I Thought I Told You To Shut Up!! (2015)
This documentary short tells the story of cartoonist David Boswell and his greatest creation: Reid Fleming, World's Toughest Milkman. In the late '70s, David Boswell birthed Reid Fleming, a counterculture icon in the form of a comic book anti-hero. Fast forward to the '80s, Warner Brothers aimed for a Hollywood film. Today, three decades later, Reid Fleming remains stuck in a contractual quagmire. Jonathan Demme, Academy Award-Winner (The Silence of the Lambs, Stop Making Sense), narrates "I Thought I Told You To Shut Up!!" This documentary blends stop-motion animation with interviews from Boswell, Hollywood cohorts, and fans, exploring the enduring allure of the indomitable Reid Fleming, the World's Toughest Milkman.
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the audience applauded
One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.
This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.
There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.
Put it down to an addiction to online short films, but I ended up watching this film not only not knowing anything about David Boswell or his creation 'Reid Fleming', but I even did not know a single thing about the film other than it was a documentary and had a pretty catchy title. The film, as I discovered, is about this particular cult cartoon character and, by extension, the failure of Hollywood to make anything happen with it – or for the studio owners to allow others to progress it.With this approach the film becomes two things. Primarily we learn about Boswell and his creation of this tough milkman (the world's toughest in fact). Secondly we learn of the production dead zone in which the material now lives vis-à-vis the potential for the material to be a film. As a whole the documentary is delivered with a lot of energy and style. Different types of animation are used, the pace is fast but never rushed, and the contributions feature many big names and familiar faces (such as Matt Groening, Kevin Pollack, Ed Asner, and others); generally this all makes a film that has good forward motion, provides a lot of information in a fun accessible way, and is frankly easy to watch and be entertained by.However at the same time there didn't seem to be as much other than that as I would have liked. The key disappointment is that the film had the chance to use this case study as a closer look at the frustrations of the Hollywood machine. Several contributors mention this but yet it is not really explored as I would have liked. So, without this it does feel like a film that is trying to find enough of an audience to force Warner Brothers to do something with their rights, rather than having an agenda specific to the viewer of the film. The energy, the contributions, and the varied delivery all still makes it a fun watch, however it is not as interesting or rewarding as this suggestions it could have been.