Woolly Thinking

The Mammoth (2009)

Starring: Gael Maria von Sayers, Michelle Williams, Krull Directed by: Lucas Tannerson Rating: NR Genre: Serial Drama Other

Review Like the temptation just before the last temptation of Jesus, I so wanted that tingly, ants-in-your-pants falling-in-love feeling from Lucas Tannerson's latest. Instead I left the theater feeling like I once felt after a dream where I was wearing my sister's underwear, and she was still in it. Tannerson ("Show Me Yours", "Fingerlings") manages to weave 345 completely separate and totally distinct storylines into a coherent whole that slowly, then suddenly reveals what God meant when he invented the platypus. Gael Maria von Sayers ("Loving Me a Dead Woman", "Los Dos Novias de Los Dos Hermanos Sacerdotes") is excellent as an absent-minded archaeologist who, while in the midst of reconstructing an ancient Giant Cowasaurus, remembers that he's left his daughter with Michelle Williams. The ensuing tragedy seems just a little off, like a bar of cream cheese with a small patch of blue-green fuzz. Not inedable, but not really appetizing. Tannerson is a skeeballer who valiantly tries for the 50 hole, but ends up with a fistful of nothing. That said, it's great to see the fabulous Charles Ruggles again, even if only as a bearskin rug.