DEMOCRACY ROCK AND ORIGINAL INDIE COMEDY ARE ALIVE AND WELL
By Andy Turpin

Asbarez
acy-rock-and-original-indie-comedy-are-alive-and-w ell/
May 8th, 2009

BOSTON-On Sun., May 3, the Armenian Dramatic Arts Alliance and the
Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) presented writer-director Johnny
Asuncion’s 2008 feature film "Float," preceded by five music videos
created for System of a Down vocalist Serj Tankian’s solo album
"Elect the Dead."

The music videos were well thought-out short films whose political
imagery and brilliance brought all those in attendance to a short
round of applause before the last had even concluded.

Director Tony Petrossian’s video "Empty Walls" evoked engorging and
visceral, metaphorical anti-Iraq war imagery made eerie due to its
double entente of children in a chaotic "Chuck-E-Cheese" play palace
environment.

All blatantly taken from well-known news clips of the Iraq conflict
adapted to children playing war, the audience sees children in
bike helmets meant to represent U.S. soldiers breaking down doors
with boot heels, taking away civilians to a mesh ball-pit meant to
be Gitmo, confetti explosions meant to be napalm, a child standing
in the same garb as those tortured at Abu-Ghraib, and a triumphant
little boy standing beside a "Mission Accomplished" sign in birthday
party letters representing the carnage and bloodshed of the Bush
Administration’s Iraq policies.

All this amid the children dropping in feigned death in farce of our
war-torn reality. This is all hit home by the video’s final imagery
of real-life U.S. Marines in dress uniform carrying to burial their
fallen comrades.

Next, Tawd B. Dorenfeld’s video "The Unthinking Majority" is an
indictment to the U.S.’s militarism for the sake of Turkish/Azeri
and OPEC oil politics.

Told through the use of brown and gray toy soldiers and stop-motion
animation, we see images of women, children, civilians, and those
deemed enemy combatants in the name of oil revenue destroyed and
cut down.

Poignantly, all this occurs as dancing Smilex pharmaceutical pills
numb the soldiers and the drugged-up public to collusion and march
into their mouths in imagery actually taken directly from World War
I Bolshevik anti-Czarist posters, which once showed imperial Russian
troops marching into the mouth of death for the Czar.

In Ara Soudjian’s "Money," we see a piece that embodies the U.S.’s
culture of political and consumer greed and directly lampoons George
W. Bush in caricature.

Narratively the caricature goes in the beginning of the video from
a clean-cut sinister-looking senator to a Dorian Gray monstrosity
surrounded by Whores of Babylon booty dancers peddling influence and
blood-soaked oil lobby hands executing a Mexican child dressed as the
Statue of Liberty in tableau of a U.S.A. real-estate lawn sign marked
"Sold."

In Sevag Vrej’s "Feed Us," we see an exposure of the U.S.’s apathy
towards homelessness via a homeless everyman wandering the cruel
and unfeeling streets of L.A. amid dispassionate citizens that
shun the homeless and hold up placards like "Religion," "Gambling,"
"Terrorism," and reasons we as Americans are distracted from caring
about our fellow man. Conversely, we see two kind children bearing
"Faith" and "Hope" that represent the solutions to these plights.

In Kevin Estrada’s "Save Us," we see how America’s youth are
brainwashed through "Newspeak" to universal societal conformity
through repetition and fear via the imagery of "The All Seeing Eye"-a
Pythagorean and Egyptian symbol seen on the U.S. dollar bill, within
Freemasonry, the Pinkerton Detective Agency, George Orwell’s 1984,
and others.

In contrast, Johnny Asuncion’s film "Float" starring Hrach Titizian
is a heartfelt underdog indie-comedy that leaves you walking out
of the theater feeling upbeat and life-affirmed. The film is set
in modern-day Glendale and revolves around an ultra hospitable but
wheeler-dealer Armenian 20-something named Gevorg who works in an ice
cream parlor called "Float." The movie solidifies as an offbeat tale
of friendship and fatherhood as Gevorg ends up bringing together and
sheltering his mid-life crisis boss and down-on-his-luck, south Asian,
ultimate fighter wannabe friend, with subplots involving a Green Card
marriage to Gevorg’s gorgeous Armenian cousin and the boss’s daughter,
bitter and returned from the Peace Corp.

With a humor as original as Kevin Smith but as offbeat as "Napoleon
Dynamite" or "The Foot Fist Way," "Float" is up there with "The
Kebab Connection" on the list of Best Indie Comedies your friends
have never heard of but need to be shown.