Dermot Mulroney

DVD/Stream of the Week: LIVING IN OBLIVION

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Peter Dinklage and Steve Buscemi in LIVING IN OBLIVION
Peter Dinklage and Steve Buscemi in LIVING IN OBLIVION

The hilarious 1995 comedy Living in Oblivion follows a grossly under-resourced indie movie director (Steve Buscemi), who must  somehow finish his low-budge/no-budget art film despite being surrounded by zanies.  He’s got a neurotic female lead (Catherine Keener), a preening and slumming A-list star named Chad Palomino (James Le Gros) and an elderly actress who can’t remember her lines (Rica Martens).  His stubborn and sullen cinematographer (Dermot Mulroney) is bedding the First Assistant Director (Danielle von Zerneck), who has an agenda of her own.  With this outfit, everything that CAN go wrong…

Living in Oblivion is filled with lines like “I can’t act. I can just do shower scenes in Richard Gere movies for the rest of my life!” and “Hey! That’s my eye patch and I don’t want anyone else wearing it. It’s insanitary.”

But the pièce de résistance is the feature debut of Peter Dinklage, 8 years before his breakout role in The Station Agent and 16 years before becoming a star in Game of Thrones.   He plays an tiny actor with a gargantuan chip on his shoulder:   “Why does my character have to be a dwarf?” and “I don’t even have dreams with dwarves in them. The only place I’ve seen dwarves in dreams is in stupid movies like this!”.

Director Tom Dicillo, having been Jim Jarmusch’s cinematographer, was no stranger to indie filmmaking.  After Living in Oblivion, Danielle von Zerneck moved on to a producing career.

Living in Oblivion is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Xbox Video.

The Rambler: are you kidding me?

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THE RAMBLER

The indie The Rambler begins as stylish mood piece.  Somewhere in the barren Great Basin, a laconic guy (Dermot Mulroney) is released from prison back to his trailer, his snotty and unfaithful girlfriend and his cretinous friends.  When offered a job by his brother in Oregon, he begins a road trip across the West.  Although not much is happening as he begins the trek, there’s an inventive soundtrack that reels us in, along with a supporting cast of grotesques right out of Fellini or Leone.

So far, so good.  Our hero picks up a mad scientist with a gadget that can supposedly record a person’s dreams on to VHS (VHS is another nice touch).  26 minutes into the film, they meet another guy in a bar, hook him up to the gadget – and his head explodes – Holy Shit – didn’t see that coming!

And then there’s the first of a few extremely disturbing dream sequences, with lots of gore.  Although Dermot Mulroney keeps staring impassively through his aviator sunglasses, The Rambler turns next into an homage to David Lynch, and, finally, to Rob Zombie.

At 70 minutes, Mulroney dreams that he is strapped to a bed when a dummy dressed like an old hag plunges through the window above his head and vomits what looks like yellow paint on to his face and into his mouth.  It is an extended vomit scene – 58 seconds (I timed it).

The writer/director responsible for this disjointed collection of shock pieces is Calvin Lee Reeder.  It’s pretty bad, but the most insulting part of the film is the last three minutes –  a montage of the road trip’s horrors, essentially a highlight reel of the movie’s shockers in case you have already erased them from your memory.  I am now certainly going to follow Reeder’s career (if he has one), because The Rambler is astonishingly bad.

The Rambler is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube.