Benten's The Guatemalan Handshake.

I'll be honest. I've been holding these pointers for the day that Todd Rohal's The Guatemalan Handshake exits that right-hand column over there - so that this splendid cover might grace the front page here for another seven days.

Filmmaker runs David Gordon Green's essay that's just one of many extras Benten's packed into this release: "We meet people with funny names and see images that make us laugh and snap the elastic of our underpants, but the root of this film's strength is the sad beauty of loneliness and loss that sneaks inside our heads when we lose our power.... Subject now for discovery by ancillary markets, alternative distribution, word-of-mouth recommendation and happenstance exposure, I predict that this film will not only endure the savage bitch of festival rejection and media neglect, but will find itself the harness of inspiration for artists to come."

Updated through 5/11.

"Here is a film that operates on the same logic that compelled Benjamin Franklin to recommend the turkey, rather than the eagle, as a symbol for the newly formed United States; it holds no illusions about itself, and its idea of majesty is decidedly against the grain," writes David Lowery.

"Take Richard Linklater, Harmony Korine and David Lynch, combine them into one man, shackle them to strange, small-town America, and inject them with thoughts of short shorts, strange characters, and lots of atomic buzzing - then, just maybe, you can begin to imagine what's in store for you with this film," writes Monika Bartyzel at Cinematical.

"Thinking about the film just a little bit more after one viewing, what The Guatemalan Handshake may resemble is not any other film, but a smaller, less rambling version of a story by Kurt Vonnegut," suggests Peter Nellhaus.

Earlier: Michael Atkinson for the IFC.

Update: "In order to write about The Guatemalan Handshake, one must contemplate inventing a new language," proposes Michael Tully at Hammer to Nail. "For that is exactly what this movie does. To call it a dream isn’t quite appropriate. The illogic at work here is not of the sleepy subconscious. Rather, it is of the youthful, nostalgic, foggily awakened mind."

Update, 5/7: "[T]he whole thing sometimes feels like a not particularly interesting indiewood quirk show, but Rohal manages a tone of vague melancholy (and a few laugh-out-loud offhand bits), and it's possible to see all the weirdness as an honest, sideways grasp at magic," writes the L Magazine's Mark Asch.

Update, 5/10: Online viewing tip. Bilge Ebiri has a short from the package, "the brief but strangely haunting Fifty States, created by the film's grip, Jared Larson, and composed entirely of his dad's narrating a speedy montage of snapshots taken all over the country. Director Rohal himself calls it 'the closest to a motivational film as I could hope to find.'"

Update, 5/11: Paul Matwychuk: "I think The Guatemalan Handshake might be my favourite movie so far this year, and yet I’m kind of at a loss to explain why I liked it so much."

Posted by dwhudson at May 6, 2008 5:34 AM