Review of ‘Rolling’ week 3-4

‘Rolling’
One repeatedly word for the review of ‘Rolling’ is absolutely and indefinitely weird. But in terms of love isn’t there some one out there for all of us? Both director Angeline Lim and writer Simon Ramirez has done one great job here. Starting in media res, I as an audience being given the big surprise of a simple desperate love seeking guy wanting to buy amounts of toilet papers as reason to get a chick’s number, find that desperate but makes the movie funny, entertaining and cute.

The medium shot/panning combination gives the viewer a depth of the antagonist’s world and I sense his reality of how hard and complicated love can be when shopping at the supermarket. All the weirdness in the conversation between a staff and a customer it starts off with, is simply silly and entertaining; ‘Do you want me?’, ‘Why would I do that? What makes you think that?’ and ‘I saw you staring at me and I work here so I thought you were needing help?’.

He them points at the toilet papers saying it is to orphans. This engagement with the audience the film has is weird but brings surprises of funniness.

The editing of fade out, texts and music works as a driving force for the eye and further on the symbols and items used as ‘Carpe Diem’ shows how much spare time this lonely toilet paper obsessed guy has. As an audience (both in the lecture and in the aftermath), this fulfills the concepts of unusualness and extremeness of how not normal this bloke is.
The wide shot zooming out from his chair with the antagonist eating a dried toasted bread demonstrates the weird character and one have to look further into the film to see what other weirdness it will show.

Mixing the present with the past works as a tool for the antagonist’s reality perception and the short films engagement works with the audience continuously until the end. The appearing color shifts of balanced fluorescent lights for me works; it gives that bright light supermarket feeling.
The protagonist (the girl) acting as the most confident character increases the spice of the movie and becomes the icebreaker both as a character and also as the diversion between the ‘toilet paper world’ and reality as she recognizes him and says his name.

However, the best part is when the protagonist herself actually delivers the 25 toilet paper package. The scene knocking on the door is totally awkward, horny for him, but cute and funny. Even ‘herself ‘is excited and that becomes some of the weirdest part of the movie, is really entertaining. And she’s keen to step inside. The producers surely kept the objectivity in a tight frame and succeed with their intentions of a weird production design.