★★★½           By Ambrose Vok                    September 8, 2090

Movies are back! We on Earth are currently living off a weekly ration of three cans of baked beans and half a Nature Valley bar and anyone who lives on a moon or an asteroid has almost certainly had to relocate to a refugee station, but the movies are back goddamnit and that’s a victory. We can get back to work. For my higher-ranking colleagues that means they have to endure obnoxious propaganda films and write nuanced and thoughtful pieces about their political and epistemic implications. I, as the junior critic of the Pondering Cosmo Film Desk, instead get assigned to review a film that has inexplicably been released in theaters in the midst of a brutal war because its producers seem to have absolutely no idea what to do with it. The important critics get depressing and problematic films about the war we cannot escape from for an instant. I get to see Spatula DeMoron Ruins Christmas. I am winning.

The first thing you have to understand about Spatula DeMoron Ruins Christmas, written and directed by Saskatchewanian performer Mickey Indibiddi, is that nothing about it makes sense. Any expectations of coherence and logic have to be left at the door; they will be of no use in the space this film ventures. The film might as well have been designed by consulting a Ouija board, or by an extrasolar being doing their best to approximate what human life is like. Ordinarily such features would be a major problem for a film, but not here. At a time like this, nonsense is more than welcome. Look outside and see how far so-called reason and logical thinking have gotten us. When regular life has become so oppressing, what can really help is something so bewildering, so far outside of our most basic notions of how things work, that we are forced to break out of our ordinary rhythms and embrace lunacy. That is what Spatula DeMoron Ruins Christmas offers us: a much-needed escape from the “sensible” world and into one that operates entirely by its own rules, if by any at all.

So who is Spatula DeMoron and how does he ruin Christmas? Our main character in the film has the birth name of Demetrious but is called Spatula because he has one sticking out from his forehead, the result of a childhood accident in which he misread the instructions on a box of Hot Pockets (the details are left to our imagination). This fact about him might also provide some insight into his last name, which references him not exactly being the brightest bulb. Nevertheless, Spatula has a good heart and is played endearingly by Devin Riggleman, even if the performance can lean a bit too much Simple Jack. As a token of gratitude for his loved ones, this Chaplinesque hero conspires to surprise his town of Towntown with the best Christmas ever. As the title might indicate, this does not go well.

The details of the caper Spatula goes about pulling are hard to parse out because it is never quite clear how the world of the film operates. Among the actions taken by Spatula in his pursuit of the perfect Christmas is making a visit to the Bee Store, that being a store that sells bees. One dollar gets you one bee. Why is there such a store on Main Street in Towntown? Take your best guess. Another part of Spatula’s scheme involves a visit to the Kidney Sultan, an old man who sells wisdom for five dollars. The catch is that you have to buy the wisdom blindly, so you have no idea what kind of wisdom you are going to get and if it will be helpful at all. The wisdom that Spatula receives: “If you walk around with oil on your socks, you will probably slip a lot, but if you have shoes on, you will probably slip less.” What bearing does this wisdom have on anything in the rest of the film? Or indeed, anything at all? Again, your guess is as good as mine. I assure you that having seen the film does not help to answer the question at all.

If you watch Spatula DeMoron Ruins Christmas the way you would a normal movie – that is, expecting causality within the plot and thinking about what you are seeing – you are going to be very frustrated. But if you can take the film’s cue not to concern yourself with such things and accept what the film offers, you will probably have a good time with it. No, it doesn’t matter why there is a bear running around howling out 19^th-century romantic poetry! There just is. Isn’t that crazy? What fun! There are probably some who would take this review as an advocation to “turn your brain off” and not think critically about the film one is watching. I disagree: the first step towards any decent critical evaluation of a film is that one takes the film on its own terms, that one judges the film based on how well it accomplishes what it is trying to do, and watches the film in the way that it is intended to be watched. Spatula DeMoron Ruins Christmas is clearly not a film that wants its viewer to watch it with a mind towards consistency and logic. The film is designed, whether consciously or not, to thwart logic at every turn, like a cinematic “I Am the Walrus.” Criticizing the film, then, on grounds of its being dumb or not making sense is a failure to take the film as it is, instead imposing on the film a framework for quality it never meant to appeal to. There is much to be appreciated in Spatula DeMoron Ruins Christmas, but in order to appreciate it, one has to be willing to let go of their preconceptions of what good movies are supposed to be.

Serious, important movies certainly have their place in the world, and heaven knows there is no shortage of people trying to make them. But films like this ought to be celebrated as well for their outright refusal to be about any of those things. There is lots of covert pressure placed on media nowadays to stand for something, to make a statement, specifically one that its viewers already comfortably agree with. And while many admirable films do this, the widespread adoption of a moralizing mandate for every film to give a political message tends to produce a landscape of art at once overwhelming and vapid. I suspect that if we had a greater acceptance for pure nonsense in our media, the world might be a chiller place. To that end, do yourself a favor and, if your circumstances allow you to, go see Spatula DeMoron Ruins Christmas sometime. It won’t give you any profound commentary on the world, but that is the point. We are already inundated with proclamations of our imminent doom, whether from the war or elsewhere. This film will take your mind off of that for a couple hours. It is much harder to worry about the possibility of a magnetonuclear strike when you’re watching Spatula running around Towntown with his hive purchased from the Bee Store trying to shake down the Duke of Kung Fu for a boneless skeleton.