“Artois the Goat” is an indie comedy from Texas about a wacky lab technician’s goal of creating the world’s greatest goat cheese. Yeah, it is as bad as it sounds.
Virgil (Mark Scheimber) works as an assistant in a food flavor laboratory. His girlfriend Angie (Sydney Andrews) is a would-be writer. We know they are a funky couple because he wears dark-rimmed eyeglasses and rides around on a moped and she works on a manual typewriter. But when Angie takes a job in Detroit (which, of course, is the epicenter for new employment opportunities), they are forced to separate. Virgil, however, believes he can earn his fame and fortune by recreating the ingredients of a rare French goat cheese.
Filmmaking siblings Cliff and Kyle Bogart try to compensate for the film’s impoverished concept by drowning the viewer in a surplus of cutesy sight gags and weird camera angles. The result is a visually atrocious mess that tries much too hard to be funny. The young leads aren’t much help – Scheimber is constantly doing a third-rate approximation of Jim Carrey’s shtick and Andrews just cannot act.
Artois the goat, in case you are wondering, provides Virgil with some much-needed help. The goat is cute and the numerous shots of various cheese concoctions will please the inner glutton of those who somehow discover this film. Nonetheless, masochist foodies are recommended to stick to Paula Deen’s artery-clogging kitchen antics and let this one go out to pasture.
