Rogue Cinema - Hubris (2005) - By Duane L. Martin

Hubris (2005) - By Duane L. Martin
Posted on Monday, May 01 @ Mountain Daylight Time by Duane

I love short films. They're quick to watch, the action is concentrated fown into a mere twenty minutes or so and they tend to be well paced and fun. Such is the case with a film I received recently from film maker Gary King.

Hubris is the story of a 36 year old guy named Barry (Frederik Goris) who just wants to get a date. His buddy Jeremy (Jeremy Koerner) wants to help him out, and to that end, he arranges for them to go to a speed dating thing. Basically, for those that don't know, speed dating involves getting a group of men and women together in one place and then they each spend five minutes talking with one person, and then every five minutes they switch to the next person. This goes on until everyone has met everyone. At the end of the evening, they write down the name of the person they'd like to go out with, and if there's a match, they get to go out on a date together.

Well this place Jeremy found is super secret and only accepts cash. Barry is pretty worried about the whole thing, but Jeremy has a plan. He's invited "the boys" along. "The boys" include an asian guy called Ricky the Rocket (Jared Asato), a fuzzy and extremely cheesy disco type guy named Edgar (Jeremiah Liebrecht) and an old guy known as Uncle Lou (Fred Zappert). The plan is for Jeremy and "the boys" to be as boorish and obnoxious as possible while Barry is basically just himself, since he's natually polite and gentlemanly. Once they get to the speed dating part of the film, that's where it really gets awesome. Jeremy and "the boys" are absolutely hilarious, and as the screen splits off into four different views with the sound shifting focus from one view to another, we get to hear them all being as obnoxious as possible to the women sitting across from them. I mean, this whole session was seriously funny, but there were two parts that really stuck out for me. The first was when Ricky the Rocket was talking to this one girl like she used to be a man and had a sex change and totally didn't believe her that she was never a man. The other one was when Jeremy was explaining to another girl about monkey sex. I don't want to spoil that part, but the phrase "flingin' the poo" was used numerous times. It was just hilarious.

I don't want to spoil the ending, but trust me, whatever it takes, you really want to see this film. The editing was just awesome and the whole speed dating thing was handled perfectly. I can't actually think of anything I didn't like about this film. The pacing of the film was snappy, the dialogue was priceless, the acting was great, the characters were cheesy and fun, the comedy all worked, and all in all this was just a really awesome film. Gary King has an unbelievable talent as a film maker. I look forward to seeing more of his work in the future.

If you'd like to find out more about this film, you can check out this and all of Gary's other films by heading over to Gary's website at http://www.grking.com.