Kabluey Movie Review

Kabluey is an anthem for hard times.

Just look at the poster (or DVD cover). It's got a giant blue guy, his head hung low, standing in the middle of a highway in the middle of nowhere. Consider as well the title. No way is anything good going to happen to anyone in this film.

I was worried at first that Kabluey (the blue guy) was going to turn out to be some freakishly deformed child, with the film a surreal examination of his life, a la Edward Scissorhands. Not so. Kabluey is a dude in a costume, sent to hand out fliers on a virtually untraveled highway advertising vacant office space at the dot-com company headquarters where he's the mascot.

Inside the suit is Salman (Scott Pendergast, who also wrote and directed the film), the brother-in-law of Leslie (Lisa Kudrow), a mother of two and receptionist at the aforementioned dot-com, who lets Salman crash at her house if he'll take care of her hyper-bratty children while she's at work. Eventually Leslie realizes that Salman is so unable to control the kids that he's better off taking a job to help pay for day care... even if that job means standing in the Texas heat (the movie was shot in Austin, though you'd never know it) all day in a rubber suit.

While Pendergast sets up some basic ground rules -- Salman is a spaz who can't keep a job; Leslie is a shrew at the end of her rope; the brother/husband is off in Iraq -- mostly the film is a platform for stand-alone sequences that outline how severely lonely and miserable just about everyone is. Salman rides the bus to work and observes the teeming masses... listening to their banal chit-chat and abect cruelty to each other from a distance. Things get even stranger when he dons the Kabluey costume. He's either abused by passers-by who think he's some kind of freak (which, you know, he kind of is), or he's completely ignored as people seem to forget there's a live man inside.

Kabluey, I should also note, is a black comedy. Everyone's so miserable but their circumstances are invariably absurd. The dot-com is down to a skeleton crew, but everyone hates each other. The ladies who lunch crowd (personified here by Christine Taylor) is even worse, keeping up society appearances while obviously barely-masking some Peyton Place theatrics beneath the surface. Throughout all of this, no one seems to realize how silly it is that a naked blue guy with a giant head is wandering through their lives, eating and drinking inside his suit by sticking a hand out the backside in order to get a soda and consume it within.

Nom nom nom.

He was hot and he was hungry.