Plot:
A slacker who has stayed at the same dead-end job for many years is finally let go when the company is going under. He finds himself in a personal crisis when he also hear that his favorite author, who he thought was a guy but turned out to be female, died before being able to finish his favorite novel series. Now a voice is guiding him to seek out his old friends...
Our thoughts:
With a movie like "Saberfrog" you have to accept that it will be a bit rough around the edges. It's clearly made by joy rather than great experience and knowledge. It's essentially a movie where you can expect the characters being much like the filmmaker. The movie blends your typical slacker and nerd comedies with far-out sci-fi (think Kevin Smith meets Carlos Atanes' "Proxima").
John is a nerd who is obsessed with a sci-fi novel series, but he really hated the last installment. He hopes for the next chapter to make up for it, but instead his favorite author dies. Now he not only loses his idol, but finds out that the author was a female. To make matters worse, this happens on the same day that he was fired from his dead-end job. Trying to cope with the fact, a voice begins to speak to him. The voice tells him to find his old friends from 10 years ago to reunite the old gang.
The most interesting thing about "Saberfrog" was the introduction to each character, even if there might a bit too many of them. It introduces one character, and in the end of that character's chapter they meet another person. The next chapter shows the story of THAT character, and so on. It's an exciting way of explaining where they all came from and how they got where they are now. But the movie does have a problem when THAT is the most exciting thing. I find the "quest" of getting the old gang together to be alright but it takes a bit too long to reach an actual point of doing it. When it finally does, it injects it with sci-fi in a way that seems clueless and frankly loses me as an audience. It just comes off as random and not very well-planned.
All would be forgiven if the rest was perfectly executed. There are many good jokes in the movie (I can't hate the character obsessed with walrus porn), but the jokes aren't performed right. It's the kind of thing where if I had read it in the script I could've laughed, but then watching it leaves me quite empty. I think the filmmakers will be able to "carve" their future movies better - ignoring some of the poorly performed jokes, much of the comedy could've been improved had the timing been worked on.
"Saberfrog" is a nerdy movie, and the jokes seem to genuinely portray the filmmakers. Nothing wrong about that since many of the jokes are good, just not executed right. In the end, I feel "Saberfrog" is too rough already in its production, too random in its sci-fi elements, and sadly misses the mark a lot of the time. The filmmakers will need to make a few more movies like this (perhaps test the water more on short films?), but I don't think all hope is lost. There's definitely something here that is worth exploring more, and the movie is far from a waste. It just doesn't appeal to me very much. |
