Josh Locy is the director of the off-beat Hunter Gatherer, which features an uneasy mix of farce and tragedy in a lower middle class African-American community in Los Angeles. The protagonist is Ashley (well played by Andre Royo, best known for his work on The Wire). When we first meet Ashley, he's just done a three year stint in prison and moves back home with his mother who soon tires of his presence.
The tone for most of the film (except for the ending) is decidedly farcical. The Hunter Gatherer of the title is our protagonist who can best be described as a hustler. He's obsessed with a former girlfriend, Linda, with whom he wants to get back together with and then concocts a ludicrous scheme involving the sale of old refrigerators.
When he learns that the county requires $100 to dispose of the refrigerators as "hazardous material", he goes around the neighborhood offering to take the aforementioned junk off people's hands for a reduced price. He then conscripts Jeremy, a young man he meets out on the street, to transport the refrigerators using his truck, to a dump outside the city.
When the truck breaks down, Ashley ends up first burying the refrigerators in his mother's backyard. He then attempts to hook up with Jeremy's aunt, a prostitute who soon dumps him for a manager at a motel. Somehow Ashley finds a way to convince the motel manager to let him stay at the motel, where he uses an adjoining room to stash more refrigerators.
At first all the quirky characters are kind of endearing but the refrigerator plot goes on for much too long. There's also a sub-plot involving Ashley taking continuing education classes to improve his penmanship.
The narrative begins to veer away from the comedy when we learn that Jeremy has been hustling also—earning extra dollars as the subject of a medical clinic's experiments (the nature of those experiments is never explained in detail). Jeremy is also trying to have an old ventilator repaired to try and help his grandfather breathe better—Jeremy in fact lives with his grandfather (of all places) in a nursing home.
As noted above, the narrative is basically a one-note idea that far extends its welcome. There is an attempt to inject pathos to the story when Jeremy saves Ashley from committing suicide by blowing himself up with dynamite—and Ashley in turn is unable to save Jeremy, who ends up drowning in a swimming pool.
Somehow in all this there's a message about the power of friendship but most of it relies on extracting humor from the main character's lack of insight. We get it early on and ultimately the Hunger Gatherer runs out of gas.
The tone for most of the film (except for the ending) is decidedly farcical. The Hunter Gatherer of the title is our protagonist who can best be described as a hustler. He's obsessed with a former girlfriend, Linda, with whom he wants to get back together with and then concocts a ludicrous scheme involving the sale of old refrigerators.
When he learns that the county requires $100 to dispose of the refrigerators as "hazardous material", he goes around the neighborhood offering to take the aforementioned junk off people's hands for a reduced price. He then conscripts Jeremy, a young man he meets out on the street, to transport the refrigerators using his truck, to a dump outside the city.
When the truck breaks down, Ashley ends up first burying the refrigerators in his mother's backyard. He then attempts to hook up with Jeremy's aunt, a prostitute who soon dumps him for a manager at a motel. Somehow Ashley finds a way to convince the motel manager to let him stay at the motel, where he uses an adjoining room to stash more refrigerators.
At first all the quirky characters are kind of endearing but the refrigerator plot goes on for much too long. There's also a sub-plot involving Ashley taking continuing education classes to improve his penmanship.
The narrative begins to veer away from the comedy when we learn that Jeremy has been hustling also—earning extra dollars as the subject of a medical clinic's experiments (the nature of those experiments is never explained in detail). Jeremy is also trying to have an old ventilator repaired to try and help his grandfather breathe better—Jeremy in fact lives with his grandfather (of all places) in a nursing home.
As noted above, the narrative is basically a one-note idea that far extends its welcome. There is an attempt to inject pathos to the story when Jeremy saves Ashley from committing suicide by blowing himself up with dynamite—and Ashley in turn is unable to save Jeremy, who ends up drowning in a swimming pool.
Somehow in all this there's a message about the power of friendship but most of it relies on extracting humor from the main character's lack of insight. We get it early on and ultimately the Hunger Gatherer runs out of gas.