Whiffed Out
2014 · 10m · USA
Directed by Jason Giampietro
Genres: comedy, dark comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, humorous
An anxious New Yorker's summer is ruined when a friend stashes a bike in his hallway for 'only a couple days' — three months later it's still there, and so is his sanity, fraying in a ratty aqua short-sleeve. A bizarro lo-fi sitcom of NYC street characters.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A movie about a bike in a hallway is exactly the kind of nothing-stakes premise that snobs would dismiss — which is why I love it. Giampietro understands that real comedy lives in the petty resentments nobody else thinks to film.
Giampietro's stoop-hang grudge comedy with a hallway bike as antagonist is the deranged public-access lineage Dustin Guy Defa actually owns. Lo-fi NYC sitcom with stakes — sign me up.
A neurotic guy in a ratty aqua short-sleeve losing his summer to a hallway bike his friend wouldn't pick up — that's an exquisitely petty engine and the stoop-character ecosystem around it sounds like a real Brooklyn micro-world. Sitcom-with-no-joke energy in the best way.