Hold It Like A Baby (Michael and Tina Love, 2009): U.S.A.

Reviewed by Kathleen Amboy.  Viewed at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara Film Festival.

Outrageously funny is the only way to describe my reaction to an extremely low budget film that premiered at the SBMOA on Sunday night.  Wilbur Waskowicks is a local (Santa Barbara) shrink that specializes in anger management.  He has a spectrum of clients that consult him regularly and his mantra for dealing with anger is to “hold It Like a baby” and embrace it.  One of his clients has a weight problem and anger issues, and desperately wants to lose the weight in order to find a good sex partner.  She prefers surgical treatment, but the good doctor advises her to exercise and eat healthy.  After weeks of this routine with no success, she erupts in anger much like a volcano and asks Wilbur , “Why should I hold it like a baby, am I expected to nurse it too?”  Waskowicks encounters one lunatic after another, but is not above reproach himself.  He thinks nothing of seducing his married office assistant, and then dumps her immediately for someone else.

After dealing with one “asshole” too many, Wilbur begins to short circuit and in juvenile fashion makes prank phone calls to clients from a phone booth (so his number can’t be traced) calling them an “asshole” and then hanging up.  Foolishly out-of-control, he then pits two “assholes” against each other, and ends up getting shot in the ass himself.

Invoking one with the feeling of being a fly on the wall, this ridiculous film has a running time of 1 hour and 22 minutes, of which 95% of the audience (myself included) laughed continually for 1 hour and 20 minutes!  This was the World Premiere screening and I wasn’t about to miss it – I had to run up State St. from the Metro 4 screening of Dim Sum Funeral (Anna Chi, 2008) which had Q & A with Anna Chi afterwards that I also had no intention of missing.  Arriving at the SBMOA at show time, I was dismayed to find such an extremely long line filled with impatient patrons.  But I got in, and I was one of the last to make it (leaving a long line behind me).  Michael and Tina Love both wrote and directed this highly irreverent comedy that was shot in and around downtown Santa Barbara.  At Q & A time my question to Michael and Tina was how did they come up with the “Asshole” song?  Their reply of course was “over the internet.”