Black Mountain Poets

Black Mountain Poets is an improvisational comedy, that will delight some, though it is not my cup of tea.

What can I say? I walked out on this one folks. The premise is fairly clear. A couple down on-their-luck friends steal the car that belongs to the poets, The Wilding Sisters. The sisters are on their way to a poetry retreat, and the pair decide to pose as the sisters whilst knowing nothing of poetry. As a premise it has a lot of potential to be a really entertaining watch. However though improv comedy can be used to great effect, I’m thinking of Christopher Guest films, this film seems to lack the discipline required to simply cut the fat. At two hours long, all I can say is the first forty-five minutes felt like two hours.

I think the major reason that Black Mountain Poets fails, is that it is not an laugh out loud comedy. It is funny, and I felt a generally sense of bemusement, but that is not what I am looking for in comedy fare. In some ways it approaches mumble core films, but rather than being hysterical it only elicited grins from me.

That being said, the dialogue failure is one in which it does not do what movie dialogue is supposed to do. In the movies, everyone sounds funnier, cooler, and smarter than we do in real life. It is a heightened conversational hyper-reality that makes cinema entertaining. The problem for me with Black Mountain Poets is that it is only as funny as I am with my own friends. As we all do, we laugh a lot with our friends in the moment of an experience, but when we try to recount it we usually end up telling the person “you had to be there.” Black Mountain Poets does not give the sense of immediacy found that in that hyper-reality and I did not feel as though I was there, but watching the document of a story in which I had no part. I guess I had to be there…

I am sure some folks will love this film, but for my money, I have say that it was a missfire. I certainly could be wrong, and the full feature might redeem the dull opening, but it would take some convincing to get me to see it again. I would love to hear another opinion in the comments below.