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 a San Diego Film Festival screening at the Pacific Gaslamp 15 in San Diego, CA.