The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle‏ - Some reviews

I got sent some reviews by Charlene for The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle‏. Looks really good. Just hope it gets released in the UK.

WE ARE MOVIE GEEKS / Scott

Sundance Review: ‘The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle’

Submitted by Scott on Friday, 23 January 2009One Comment

Everyone is talking about how crazy this movie was so I definitely had to check it out for myself. What I found was an experiment in cinema story telling, and the story keeps you holding on because you cant believe what you are seeing. The story follows Dory (Marshall Allman) who is struggling to find his way in life, quits his day job and gets a job as a janitor with a night cleaning company. The cleaning company

is run by a strange group of people that love what they do. One of the buildings they clean specializes in market research and are currently working on studies for cookies. The cookies contain an experimental chemical that is supposed to emulate the warm feeling for fresh baked cookies.

During the experiment it starts to have a strange reaction in all of the male subjects. They start to experience abdominal pains, cramping and sickness. After a while they finally realize that they could be carrying something in their stomach’s. The movie stars one of my favorite indie comedy guys Vince Vieluf, and he is absolutely brilliant in this movie. The guy seems like a goof off, and I think he plays the high strung slacker guy better than anyone else in the business.

David Russo the writer/director of the film did a tremendous job writing and showing his vision for the story. This is the first film I have seen of his and I have to say that I am pretty impressed with his work. Not sure this one will hit everyone in the mainstream, but if you get a chance to see it make certain that you do.

Overall Rating: 3.5/5

URL: http://wearemoviegeeks.com/2009/01/sundance-review-the-immaculate- conception-of-little-dizzle/

FILM ARCADE / Kelsey Zukowski

Sundance 2009: The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle Movie Review-By Kelsey

Zukowski

The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle

Starring: Marshall Allman, Vince Vieluf, Natasha Lyonne

Written & Directed By: David Russo

Grade: B+

David Russo makes his feature debut with The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle. It’s definitely a strange film, but Russo created the right context for this to really make it work. The characters are extremely likeable, very lively, and charismatic. They’re unique and fun, without them I am not sure everything else would have fallen in to place the way it did.

After putting up with all of the annoyances at work, one day Dorey (Allman), snaps, he literally snaps a girl’s cell phone in half, smashing it to destruction. He gets fired from his high paying job because of this. He still is trying to pay for his school and is struggling just to pay for rent. So to make some money in the mean time he starts working at Spiffy Jiffy Janitorial Services, a night time service that works through a series of office buildings. There he meets his new co-workers, O.C. (Vieluf), an energetic, but offbeat guy who envisions himself as an artist, the hippy cross dresser owner, and Ethyl and Methyl, two edgy, chaotic lovers. Soon Dorey get used to things and settles in. One day he finds a cookie in the garbage that he is about to take out. It is still wrapped and it seems alright so Dorey eats it and immediately vomits it back up. Tracy (Lyonne), a product researcher who works in one of the offices in the building sees him doing this. Her company is testing out cookies that have ingredients in them that makes them always warm. She invites Dorey to test some of them out.

At first every cookie tastes disgusting. However, later Tracy does a different experiment. She leaves sample cookies in the garbage where the janitors find it. Soon they are all completely hooked to them. They do have some bad side effects. The boys always have bad cramps, digestive problems, have salt cravings, and get hallucinations. Dorey tries to tie this all together to figure out what is going on. He saw something blue in the toilet when he started working with the janitorial service, something alive. Dorey suspects that the cookies make you give birth to this blue creature. No one else seems to believe him, until they blue creature emerges out of them the way that it did to Dorey. They tape it to prove the wrongs that the company making these cookies did to them.

The acting was phenomenal, really bringing these characters to life. Natasha Lyonee was the only one I was really familiar with. She did well and it was nice to see her in this. She helped put up that barrier in her character. You liked her to an extent, but using the character that we cared about most as lab rats held that back a little, and it was meant to. Marshall Allman and Vince Vieluf were the real stars of the film. Both of their performances as well as their characters were extremely refreshing. They were very different but worked as great opposites with one another. Marshall Allman as Dorey played the very intelligent, innocent, nice guy. He was also constantly trying out different religions, showing that he is open-minded and still trying to find himself. Vince Vieluf as O.C. is very go with the flow, goofy, and seems to have a slightly off vision of reality. We see the film through Dorey’s eyes and O.C. is our loveable idiot that makes everything more fun.

