31 / Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure / Matthew Bate

I kind of forgot to write about Shut Up Little Man when I actually watched it last week, so unlike most films which I write about on the day of watching, this one has had almost a week to swill around in my brain, not that it really needed that. Shut Up Little Man is a documentary about two friends who in the 80's lived in a shitty apartment in San Francisco and ended recording their neighbours arguments which eventually went viral. You can se exactly why these amazing little tapes of these two drunken men arguing got so popular, because they are absolutely hilarious. It feels wrong to use terms like 'going viral' to refer to something in the 1980's as that is seen as being such a new thing that was born out of the internet, but this film goes to show it's not. These thing's went viral in the old analog way, tapes being handed around, then people just using them as inspiration to make things, zines, comics, plays, everything. The film does a really good job of documenting the way these tapes managed to disseminate into this society and there's something abou the aesthetic of spreading something in this way that just has such a great romanticism about it.

Not only does Shut Up Little Man manage to do a really great job of showing these aspect of the story, there is also the other, more personal side of these people that where recorded arguing. The filmakers don't shy away from questioning the morality of these poor people becoming counter culture stars, they try to track them down and have discussions with them but most of them are dead and gone or just don't want anything to do with it, ut you have to respect the openness of the film. Overall it is ust a really entertaining watch though, and as someone who has a real love of that late 80's early 90's american subculture, I loved it.