Twitter
Facebook
Reddit
Digg
Tell us what you think!Send a letter to the editor about this or any other article in The Maine Campus.
Jimmy Smash throws a punch into the face of his enemy. A pink, pulsating light surrounds him as he channels a dead friend in heaven. Throwing the fatal blow, his enemy is sent through the window of an underwater laboratory. Propelled through the sea, he is stopped only by the open jaws of a great white shark, which shreds his body to pieces.
“That’s how I spent my winter break,” said Patrick Gill, pausing the video on his monitor. Gill, a senior University of Maine new media student, was editing scenes from the short film “Puncher 2,” which had its online premiere Saturday, Feb. 7. It’s a sequel to the 2008 short film that earned Gill and his writing partner, James Marcel, a People’s Choice Award at last year’s Maine Channel Film Festival and a favorable mention in the notoriously cynical Internet blog Gawker.
But Gill and Marcel have a hard time believing they’re doing anything right.
“Most people don’t actually think ‘Puncher’ is funny,” Gill said. To him, the film festival wins were flukes, the result of drawing out more friends than his competitors did. He’s also pretty sure the writer who wrote about them on Gawker got fired.
And Marcel’s girlfriend, Alice Shin, doesn’t think “Puncher” is funny.
“Maybe it’s because I’m Korean,” Shin said to Marcel with a shrug. “My sister doesn’t get it. She didn’t understand what you guys were trying to do.”
“My grandma didn’t like it, either,” Gill said.
Aside from the male nudity, cursing and gratuitous violence, perhaps there is another reason grandmothers won’t like “Puncher 2.” One writing session revolved around terrible things the cast could do with four kittens. This is not grandparent humor.
“Puncher” doesn’t fit neatly into any genre. For each surreal non sequitur, there’s a toilet joke. For every joke delivered on its own merit, there’s also a joke designed to fail. The humor is in the failure. They’re making fart jokes, but they’re also making jokes about making fart jokes.
They’re proud to be doing both.
“The fart is the simplest joke,” Marcel said.
“It’s God’s joke,” Gill added. These kinds of jokes can be shortcuts, he admits, “but they’re shortcuts you’d be dumb not to take.”
When Sigmund Freud sat down to write “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious” in 1905, he didn’t predict the rise of ironic humor so convoluted that even comedians would lose track of what, exactly, they were making jokes about. Going through a list of Freud’s theories about humor, the two were dismissive of the idea that their jokes reveal fear or pent-up aggression toward ’80s action movies.
“I don’t buy the theory that humor is based on fear, anyway,” Marcel said. “If it’s true, there’s a huge untapped market for, like, spider humor. Or jokes about deep, dark pools of water.”
For Gill and Marcel, the humor of the “Puncher” series and their “Dragonshirts” series from 2007 comes from remembering R-rated ’80s action schlock from their childhoods.
“It’s nostalgia, but it’s not like, ‘Hey, remember the Care Bears?’” Gill said. “It’s more like, ‘Remember when there was a shot of a guy zipping up a boot, and there was a guitar chord?’”
“And how cool that was when you were eight,” Marcel said.
The result gives the sense of watching every terrible action movie and every terrible satire of an action movie at the same time. It’s funny, but is it too easy?
Sitting with Gill and Marcel a week before their premiere, accusations of laziness start to fall apart. They’re engaged in the tedious process of dubbing audio with Bobby Dagget, the actor who plays Danny Smash in “Puncher.”
“You’re not saying words anymore,” Gill says to Dagget, who has spent three minutes re-recording a single line for the 11-minute movie. But there was microphone noise in the shot, and they all wanted cleaner audio.
Daggett doesn’t get frustrated. He tries different takes, refocusing on the meaning of the words whenever the repetition turns them into empty phonetics. Another two minutes pass, and they finally have the intonation they want.
It’s just one example of the effort it takes to make a movie that looks so perfectly wrong. Marcel spent three hours building the underwater laboratory in paper mache; the model appears in the film for about five seconds. The shark scene took Gill most of winter break and lasts about ten seconds.
It is an active, deliberate process to create a short film – repetitive tasks, lost weekends, confused grandmothers and girlfriends. All of that hard work ends with a finished film – a finished film that ends with – spoiler alert! – a burp noise and an explosion. Or is it a joke about burp jokes and explosions? It’s impossible to tell.
Gill and Marcel are happy to have something they can actually show people without flinching. They have higher aspirations – Gill talks about how smart you have to be to write complex comedy and characters. He’s aspiring to get there. For now, both seem content to be making something they can laugh at.
“We’re not going to make a serious movie when we’re in college because we know it would just end up as a ‘college movie,’” Marcel said. “We’d rather make something fun that people can actually watch.”
Gill’s other movies can be viewed at vimeo.com/keepitsmooth
