This is a review of Andy Needs his Milk (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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16 September
This is a review of Andy Needs his Milk (2012)
I know from asking him that Carl Peck hasn't read Barcelona Plates, a collection of short stories by Alexei Sayle (which I think that he published before appearing as a novelist), but something about the walk that Carl's mind works in his short Andy Needs his Milk chimes with the feel of many of those pieces, and with the meat of one in particular (whose title I must look up).
In Project Tridentfest's gig at Cambridge Film Festival, Carl said that he had taken as a starting-point the reported last words of Michael Jackson, and he wove from that utterance, in which he found a sinister ring, a tale that, even without considering the resonances, is both amusing and chilling. Looked at in figurative terms, we have a narrator blaming his extreme actions on an irrational desire to keep satisfied the insatiable, because we know, if we stop to think, that what he is telling us (for good and ill) is not verifiable.
Yet, even at a subsconscious level, we know that he has locked himself into a behaviour, and that, even if we can trust his account, it is a sort of victim mentality that has led him to appeasement just literally for a quiet life. The whole piece is carried off in a way that takes us with it, which is the point of connection with the Sayle pieces: creating an interior logic that beguiles us, simply because the presentation effortlessly makes us feel within the thinking looking out, however distorted and contorted it may be.
Scripting and directing the short, Carl even has a cameo role, but the whole project needed a solid player at its heart, and it has that in his casting of the narrator (who would get a credit, if I had a name), bringing off this fine balance between desperation and servility that is in the character / situation.
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