Yesterday, I put on Alex Karpovsky’s The Hole Story. I put it on despite the fact I was already expecting to not like it. I wasn’t in the mood for a mockumentary and Karpovsky’s plot sounded feeble. A director is looking for debut story in a mysterious hole that appears in the middle of an icy lake, only the hole disappears and he’s left with no story at all. Which sounded to me like the makings of a painful, artificially quirky film that would strain throughout for a reason to be and supply none other than a couple of hackneyed proposals that you laugh so it could feel like it had accomplished something.
As the first few seconds played I thought, “No, I don’t think so,” and because other things were transpiring in the background, right behind me, that were needing my attention, I cut the film off and didn’t think about it again for another couple of hours, when I for some reason decided to start the film again and stick it out for however long I could tolerate it, which I considered might be around a minute and a half.
Yet I also knew I would end in watching the entire 81 minutes, but had no clue why I was already committed.
About halfway through the film there came a scene where I had to turn from the screen.
You know how someone sneaks up on you and you don’t know they’re there and they yell, “Boo!” and you jump and scream? This wasn’t like that. Instead it was like having someone sit in front of you for a while and they never yell, “Boo!” but there comes a point when you look down and realize that somehow you’ve got a line tied around your waist connecting you to them and they have that line around their waist as well…and, yes, you are involved.
Which is all I’m saying about this story of the great abyss because it deserves to be experienced with no inkling of what may transpire.
Just like life.
This is Karpovsky’s first film and I’m looking forward to seeing more. Unfortunately for me, his new film, Woodpecker, currently on the festival circuit, played in the Atlanta film festival back in the spring and I missed it because I’m slow on the uptake and hadn’t seen “The Hole Story” yet and didn’t even know there was an Alex Karpovsky. If this was January of 2008 and I’d seen “The Hole Story” I would have been at that festival for “Woodpecker”.
P.S. He should be glad I didn’t know yet last spring about “The Hole Story”, because I might have shown up at the Atlanta film festival with a copy of “Unending Wonders of a Subatomic World (or) In Search of the Great Penguin” and irritated him by dropping it on him and telling him all about how it was a totally different beast from “Woodpecker”, despite it involving the quest for a giant penguin (kind of), and suggesting it be his next film. That would have been no fun for him at all.
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