#omgimtrending

This review is part of an ongoing series of reviews I am writing about the nominees for the Beneath the Earth Film Festival, all of which are short films. For more info, go here.

As you might gather from the title, this film is so current and up-to-date in terms of social networking trends and youth culture that it can't help but adopt a mode of tongue-in-cheek humour. As a result it's a comically dense but superficial odyssey, surprisingly epic despite it's short length and seeking to encompass as many aspects of contemporary pop culture as possible (vampires, zombies and unicorns all feature). Think of it as part Juno, part Terry Gilliam and part Scott Pilgrim.

The script is very clever in the way it satirises social networking, and the comedic timing of all involved is great. Fletch Finn (Patrick Alan Davis) embarks on a life-changing journey through this distorted version of reality, encountering supernatural beings and ex-girlfriends in his search for a beloved pushbike, but it's all a little too hip for its own good. It's weird that I feel so neutral about this because I kinda enjoyed it on a surface level, but I found the tone and idealogy to be inherently annoying and quite self-destructive. The hipsterism in this film is absolutely rampant, the cast is filled with hipster stereotypes but it's so annoyingly hip that it's ironic, and this irony in turn makes it even more annoyingly hip. I wasn't sure if the stereotypes were a criticism of hipsters, or if this was an ironically-vain hipster attempt at self-appraisal. Either way, I found the film as effortlessly hateable as hipsters themselves, with both employing an vapid subversiveness that deliberately invites scorn. This phenomenon makes post-ironic works like #omgimtrending inherently hard to like, despite their obvious entertainment value.

So, whilst the film is, on one level, enjoyable to watch and very well put together, I just found everything about it on an ideological level to be too much of a turn off. Whether it's shallow or a supreme work of mockery ceases to matter if each resembles the other so closely that they're completely indistinguishable.

DIRECTOR: Jorge Enrique Ponce
WRITER/SOURCE: Jorge Enrique Ponce
KEY ACTORS: Patrick Alan Davis, Olivia Harewood, Rya Meyers, Lizzy Davis, Sterling Price, Tony Calle

RELATED TEXTS
- Jorge Enrique Ponce has also made the following short films... Meatshake: A Musical, The Awakening of Spring and My Boy.
- For more hipster-orientated films, see also Juno and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World .