole objective of gaining hegemony in the world of global entertainment. Avesani is no longer just the agent of Pandemonium. He grew up, agreed to undertake a course of therapy with a child psychologist, graduated from Itis and then realized his dream of enrolling in DAMS. Chaos studied cinema and now makes real films, the kind that win prizes and are also liked by those who, at the cinema, don’t have the fetish of necessarily having to break their dicks. I am thrilled and delighted at the same time. Theme song!
Now I’ll wait a moment for you all to go and recover Hundreds of Beavers. With the other legendary people who have already seen it, we could spend the next 105 minutes on the phone, like when your mother forgot to put the phone down and you were on the line for a while convinced you’d pick up something compromising and/ or exhilarating like a thunderous fart but instead there followed a half hour of absolute and even slightly ominous silence which made you reflect a lot on the inexorable flow of life and the meaning of happiness. Or we pretend nothing happened and in the meantime we watch together this crazy analysis made by Every Frame a Painting (saints immediately) on Chuck E. Jones. Now that we’re all caught up, tell me if Hundreds of Beavers and it’s not (also) a Looney Tunes cartoon. Which is kind of the best compliment I’ve ever paid a live action film before – maybe I thought so when I saw Kung Fusionbut then that film does other things – and above all it was a compliment that I didn’t know I wanted to pay, but now that I did it I feel much better.
Above are other people who feel much better
Hundreds of Beavers is the debut feature film by Mike Cheslik, director, editor and good guy who has probably never seen a fax machine live. He decided to create a crazy cinematic comic installation which is a bit like a gameplay walkthrough of a video game they should release the day before yesterday, and a bit like a Chuck E. Jones film written with Mel Brooks sprawled on the sofa with his feet up on the ottoman that every now and then throws out some ideas for a gag, and another bit of the irresistible pastiche of kickable b-movies – science fiction (from Méliès to kaiju), beaver horror, adventure, espionage, saloon brawl – that from a at a certain moment he takes over and loads the beavers onto a supersonic cable car, airlifting them towards new unattainable peaks. Other than Monte Dementia (Footballable). Here I feel like saying that we are near Annapirla; if not even up there, on Everesso, the cracked mountain. Sorry, it’s the flu Hundreds of Beavers. Only they – the rodents, the sadistic director, the masochistic protagonist (and co-writer), the cinematographer, the extras and stuntmen trapped in ridiculous costumes and subjected to the slapstick equivalent of a Gareth Evans Indonesian set – are good, but really good.
Good job, everyone
Somewhere in 1800 and in the midst of the boundless spaces in which the incestuous sects, Unabomber or serial killers hide in the United States, Jean Kayak enjoys great success with his little Applejack factory – a brandy obtained from the distillation of apple cider, kerosene that you pluck from the trees – and with the retail sale of stupendous spirits intended for the after-work joy of the very tough fur trappers who wander through the forests of the area toil and then come to him to celebrate the end of the working day by drinking and singing. The fact that Jean Kayak is also an alcoholic further helps paint the idyll of this stupid perfect life. Until one fine day, the innkeeper and his furrier friends have an excessive feast, they get drunk as if they didn’t have to go hunting for raccoons in the snow the next morning, and they blow up the little factory together with the rows of apple trees from which they drew the magical alcoholic concoction. Jean is ruined and is forced to start from scratch, from mere survival in the snowy and wild north of the United States of America.
Having exhausted the premise of the premise – which also serves to get us used to the particular aesthetics of the film (strongly saturated black and white, interpolation of animations and graphics, zeroed dialogues) – Jean Kayak finds himself naked and shitless in the middle of merciless nowhere, getting busy to get through the tutorial without succumbing to the difficulties. With great tenacity and after several failed tragicomic attempts, Jean manages to kill a raccoon – which like all the animals in the film is a poor extra wearing a mascot costume – finds the merchant of the game and discovers that he, in addition to exchanging furs for tools that facilitate hunting, he is also in possession of a young and unmarried daughter, as beautiful as she is capricious and lethal with the skinning cleaver in her hand. For Kayak it is love at first sight, so much so that he will decide to become the greatest fur hunter on the continent in order to obtain the hand of his girlfriend, jealously guarded by her father, a generally grumpy guy and a very poor chewing tobacco user.
Then it’s just from here on out Hundreds of Beavers loses excitement suddenly and without a reason, so randomly, suddenly becoming a stupid film. It’s always been a goofy movie from its first frame, shooting itself out of the cannon with the magnificent coherence that makes it the special little movie that it is. Put that way, it seems like he’s treating him like a child who needs a support teacher, but young Cheslik’s debut is exactly like that: small, because it’s practically made up only of ideas – the internet says that the budget was 150 thousand dollars , but I imagine that half of it went to medical expenses for the protagonist’s hypothermia – and special, because it’s actually stuff that you won’t see again tomorrow or the day after and that I’m not so sure you even saw yesterday. He left me the same frizz on the perineum that he gave me a dozen years ago Final Cut, a Hungarian film that tells an archetypal love story by editing together clips from 450 other existing films. The love for cinematographic language is the same, it is very pure and it is not the snobbish kind that rejects you if you don’t have a Bazin Literary Club membership card – I beg you to madly love the scene of the footprints left by the rabbit family.
But more, compared to Final Cut, Hundreds of Beavers he has the guts to invent something even more creative and imaginative. It takes the typical trend of the slapstick gag – a premise that is constructed logically in the eyes of the viewer and which is then disregarded, always resulting in surreal and unexpected consequences. The carpet that is pulled out from under our feet – and reiterates it, accumulates it almost to the point of paroxysm and modifies some elements in a crescendo of absurdity, pace of editing and painful results for the protagonist. When Kayak takes thirty seconds to pick up a coin from a flat surface I had a slight syncope. When the American Indian – you can’t help but call him that, he represents the parody of the American Indian stereotype – gets on the horse made of extras I started sobbing uncontrollably. When the mecha beaver appeared, my bladder gave way and I actually pissed on myself.
Worthy Exception of the Year quotas:
“Fabrizio, don’t bother me and enjoy the film, it’s wonderful”
Toshiro Gifuni, i400calci.com
>> IMDb | Trailer
