Puffy Chairs & Disconnected Dots

If you live in TO you have a chance over the next couple days to see this movie The Puffy Chair at the Bloor, which I highly recommend. I laughed all the way through it – not because there were any ba-dum-bum jokes, but because of the way the characters talked and the things they chose to say and because everyone on the screen totally seemed like a real person and real people are funny things. It reminded me a little of The Squid and the Whale, one of my favourite movies of the past year or so – not in in content or anything, but just in sensibility, and in the nature of the laughs.

What’s it about? Well, if you must know, it’s about a typical NYC smug indie dude (his band busted up so now he’s a would-be booking agent) who’s taking a road trip to see his parents in Atlanta, with a detour along the way to pick up a puffy chair that he’s bought for his father on eBay. And he ends up bringing along his girlfriend, mainly so she won’t be mad at him, and they stop to visit his brother, who’s maybe, ah, not quite cut out for this world, and they end up bringing him along too, and they have various misadventures, some of them relating to the puffy chair, and the indie dude and his girlfriend rub at their troubled relationship until it scrapes their skin raw.

That’s all you get from me. But you should really see it. And this nice Of Montreal song is on the soundtrack. Dig that glam disco hippie indie-pop sound.

• Of Montreal, “Disconnect the Dots” (buy here)