Written and Directed by
Patrick O’Leary

Starring
Nicole Holovinsky
Erik Nilsen

One day I saw Michael Snow’s Wavelength, and was very unimpressed. I got it into my head that I could make an experimental film that was shorter than that, more entertaining, and more meaningful. Using the same structure, Pixel Poppers is a multi-layered commentary on Television, and on experimental film itself. I can’t sum it up any better than this review below by Steven Babitsky:

Patrick O’Leary, serving as lenfant terrible for Generation E! (as in E! Entertainment, or Ennui as the film would put forth), concocts a devastating amalgam of spiritless sitcoms playing out as banal, broken records. A twisted, digitally stretched, upgraded brother to Bruce Conners 1969 A Movie, Pixel Poppers utilizes clips of B-TV shows as opposed to B movies.”While the effect is similar as it makes one ponder how and why one watches imagery, the conclusions differ. Conner’s film proposes that people are entertained by the base, the primitive. O’Learys film reflects that people are entertained (not even entertained, but satisfied and pacified and hypnotized) by the intellectually void, as well as repetition (or reruns, as would be the case). Technically, the film deals mostly with slo-motion, repetition, and reversals. These tricks put the editor as chief architect, again likening O’Leary to Conner.

We, the viewer, are at the mercy of post-production. As such, throughout, the viewer is constantly hoping for some drastic change, some creative act by some unseen hand to lift the film from its cycle. These edits become analogous with channel surfing, with wavering consciousness. Though these forces are present, they cannot raise the material and make the past dozen minutes into footage that truly needed to be seen.

Paradoxically, this is the point of the film: these programs pleasure us only to lobotomy. The title itself, thrown out as a startling jaccuse at the end, casts an aspersion to link the viewer with a drug addict. O’Leary splashes icy water in the face of the viewer, the listener for whom a laugh track on a sitcom has become a soothing, brain-numbing opiate.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself!

DVD

- Full length film

- Full-screen TV-show reel

- Hard copy of the review by Steven Babitsky

• Father and Son, 2007, 5 min.
• Reflection, 2006, 11 min.
• The Vig and the Juice, 2006, 25 min.
• Pixel Poppers, 2005, 12 min.
• On a Field of Black and White, 2004, 6 min.
• Even in Death, 2004, 16 min.
• She's Coming, 2003, 10 min.
• What You Wish For, 2002, 10 min.