Rating: 14/20
Plot: Nina Conti and her little monkey travel to a a place called Venthaven which is like a cemetery for ventriloquist dummies whose owners have died. She takes along a few of her mentor's puppet's, first spending some time at a ventriloquist convention. And I believe she and one of the puppets (the one sporting wood throughout the trip) actually "do it."
There's a "Distant Voice Expert" in this named Nacho Estrada. Seriously, how badass a name is that? If my name was Nacho Estrada, I wouldn't spend any time at all with puppets. I'd just walk around referring to myself in the third person, often in a menacing way.
As tempted as you might be to see this movie based on the poster, believing that there really might be some girl-on-puppet action, I don't recall anything like that happening. But there is a very strange scene where she disrobes the old lady puppet and takes it with her into the hotel pool. That's the kind of people you're dealing with here--these ventriloquists. I enjoy puppets more than most adult, but I'm pretty sure I'd be uncomfortable hanging around with a ventriloquist. Can they be trusted? Do I dare look at the human mouth while the puppet is talking? If insulted, do I take a swing at the puppet or the ventriloquist? It's just too much to think about.
I liked Conti fine. She's maybe one of the cutest female ventriloquists out there, and she's really good at her craft. Her main puppet--a monkey--is about the most boring ventriloquist dummies that I've ever seen. It looks like something you could buy at a dollar store or something. Conti's funny enough with her monkey, but I liked her versatility with the other puppets more, a kind of exploration as she tried to find their individual voices and personalities. And there was this idea running throughout the movie, from the work of Conti's mentor to all the other ventriloquists, that these dummies are really a device to make the complete insanity of the artist acceptable. I liked that. There was even a quote--"Creation and insanity are almost the same thing." Of course, the stuff at the ventriloquist convention was fun for me. Like most Americans, I'm easily amused, and watching the creativity and trickery of a lot of those artists was great. And you just know they're all checking out each other's mouths. The whole thing builds to the trip to puppet heaven with all those sad-looking dummies without voices. There was something touching about the whole thing.
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