You wanna be in on the ground floor of something absurd and awesome? Strap on your ski boots and hit some Beat Beat!
Opinions were all over the map at SXSW concerning its SXFantastic midnight film The FP but I will personally challenge anyone to a 187 cage match who says this movie is anything other than a great time.
Set in some alternate universe, The FP takes sports films, 1980s action pictures and the patois of urban youth and puts it all in an acid wash blender. The result: a Warriors-esque gang film about the underground Dance Dance Revolution circuit, where the fate of your own home turf down to the very park ducks is determined.
No cliche is left behind in The FP, but unlike pieces of dreck like Meet the Spartans this is not a "reference" movie. It is (and this is what makes it so fantastic) deadly, deadly serious.
Our hero JTRO (lookng a lot like Snake Plissken in Canadian formal wear) must avenge his fallen brother BTRO, wrest the town's liquor pipeline from the greedy hands of L Double E and also win the girl. Tearing him away from his life of solitude is KC/DC, played with high energy insanity by the miraculous Art Hsu. Everything this guy says is funny. I can't wait for this movie to get its release, just so I can hear the YouTube mashups of KC/DC's lines. When Art Hsu looks you in the eye and calls you a "knucklefluffing whatchamacallit" there's no way you remain uninspired.
Indeed, not since Pootie Tang has a film had so many absurd neologisms mixed in with its F-bombs and N-words. (Incidentally, let it be now known that NIGGA stands for Never Ignorant in Getting Goals Accomplished.)
I will always support any film relentlessly devoted to its vision. The FP cliff-dives from the first scene and does not let up. Its production design, costuming and action sequences feel borne of a PCP bender, and for that I give it a warm salute.
To be sure, there's probably one too many training sequences, and there's one white hat/black hat confrontation that could've hosted the conclusive battle, but still, The FP is bursting with idiotic humor and in-your-face stoner wit. See it with your friends, see it late and then start talking like a moron (c.f. the video below.)
