Shut Up Little Man

Imagine, if you will, a couple of cartoonist Harvey Pikars living in the next apartment in 1987 San Fran; only these two aren't savage cartoonists and don't have Harvey's wit or wide-ranging interest in humanity. They're just a couple of aging men, roommates, one gay one straight.

Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure is the strangest documentary you'll see this year or almost any because nothing really happens except that filmmakers Mitchell D and Eddie Lee Sausage tape their two old neighbors, who, when drunk, verbally abuse each with the same repetitive expletives, the most memorable being Ray's, which is the first part of the film's title.

Two elements of the experience are worth noting: a viral fame came by way of a world-wide network of lending tape organizations (remember, no You-Tube or Internet), and talk of litigation about privacy rights appears and then vanishes.

These two topics could have been the heft needed to counterbalance the repetition of Ray and Pete's rants, which are strangely uninteresting except for our voyeuristic interest in loser humanity and the sheer banality of their lives, perhaps reminding viewers of their basest moments of stupidity and anger against a loved-one.

The doc is peopled by geeks who spend a large part of their lives pursuing these tapes as if they were the private conversations of Charlie Sheen. Wait! That's the answer: We love the salacious, degraded moments of someone else's life because we feel superior or we need to know that others have the same weird moments we do. I must admit to a fascination with the rhythmic patterns of their language, poetry from the tenement but not T.S. Eliot.

Its lowness mystifies me, an art house fan, and yet attracts me, as a winsome prostitute might. I know she's not part of my life, but for some reason I'm compelled to invite her in.