I guess maybe it’s because I’m not too into the avant-garde, but Yamashiro Live! by co-writers/directors Blake James Reid and Max Naum has almost nothing I can recommend. It was too long at 20 minutes. Honestly, it felt too long by the 20-second mark. It tells the tale of an unlikeable young man who spends the entire time acting like a jerk in a variety of ways. The press kit would have you believe it was about someone “speed running through personalities,” but I don’t know what that means or why it requires filming.
Things are permanently grounded by self-indulgence. The opening scene feels mostly interested in the scratchy tattoos and sexually ambiguous nail varnish on the hands of the unnamed lead (Aidan Yobear) as he has an incoherent, 5-minute-long fight with his girlfriend, Juliette (Mag Dwyer) at the door of her apartment. Behind them, a poster for bondage gear is kept in shot as the backdrop for so long I can remember every hipster garbage detail of it. This is easily the poorest scene of the whole affair, and the film is so surreal you wonder why Naum and Reid didn’t just cut things up and give themselves a fighting chance with viewer attention by leading with something else. Instead, it’s hard not to loathe everything in front of and behind the camera before the scene is barely underway.
In the next scene, the protagonist annoys a middle-aged man in a confusing exchange where he pretends his father has died. It lasts three long minutes. Then Yobear pretends to learn saxophone off YouTube, blowing mindlessly into the instrument, constantly enraged that it doesn’t play. That’s another 5 minutes, which are as long as they sound. Then, he pretends to be a famous jazzman outside a club for no apparent reason. Then the loathsome young man buys some Asian pornography and zones out to it as if this whole thing wasn’t already masturbation. Then Yamashiro Live! finally ends.
“…the tale of an unlikeable young man who spends the entire time acting like a jerk…”
Yamashiro Live! misses the mark. While watching it, I felt possessed, my arm rising, desperate to fast-forward, then falling as I resumed my obligation to reportage. Twenty minutes later, I was free. The photography by Matteo Coelho is mostly competent but totally off. Nearly every shot is zoomed in and handheld as if it were white-hot action, but none of it is. There is also a few seconds of a head morphing in CGI, thrown in abruptly, I am guessing because they were playing with 3D models and lacked the discipline needed to tidy their toys away.
The on-screen credits, which appear in batches throughout in a succession of foul and unreadable fonts, were so obscure and stylized that it looked like the filmmakers had just taken the shrink wrap off new editing software and couldn’t calm down.
There was one semi-bright point. Pier Luigi Consagra was pretty engaging as a confused jazz club owner fending the lead’s tedious bullshit off. But he proves to be the only good thing. If Reid and Naum have anything to show an audience, they need a fresh approach next time. This is offensive, smug, indulgent, and undisciplined in nearly every department. It seems to be goading the viewer into a negative response, the same busted promotional currency peddled by the absolute nadir of mainstream genre films; it’s seldom a marker of voices worth hearing.
I’d never say a film shouldn’t be made. Art is art, expression is good, and I sincerely hope the filmmakers got something out of creating this and that their interest in film thrives and develops. But, after viewing Yamashiro Live! I can report I got nothing but annoyed, and felt that was the point.
"…art is art, expression is good..."
