As seen at the
2007 San Diego Film Festival:
Kabluey is a sitcommy farce about, quite simply, the
social estrangement felt by a man wearing a big blue suit. Said
man is the confused and somewhat isolated Salman (played by
writer/director Scott Prendergast). In the film’s first act,
Salman comes to live with his sister-in-law Leslie (Lisa Kudrow),
whose husband (Salman’s brother) is stationed in Iraq. He is
offered free room and board with Leslie’s family so long as he
takes care of her two single-digit-aged boys while she is at
work during the day. This task proves to be more difficult for
Salman than he initially expects; the kids act obnoxiously and
treat him horrendously.
As soon as
Leslie sees things aren’t exactly going according to plan, she
tries to distance herself and her children from Salman by
allowing him to take a part-time position for her company. His
job: to wear the aforementioned big blue suit and hand-out
fliers advertising office-space to passersby on the side of a
road in the Middle-of-Nowhere. With this newly-acquired blue
alter-ego in tow, Salman becomes a master-eavesdropper. He soon
discovers that Leslie is having an affair with her boss and
desperately sees the need to end it, especially as he comes to
connect with his emotionally-disgruntled nephews.
Kabluey’s
story is cute enough, but it doesn’t end up going anywhere.
Prendergast’s script mainly relies on broad comedy that is only
funny for so long. Many of the film’s characters and situations
practically scream out “Look at me! Aren’t I clever?” and this
gets to be rather tiresome for the viewer, especially when they
realize that all the movie does is repeat said characters and
said situations. In a Q&A session after its Opening Night
screening at the San Diego Film Festival, Prendergast claimed to
have based the movie’s concept heavily on personal experiences
with his own sister, but one would never guess this based on
what’s onscreen. The film’s sense of humor does not come across
intimately within the context of the movie’s story at all; in
fact, it is so average in its showy quirkiness that it would
probably be better off accompanied by a laugh-track. This
doesn’t necessarily mean that Kabluey is painfully
unfunny; rather, its comedy is simply too safe and too appeasing
to lend to the creation of a multi-faceted story. In fact, the
picture doesn’t even have the narrative or thematic depth of the
average episode of “Seinfeld”, “Frasier”, or “Everybody Loves
Raymond”.
The lackluster
performances in Kabluey don’t offer the film much help as
a unified whole, either. Leads Prendergast and Kudrow deliver
entirely average performances, aptly filling the roles outlined
by the script but never reaching above and beyond what’s
required of them. The child-actors playing Salmon’s nephews in
the film, Landon Henninger and Cameron Wofford, are occasionally
amusing but not much more. The only truly inspired performance
found in Kabluey is delivered by first-time cinema
actress Angela Sarafyan, who plays a local grocery-store clerk
that slowly develops a compassion for Salman. Sarafyan, who was
incredibly shy in person at the screening, is apparently already
onto bigger and better projects than Kabluey, hard at
work on a very high-profile studio-financed picture starring
Mickey Rourke.
When it is
released on DVD later this year, Kabluey will likely
prove to be a satisfying entertainment. Seen in a theatrical
setting, however, its sparsely amusing sense of humor will
strike viewers as too minor to prove itself worthy of the price
of admission. Ultimately, Kabluey is just too ho-hum to
be thoroughly successful.
-Danny Baldwin,
Bucket Reviews
Review Published
on: 9.29.2007
Screened on:
9.28.2007 at the Pacific Gaslamp 15 in San Diego, CA.
Kabluey is rated PG-13 and runs 86
minutes.
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