Konterr Brilliant and touching

Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Alistair Olson After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Warren Drake Springer Just watched this again for the zillionth time, and it never gets old. I love every bit of it. I believe it shows modern alienation, that behind a mask you see people's true colors. That's how Salman saw how Leslie was having an affair with her boss, but her boss was also having an affair with that other woman from the bus, the one who talked the old lady's ear off. And when Teri Garr's character drove by in anger at Kabluey, but then asked Salman for the tin foil in the store, and he was frightened hahaha. It was funny in parts, but I felt the over all tone is that of a lonely melancholy, it is very sad :( Not many movies have such grace in deliverance as this does, especially with a low budget, independent movie. A+ definitely... this will stay in my top 10, top 5 even

Roland E. Zwick Scott Prendergast wrote, directed and stars in "Kabluey!," an indie comedy that's as quirky and offbeat as its title."Friends"' Lisa Kudrow stars as Leslie, a small town woman whose husband has been off fighting in Iraq for a year and a half and whose two unruly sons are more than this harried, overstressed mom can reasonably cope with on her own. Enter Prendergast as Salman (like Salman Rushdie, he proudly proclaims), Leslie's ne'er-do-well but well-intentioned brother-in-law who comes to live with the family and ostensibly offer his assistance - though Salman may be in as much need of help as Leslie and the kids."Kabluey!" is distinguished primarily by its droll and understated visual humor, which comes primarily through the humiliating costume Salman is forced to don for his job delivering flyers advertising a flat-lining dot.com company to utterly uninterested and even dismissive passersby. Salman has been pretty much a failure his entire life, but he soon discovers that , even though he can lose himself and even take a proactive role by hiding his identity in the suit, it is ultimately only by shedding the costume that he can hope to grow up a bit and become a responsible, fully functioning adult."Kabluey!," like most idiosyncratic independent comedies, captures the capricious flakiness of the people and environs of small-town life and the special quality of alienation that seems to reside in such places - and no one is more faceless and alienated than Salman when he's stuck in that suit. Its talented cast also includes Terri Garr (Kudrow's real-life mother and perfect voice-match), Christine Taylor, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and "SNL" and "Portlandia"'s Chris Parnell.It's a nicely atmospheric look at post-9/11 America, one that mixes humor and pathos in roughly equal measure.

j-lacerra I am not an expert, but I would assume that one of the first rules of comedy is that it be funny, or at least heart-warmingly humorous. Kabluey is neither. I did not laugh once during the 45 minutes of the picture that I watched. The blue suit joke drew one chuckle, and they beat that device into the ground, negating it.Is anyone truly as obtuse and socially comatose as the Salman character, played by Scott Pendergrass? 'Stupid is as stupid does', but it is not necessarily funny. Are any children as completely malevolent as these two boys? How could anyone find humor in watching these out-of-control brats assault everything and everyone they come in contact with? The mother character, played with an evil benign deadpan annoyingness by Lisa Kudrow, is rude, nasty, ungrateful, and mean. Kudrow, apparently a known television actress, is so unsympathetic in her character that she engenders outright dislike from the viewer.So, not only is Kabluey unfunny, but it is actively anti-funny. Please, do not depress and torture yourself with this steaming turd of a motion picture.

D_Burke If you ever find yourself at a retail video store by the likes of Blockbuster or Movie Gallery (if you're lucky enough to find one that's still open), the choices of movies you'll find are overwhelming and daunting. It's not that these stores don't have good movies, but 70-80% of the movies they do have you probably haven't seen because you've never seen them in theaters. Reading the description on the back doesn't seem like a good enough choice to rent the film, because the two hours you spend watching them may be wasted if the film is really bad. There are no credible reviews to guide you, and even if the film has a familiar face or two, that's not even a guarantee that the film will be good or memorable. The problem is not that there are a couple of these films, but movie stores nowadays have packed their shelves with so many of them that it's harder than ever to choose."Kabluey" is one of those films that gets lost in the video store shuffle of all the crappy films. It's unfortunate too, because "Kabluey" is an incredibly original film. It's quirky throughout, laugh out loud funny at times, and has the deadpan sensibility of indie film gems like "Rushmore" and "Napoleon Dynamite".The movie starts out by introducing Leslie (Lisa Kudrow), an Army wife whose husband is stationed in Iraq. He's not dead, but his absence still hasn't been easy with their two hyperactive, uncontrollable sons and no one to watch them without bills being sacrificed. Leslie then learns about her husband's 32-year-old brother Salman (pronounced how it's spelled), who doesn't have a job or a home for that matter.Salman, played by writer and director Scott Prendergast, is the 21st century version of a vagrant. He is a well meaning but inept guy with no skills or education of any kind, thereby differing in Biblical ways to his brother. He has nowhere to go and no money to get there, but he isn't exactly the homeless guy you see sleeping on the sidewalk. Salman arranges with Leslie to watch the kids while she works to pay off the children's Medicare and other expenses. Salman in turn would stay at her house and work until he is back on his feet.The premise so far sounds like a family comedy, but it's far more original than that. The story gets weirder, and therefore more unique, when Salman gets a thankless job handing out fliers in the middle of a barren street with few pedestrians. To make matters worse, he's in a heavy costume with limited visibility and not even the convenience of fingers to easily hand out fliers with.His costume is of Kabluey, a web icon belonging to a failed Internet company called BluLeXicon. Kabluey looks like the yellow AOL man, and has a hanging head to match his blue complexion. There's no shortages of ways it becomes difficult to wear that costume, although Salman tries harder than I would to pass out and organize the fliers. It's also funny when he discovers that the only way to use the bathroom is through the zipper in the butt area of the costume, resulting in his having to temporarily wear the costume backwards.There are many interesting subplots in this film, and they all come together very well to reveal a lot about the characters. The story is strange, but nothing seems sugar-coated about Kudrow's army wife situation. Kudrow plays someone who is understandably distressed, and looks it throughout the movie. She can't control her kids, and she has virtually no friends around to help her. Her situation is entirely understandable, and she's one of the best things about this movie.When I saw Prendergast, I couldn't help but think of Ben Stiller. It's not only because Christine Taylor, Stiller's wife and occasional co-star, is featured in this movie. Stiller seems the be the go-to guy when it comes to playing an incompetent slacker who won't grow up. Prendergast here, however, doesn't come off as a rip-off of Stiller at all. He has an originality to him that eradicates the Stiller comparisons successfully, and his character is as odd and appealing as this entire movie.There's no doubt that this film is odd, but it is very much a rhapsody of intangible qualities that made last decade unique. In this case, the bust of the Internet bubble (signified by the Kabluey costume), and the War in Iraq. These things have made last decade (and this decade so far) notorious, but have not been incorporated into any film I've seen so far, or at least not as seamlessly as this film has done. For a deadpan comedy to have those subjects serve as a backdrop could not have been easy, but somehow the film succeeds.The film has many inconsistencies and unexplained occurrences, with Teri Garr's recurring appearances being one of them. However, this film is the good kind of odd that could make it a cult classic soon. I'm sure people will find this movie after digging through the unimaginative, run-of-the-mill, Hollywood casualties that may be to blame for Blockbuster's demise, and they won't be disappointed.