2 out of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Fooled myself
Andybe from ,
17th September, 2008
I could have sworn I read a recommendation for this film school project from a reputable critic. However, when I went back to double check after watching, I found that the review wasn't the praise I remembered. Old age, perhaps, but clearly my mind playing tricks on me. The Puffy Chair is more or less a road trip featuring 3 20-something adolescents: 1 who wants to grow up, 1 who thinks he has grown up, and 1 who thinks he's in touch with his inner self and has perhaps risen above growing up. The premise is good enough - buy an overstuffed chair for dad's birthday 'just like the one he had when we were kids' and drive cross-country through 'Deliverance' land to personally present it - all on a budget as low as this film's. Plenty of potential for humour, actually, but in the end it doesn't deliver outside of a chuckle here and there. The best scene, in my opinion, was the standoff in the furniture warehouse when the Puffy Chair didn't quite live up to expectations. Unfortunately the scene followed suit on the expectations front, leaving us dangling and wasting the opportunity for a really witty exchange. This low-energy rendering of post-collegiate self-(non)discovery doesn't have enough punch to overcome the wearying script in which the juvenile dialogue starts to beat you down from the very first minute, continuing relentlessly throughout the film. I simply lost interest. To summarize: I've seen worse, but that doesn't make The Puffy Chair good. There is a silver lining for those of you who, like me, have a masochistic tendency to finish what you started even if only to punish yourself for poor judgment or faulty memory... With a runtime under 90 minutes the pain is short-lived . I clearly need to pay more attention to the reviews I read.
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