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Now Online: Jillian Mayer and Lucas Leyva’s Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke
One of the most brilliantly out-there shorts of recent years, Jillian Mayer and Lucas Leyva’s Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke has finally made it online, and you’d be a fool not to check it out. It’s the film that put the pair on the map when it played at the festival circuit in 2012, and then later justified their inclusion our “25 New Faces” list last year.
Calling the film “both very smart and gleefully nuts,” this is what Scott wrote on Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke in his profile of Mayer and Leyva for the 25:
It’s a bit of a cliché, an American independent filmmaker making a film inspired by a classic French art film. But Jillian Mayer’s Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke, which played Sundance and SXSW this year, is a work of such whacked-out originality and manic invention that it exists in a cinematic alternate universe far away from all the Truffaut-aping first-timers. Calling itself a “modern Miami adaptation” of Chris Marker’s 1962 meditation on time travel, love and mortality, La Jetée, Uncle Luke finds Luther Campbell of 2 Live Crew as the last man on earth, fighting for the First Amendment and against nuclear radiation, all within the cosmic slop of Mayer’s cartoon-inspired installations.
