Dropping Out

Director: Mark Osborne
Screenwriters: Kent Osborne

Institute History

  • 2000 Sundance Film Festival

Description

A year after winning the short-film award at Sundance with his claymation masterpiece More, Mark Osborne returns with a sensationally unique dark comedy, Dropping Out, a collaboration with his brother, Kent, who wrote and stars in the film. Together they bring to life the quintessential nineties apathetic Everyman in a hilarious, but somewhat foreboding, tale about the two things on everyone’s minds these days: death and the movies.

Emile Brockton (Kent Osborne) enjoys TV, chicken pot pies, and…well, not much else. His life has become a meaningless procession of banal activities that prompt him to spice things up the only way he can devise: by killing himself. However, the road to suicide is filled with distractions, and these create the ultimate conundrum for him. It turns out there’s quite a market for autobiographical snuff flicks, and Emile’s new acquaintance from work (who is a few tacos shy of a combo plate) decides to document his demise.

Suddenly, everything that was unbearably dull about his life is the object of attention and wonder. All the excitement may be just the thing to give his life meaning again. But if he doesn’t kill himself, everything will revert to the way it was. What’s a guy to do? Mark and Kent have an uncanny knack for the details of a life shaped by commercials and sit-coms. Some memorable fantasy sequences make this parable about the devastating impact of mass media on the collective consciousness of society an extremely amusing slice of Everyman’s life.

Screening Details

Credits

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