Saw Dave Made a Maze, a film about an out-of-work artist who creates a cardboard maze in his living room and then gets trapped or lost inside of it. His long-suffering girlfriend must now rescue him. It was exactly what it sounds like: a cutesy, silly-yet-sincere, hipster-ish romp surrounding one Sad Boy's feelings.
The fun of the film is seeing the inventive ways the filmmakers can use cardboard, to create giant playing card or origami cranes or nesting, telescoping pillars that encroach upon the protagonists. It has the feel of a really well-done weekend project. You get the sense of a lot of hanging out off-screen and a lot of seat-of-the-pants special effects.
The maze itself seems to symbolize Dave's emotional landscape - he is trapped in a fraught and unstable place that cuts him off from the world and threatens his relationship. His friends come to rescue him but risk getting hurt themselves in the process. This is not totally explicitly laid out, but seems like a sensible interpretation to me.
Anyway Dave struck me as being kind of self-absorbed which is not totally surprising for a film about someone who makes a film about their own emotional struggles. His girlfriend is the kind of attractive, chill, eye-rolling girl that seem to the de facto angel-girlfriends these hipster-types imagine themselves with. I started out feeling like she should really dump this man-child but then again that cardboard maze is really cool, so maybe he's not so bad.
The film is slight and twee. It's very cute and, as long it's not talking about emotions, it has a lot of silly fun. It never reaches the surreal heights of, say, Terry Gilliam's work but it does a good job of inhabiting its small, ramshackle, indie-wood niche.
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