There are a lot of weird visions on screen throughout the movie. This really works after they eat the cookies, connecting them to drugs. They are getting these visions and alternate realities that would happen to someone when they are in a trance from being intoxicated. They are addicted to the cookies like drugs and it is clear they aren’t good for them. This adds to that sense of wrong doing that has been struck on our characters, altering their minds so severely. However, the images that appear outside of the immediate reality of the film itself actually appear before this. It starts from the very beginning, but there it is used to illustrate Dorey’s inner-self since he doesn’t seem completely able to express it exteriorly. It’s funky and that’s clearly Russo’s style. The context and characters he worked this style around really compliment each other. It’s always good to find something new and with some of the obscurity of the story, The Immaculate Conception Little Dizzle definitely is that. I have never heard of any other movie about janitors’ love of chemically enhanced cookies that make these men have blue baby creatures. It’s very different and there was enough likeability in the characters to make us care about them, letting us suspend our belief about the story. Also, being just men that have the babies it is quite amusing watching the characters go through this. Once it happens they are so joyful and proud in what they created even though they are angered by how it happened. The scene where they are taping one of their friends pushing the blue baby out of him is definitely one of the funniest. The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle is a ton of fun to watch. It’s the little things that really make it so enjoyable. The dialogue is really rich, the characters are fresh, and the story is so crazy that it works.

URL: http://www.filmarcade.net/2009/01/sundance-2009-immaculate-conception- of.html

HAMMER TO NAIL / Michael Tully

The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle — David Russo’s film isn’t just different from anything I’ve seen this week, it’s different than... I don’t even know. I’m having a hard time comparing it to anything else (which is certainly a compliment). It feels like a lost midnight movie from the ’80s or something, especially with regards to the performances. I don’t really know what this movie is about, but I laughed a good bit and have a feeling it’s going to stick with me.

URL: http://www.hammertonail.com/genre/comedy/sundance-thursday-january- 22nd/

Slash Film / Peter Sciretta

Sundance Movie Review: The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle

The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle is by far the strangest film I’ve seen this year at the Sundance Film Festival. After he quits his high paying computer job, Dory (Marshall Allman) is forced to take a night janitor job to pay the rent. He joins the group of misfits who clean office buildings during the night time hours. One of the offices that they regularly clean is a company that runs test studies.They find a batch of cookies in the trash which contains a new chemical that is supposed to make the cookies taste warm, like they had just come out of the oven (which is such a great idea in itself). The janitors become addicted to the chemically-altered cookies, and they soon learn of some strange side effects. It only gets stranger, but I think that explaining exactly who Little Dizzle is might be revealing too much. First time feature director David Russo uses his experience in animated short films to create a cinematic acid trip, which might be so strange and different that it might alienate. The film integrates trippy animated hallucination sequences and an animated bright blue fish, of whom’s origins are too strange to print. Of note is Tania Raymonde (who many know as Ben’s daughter Alex on LOST), who is almost unrecognizable as one of the janitorial misfits, complete with colored dreadlocks, tattoos, and a nose ring. Little Dizzle is one of those films that you end up talking about. I find myself on the Park City shuttles explaining the story to other festival-goers. It’s the type of movie that spreads virally. Even if you don’t like it, it’s the type of movie that’s so strange that you’re still likely to recommend it to your friend, saying “you have to see this...”.

Film Rating: 7 out of 10

URL: http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/01/22/sundance-movie-review-the- immaculate-conception-of-little-dizzle/

CREATIVE LOAFING / Kaye Breeman

The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle

Kaye Breeman

I’ve just left the theater after seeing the Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, and would go to sleep, however I’m too... well... excited. This film was great, not that “great” even comes close. Odd. Puzzling. Emphatic. Ambiguous. Invigorating. Hilarious. Unique. Well, I guess those are closer. But seriously, at what other time in your life could you feel your stomach churn with empathy, or anything at all for that matter, for a man sitting on his kitchen counter staring into the sink at a little blue fish that has recently exploded out of his butt?! This is one of the many feats that director David Russo accomplishes with this film. You are drawn to investigate emotions, implications, and ideas in a story so far-fetched and unrealistic, and yet are so entirely immersed that you hardly have time to doubt.

The film starts when Dory, a strangely religious man, loses his temper at his cubicle job and subsequently loses his job as well. After a fruitless job search, he falls in with a group of misfits that work at Spiffy Jiffy’s Janitorial Service. Late at night, while blasting heavy metal music over the loud speakers, the team cleans, investigates, and sometimes fornicates in the office building. However, this all gets messy when a product

testing company decides to use them as guinea pigs for their new product: cookies that emulate oven freshness by warming in your mouth (because god forbid you actually bake your own cookies!). The cookies have some strange side effects though, including being completely addictive, inducing hallucinations and extreme sodium consumption, and quasi-pregnancies that result in the birth of a small blue fish.

URL: http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/dailyloaf/2009/01/21/immaculate- conceptions-and-more/

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