Film Geek (2005)

Written and directed by Portland based film maker James Westby, Film Geek is a low budget, kind of underground movie, staring Melik Malkasian as Scotty Pelk, the ultimate nerdy film fan. At the start of the film Scotty works at a video rental store, were he constantly annoys the customers and his co-workers with his encyclopedic knowledge about film. A lonely, rather pathetic character (yet still a sympathetic one), Scotty lives in a one room apartment were he devotes his spare time to watching movies and writing about them on his internet film site which nobody reads (ala His Other Band). Events transpire to cost Scotty his job at the video store, and he winds up working at an auto parts warehouse. Socially awkward in the extreme Scotty thinks he may have found some one with whom he can strike up a romantic relationship, a pretty young artist (Tyler Gannon he sees reading a book about David Cronenberg on the bus. The young women talks to him, and they even have a partly successfully date, but as the film maker tells us in one of the special features, while she makes him less of a robot, he’s still plenty robot. A film with which I relate more then I wish I did. The way the ending plays around with our Hollywood expectations contrasting them with real life is worthy of Bergman, even without the beautiful cinematography of Sven Nykvist . 3 ½ out of 5.