He wears his thousand yard stare like his tailor fitted suit. Even as the devil herself – or perhaps its really his mother – force feeds him the pieces of his broken life.
“I am so poorly written!,” Snerdley gasps. “Who wrote me?”
In point of fact, GNV artist, playwright and auteur Tom Miller wrote Snerdley, the tightly wound theater snob who suddenly, unexpectedly, finds himself the designated “entertainment” of the evening.
Miller’s new film “Audience” is his latest and perhaps best collaboration with Shamrock McShane (aka Snerdley) – he who never met a character he couldn’t subsume, digest and ultimately shove down our throats.
And listen, if all the world’s truly a stage, then it’s only fair that the cast of Miller’s Audience is well poised to take all of the entrances and exits cited in the Bard’s seven acts acts of life – the mewling and puking, the woeful ballad, the shrunk shanks, the sans everything.
That’s show business.
This is the point where I would recommend that GNV rush to the nearest venue to see Miller’s home-grown film. Alas, it is not to be. At least not right now.
If you haven’t been fortunate enough to get invited to one of Miller’s pop-up, “guerrilla” sneak previews, then you’ll just have to wait until Audience works it’s way through the film festival circuit. Apparently there’s a rule that you can’t actually “premier” a film before you shove it into festival mode.
And listen, if you get sideways with the festival circuit, then Miller’s much anticipated Audience sequel – Tom and Shamrock Go To Cannes (think Bing’s and Bob’s on the road flicks) – just isn’t going to happen.
Anyway, here’s what Tom himself says about Audience: “It’s mercifully short and making it has been a nightmare.” But to be fair, Miller always says stuff like that.
In point of fact, Audience is a biting and insightful tragi-comedic look at the sort of people who always seem to end up sitting next to you at any given play on any given day.
You know, the bores, the terminally pretentious, the scotch-infused, the snorers, the critics, the ones who would fall on their swords before silencing their phones.
Yeah, basically the Audience From Hell.
And it’s not just Shamrock who shines. Olive Isa plays the usher like she’s Jack Nicholson doing The Shining. Arlene Wolf’s Devil/Mother is to die for. If you don’t gag on the slipstream of cigarette smoke emitting from the nostrils of Nino Barucci’s God, then you have no discernible lungs.
And what to say about George O’Brien’s Carl? He’s glib. He’s boorish. He’s frenetic. He’s frantic. He’s a trailer-trash Hamlet. Sometimes he’s all those things all at the same time.
Good flick.
FreeGNV 