The Giant Mechanical Man (An Indie Romance Film)

The Giant Mechanical Man was shown at the 2012 Tribeca (which stands for “Triangle Below Canal”, btw, if you’re not a New Yorker) and features a pair of disconnected city folk trying to figure it all out against despite the distracting noise of advice offered by people who have made their peace with the usual lives.

Janis, adopted and transplanted from Wyoming, which she didn’t get to see much of, is struggling as a temp in NYC, and due to her inability to connect, she’s failing pretty spectacularly. Her suburban sister doesn’t get her, and keeps trying to fix her life, which, to be fair, does need fixing pretty badly, if only in terms of survival.

Tim, on the other hand, is a performance artist who paints himself silver, puts on stilts and a silver business suit, and mimes out the soulessnes of modern times.

His girlfriend, who pretty clearly works in the financial sector, may have gotten him once, but now realizes he’s a liability in the shark infested waters she lives in.

After each of them get ejected from the marginally workable shells they’ve created for themselves, they wind up working at the bottom rungs of a zoo, where they slowly find each other amid the monkeys and their own personal baggage.

Since the action takes place occasionally at an art house cinema showing silent films, a tip of the hat to Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times,” which focused on much the same themes as Tim’s Giant Mechanical Man, would have been nice, but unless I missed it, they didn’t go there. The Giant Mechanical Man was shown at the 2012 Tribeca (which stands for “Triangle Below Canal”, btw, if you’re not a New Yorker) and features a pair of disconnected city folk trying to figure it all out against despite the distracting noise of advice offered by people who have made their peace with the usual lives.

Ultimately, of course the two find and heal each other, but Tim’s alter ego in silver blue paint acts as an interesting third person in the evolution of their relationship, completely separate from Tim himself, and ironically the most emotionally available person in the whole affair, even though he never talks and generally refuses to acknowledge people standing in front of him.

I liked it, even if there weren’t any real robots (except for the soulless business types, Tim mocks) around.

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