Michael Fairbanks
Buddy comedies centered on male friendship have become a bit more rare in recent years. It’s been difficult to depict reality in a funny way. A great deal of men have become so radicalized from the internet that any escapades they may get up to would not be fodder for anything funny. Studios have no idea what to do with it. Thankfully, in recent months, there seems to be a wave of independent films attempting to pave the way for a more tender era of masculinity. Recently, Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie wove time travel antics and real world pranks into a tender story about two guys chasing a dream that is passing them by. Now, we have Plantman & Blondie: A Dress Up Gang Film, an uber-relaxed and low-stakes tale of thieves in East LA who want to care for neglected houseplants. Similar to Nirvanna, this comes to us from an online sketch group, but the humor is even gentler. A sincere tale of neighborhood connection in a world that is desperate to isolate us from each other.
Plantman & Blondie: A Dress Up Gang Film centers on Cory (Cory Loykasek), a parking garage administrator who works from home. His boss Neil (Kevin Nealon) asks him to get a houseplant for his Zoom background. He stops by a local nursery run by Frankie (Frankie Quiñones) to get a fiddle and is shortly after visited by a mysterious man (Donny Divanian) who insists that he take care of it. We learn that this individual is “plantman,” a local thief who has been lifting wilting plants from people’s homes, after he accidentally crashes his bike into Cory while making an escape. Cory gets advice from his fresh out of prison friend Fox (Kirk Fox) that he needs to get Plantman to sign a Chat-GPT written contract to free him of liability. In exchange for signing it, Plantman asks Cory to be his wheelman for one week, and the two become fast friends.
There is a heavy spotlight on technology in the first act of Plantman & Blondie: A Dress Up Gang Film. There’s a great deal of chatter about AI being omnipresent. A group of plantman’s victims (Kevin Camia, Christian Duguay and Brent Weinbach) meet up on Nextdoor to form a gang that will hunt down the thieves. Fox describes Chat-GPT with such resigned reverence, “just go with chat, seems to be reliable.” It’s an air of paranoia that makes the blossoming friendship between Cory and Donny feel radical and healing. Sure, these guys are breaking into people’s homes, but nobody is becoming impoverished by losing their houseplant. The sense of play that emerges as these two take on these micro-heists feels like two teenage boys discovering their freedom and making true connections for the first time. The film never becomes juvenile, though. Loykasek and Divanian are winning and easygoing screen presences who are funny while being relaxed and mature. It’s such a strange and refreshing dynamic for a film that is so unapologetically silly. The film’s charm and setting is also distinctly East LA, which was a delight as someone who lives in Highland Park.
There’s an undeniable Tubi-Ness to the aesthetic of Plantman & Blondie: A Dress Up Gang Film. The film was clearly shot on the fly in East LA with minimal crew. It’s not polished and goofy music from Daniel Long often sounds like royalty free tracks. However, this lack of glitz gives Plantman & Blondie a very specific charm once you get on the wavelength. This is a local production about a group of neighbors and it feels like a feature length version of something you might see at your community film festival. It also makes any of the film’s “action sequences,” particularly a late second act chase between the Nextdoor boys and Plantman & Blondie feel like minor miracles. It is a film that dares to tell its story how much the seams show.
As Hollywood curdles under the weight of mergers and productions leaving the city, independent film has become more important than ever. When I watch Plantman & Blondie: A Dress Up Gang Film I’m reminded of what people are able to create when they are simply able to show up. In order to take back this medium from these emotionless corporations who are only concerned with wringing out box office and streaming subscriptions, stories about locals facing minor but deeply human problems will help us connect to one another. Perhaps two lonely souls will meet for the first time as the only two people in the theater to see Plantman & Blondie: A Dress Up Gang Film. This may not be a film that reaches everyone, I cannot imagine where it’ll end up being distributed. Hopefully somewhere that will get in front of enough people who will become inspired to share their oddball friendships through some outlandish adventure.
