RECOMMENDED
Writer-director Dash Shaw’s gleefully cluttered, raucously absurd animated feature debut, the six-years-in-the-making “My Entire High School Sinking Into The Sea,” relishes multimedia mayhem, exploding into bold proclamations of pattern and motion on a split-second’s whim. The story’s chock full with the fall and rise of prototypical high-schooler conflicts and catastrophes, John Hughes on a variety of hallucinogens and pharma, but the tastily strange filmmaking is about handmade apocalyptic velocity and explosive score-settling. The character named for the director, Dash, is a motormouth shit, ever more indelibly so since he’s voiced by Jason Schwartzman. The world kaleidoscopes profligately around his meager existence. Plus, earthquakes and sharks. With the voices of Lena Dunham, Reggie Watts, Maya Rudolph, Susan Sarandon, Thomas Jay Ryan, Alex Karpovsky, Louisa Krause, John Cameron Mitchell. 75m. (Ray Pride)
“My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea” opens Friday, May 5 at the Music Box.
Ray Pride is Newcity’s film critic and a contributing editor to Filmmaker magazine.
His multimedia history of Chicago “Ghost Signs” will be published later this year.
Previews of that project on Twitter (twitter.com/chighostsigns) as well as photography on Instagram: instagram.com/raypride.
Twitter: twitter.com/RayPride
