Cleveronix
A different way of telling a story
Brendon Jones
It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.
Beulah Bram
A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.
Sean Lamberger
The story of Raymond and Peter, mean drunks and awful roommates whose constant shouting matches - committed to tape by frustrated neighbors - made them an unwitting, unsuspecting pair of underground celebrities. Like the thematically-similar Winnebago Man, the quest to learn more about these clueless cult legends is much more rewarding than what's actually at the end of the trail. While the focus hovers on revisiting the tapes, hearing the men who recorded them reminisce about the glory days, and watching dozens of talking heads throw on a headset and burst into genuine fits of laughter, it's a light, cheery smile a minute. Later, when the inherent humor of the material begins to run out, the whole picture begins to look downright pathetic. Hearing about the legal struggles that surrounded the story's film rights, witnessing the self-important ruminations of the guys who held the mic, seeing how confused and flabbergasted Peter was about the phenomenon, captured on film years later... these actually take away from what made the tapes so enjoyable in the first place. As a momentary distraction, an escape from the mundane to voyeuristically laugh at the worst state of the human condition, the tapes are in their element and at their best. This level of over-inspection only rubs away the veneer and many of the laughs.
Paul Day
In the end, this movie felt like an excuse to milk the tapes for a little more fame and/or money.The first 2/3rds nicely chronicle how the whole phenomenon took place. And it truly is fascinating. You get a sense of how strange, serendipitous and organic it must have been to have a personal project turn into a meme.But the key word is "organic". Other people drove the Pete and Ray story. The partners, correctly, said "go ahead" since, in effect, it wasn't really theirs to control.It's when they take control that movie inadvertently reveals that, rather than a sweet, hapless pair that fell into something, they've staked their identities on this one thing and they've become kind of self-important assholes.When Eddie Lee made proclamations about "art" my first thought was - "Really? What other art have you created? Because an artist normally creates more than one piece of art and all you did was tape some guys screaming at each other. Other people picked it up and turned it into something. Duping tapes and giving them to people...well...that's not really art." After that, the pair goes on a quest to do the one thing that art should never do - explain itself. Tracking down Ray, the roommate, felt like a stunt. It was a fishing trip to solve the riddle of whether Pete and Ray were lovers. That's dull and pointless.Art, imho, allows people to project themselves into and onto what they see. These two, Eddie in particular, seem to want to prove something that doesn't need to be proved. Wrapping up the film with the Pete and Ray dancing sucks everything that's interesting about the relationship out of it.
Robert W.
Shut Up Little Man is certainly not groundbreaking. I think in the hands of a more talented documentary maker they could have told something fascinating and parts of this are but its told in sort of a silly plodding way. However, the story itself is actually really fascinating. This was truly a story that, if encouraged by the internet, would have been viral in seconds. But this was years before the internet, before mass communication like emails and cell phones, and actually spread and became viral via the Sanfrancisco underground and audio tapes. Remarkably I had never heard of this story but it is kind of neat to watch and see everything unfold and the best part for me was seeing them trying to re-connect with the subject of this viral project. The project is of two alcoholic (and I think mentally deficient) neighbours who would become verbally abusive and scream horrendous and darkly funny things at each other. Even a film was made based on these two men which I had never heard of but hopefully will see at some point.Mitch Deprey and Eddie Lee Sausage are the two guys who started the viral sensation. Granted the entire beginnings of this is very juvenile but I feel like Mitch and Eddie were still, twenty plus years later, still sort of juvenile about it. The two men in the apartment, Raymond and Peter, have a very serious problem and yes listening to them is often funny, in the same way that if you heard your neighbours arguing especially like this you would listen in because its human nature, much like reality TV is now such a craze. Still the film does try and touch on how ultimately very sad the entire situation is, and Mitch and Eddie even seem to get emotional at point when re-visiting Raymond and Peter's lives but I wonder how sincere it is.This is writer and director's Matthew Bate's first full length documentary and he does a good job. The film is easy to watch and covers all aspects of the legend that was Raymond and Peter. It covers the gambit of things that happened to these seemingly simple recordings. I just don't think it delved into the true significance of how profound this event was in history. Decades before internet, or reality Television this set the bar for what people loved to see, hear, and experience. Its fascinating and worth seeing. 7/10
jdesando
Imagine, if you will, a couple of cartoonist Harvey Pikars living in the next apartment in 1987 San Fran; only these two aren't savage cartoonists and don't have Harvey's wit or wide-ranging interest in humanity. They're just a couple of aging men, roommates, one gay one straight.Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure is the strangest documentary you'll see this year or almost any because nothing really happens except that filmmakers Mitchell D and Eddie Lee Sausage tape their two old neighbors, who, when drunk, verbally abuse each with the same repetitive expletives, the most memorable being Ray's, which is the first part of the film's title. Two elements of the experience are worth noting: a viral fame came by way of a world-wide network of lending tape organizations (remember, no You-Tube or Internet), and talk of litigation about privacy rights appears and then vanishes.These two topics could have been the heft needed to counterbalance the repetition of Ray and Pete's rants, which are strangely uninteresting except for our voyeuristic interest in loser humanity and the sheer banality of their lives, perhaps reminding viewers of their basest moments of stupidity and anger against a loved-one.The doc is peopled by geeks who spend a large part of their lives pursuing these tapes as if they were the private conversations of Charlie Sheen. Wait! That's the answer: We love the salacious, degraded moments of someone else's life because we feel superior or we need to know that others have the same weird moments we do. I must admit to a fascination with the rhythmic patterns of their language, poetry from the tenement but not T.S. Eliot.Its lowness mystifies me, an art house fan, and yet attracts me, as a winsome prostitute might. I know she's not part of my life, but for some reason I'm compelled to invite her in.
