Seattle-based filmmaker Linas Phillips is nothing if not industrious: He has put out three features since 2006, a better record than many filmmakers working above his micro-budget level.
“Walking to Werner” chronicled his determined trek (on foot, mind you) from Seattle to Los Angeles in the hopes of meeting his hero, director Werner Herzog;
“Great Speeches from a Dying World” delved into the lives of members of Seattle’s homeless population.
The new one, “Bass Ackwards” (which just played at the Seattle International Film Festival), ventures into a more fictional realm than those two films. And yet, here’s Linas Phillips, on screen, playing a character named Linas.
All right. But this time, there’s clearly a fictional through-line carrying the character Linas along: He has just seen the end of his affair with a married woman, he’s been gently kicked out of a friend’s house after freeloading for a while and he doesn’t seem to have a job.
More or less by accident, he comes into possession of a Volkswagen “Shorty” — a version of the VW van that looks like its middle section has been taken out. And, once in possession of this intermittently functioning vehicle, Linas decides to drive across the country to visit his family in Boston.
The journey that follows is as uneven as the van’s performance. Some of it is amusing, some of it is self-indulgent, a lot of it looks improvised out of thin air.
If you’re a fan of that kind of breezy, digressive movie, which trundles along the road in hopes of finding something interesting along the way, you’ll probably be in the relatively small audience that digs “Bass Ackwards.”
It’s nicely photographed (by Sean Porter) and Phillips proves he has a keen eye for a running gag. The VW van itself is the film’s secret weapon, a freakish thing that can’t help but elicit a chortle every time you see it (same with Phillips’ increasing exasperation as the van’s engine gets weaker and weaker during the trip).
The movie doesn’t aspire to anything as ambitious or definitive as “Easy Rider,” instead settling for the value of rambling. Not such a bad thing.
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