WORLD PREMIERE @ 2010 INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM / NETHERLANDS.

2010 TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL / NEW YORK, USA

2010 GUADALAJARA FILM FESTIVAL / MEXICO

2010 SYDNEY INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL / AUSTRAILIA

2010 ZLÍN FILM FESTIVAL / CZECH REPLUBLIC

2010 SEATTLE FILM FESTIVAL, USA

2010 EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, UK

2010 MONTREAL FESTIVAL DU NOUVEAU CINEMA, CANADA

2010 MILAN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, ITALY

2010 ABYCINE FESTIVAL DE CINE DE ALBACETE, SPAIN

2010 MORELIA FILM FESTIVAL, MEXICO.

2010 MAR DEL PLATA FILM FESTIVAL, ARGENTINA

2010 STOCKHOLM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, SWEDEN

2011 DOWNTOWN INDEPENDENT - THEATRICAL, LOS ANGELES, USA.

Barlam and Natalia are siblings separated by what would seem to be only a few years. The family home, in a sprawling, yucca-studded 1950s-style subdivision on the far end of El Paso, is cluttered with Catholic ephemera and serves as the de facto crash pad for a host of chain-smoking, Guitar Hero-addicted deadbeats. Chief among them is Natalia's bedwetting other half, Zack, a slovenly gringo all too happy to take advantage of the lackadaisical lifestyle afforded by the girl's mysterious addiction and rent-free accommodations. Despite what seems to be something of a preoccupation with their parents' apparent divorce (at least on the part of Barlam), their mother is curiously absent. Barlam, when not on the receiving end of abuse at the hands of his grocery co-workers, spends his time cycling around the city, paying visits to his therapist father (Angel Marcelo Rodriguez Chevrez) to quiz him on details of the ancient divorce (not to mention taking advantage of some presumably off-the-clock advice), and obsessively stock-piling multiples of the only model car for which he has any penchant: the '67 Mercury Cougar which had been the family car during happier times. He soon discovers a look-alike teenager and, convinced that the boy (Rikardo Rodriguez Lopez) must be the product of some unknown indiscretion on his mother's part, coerces his sister into virtually abducting the youngster in order to glean the key to the apparent mystery. As the chaos of his life accelerates, Barlam is pressured into a liaison with an indifferent prostitute (Becky Vigil), the disastrous results of which may or may not spell doom for the deluded pushover. Subsequently, he embarks on a disorienting series of ill-advised trysts, descending into a shadowy murk of unprovoked violence, transgendered experimentation and mirage-like anomaly.

Much of The Sentimental Engine Slayer straddles the line between fantasy and reality, as much a puzzle for the viewer to decipher as it seems to be for Barlam. Indeed, his life appears to be a contradictory muddle of fledgling awkwardness and cocksure bar talk; of naïve vulnerability and knee-jerk aggression. When at long last he seems to have found his footing with regards to the intimate relationships he craves, he haphazardly sabotages himself in a literal bloodbath of unresolved hostility, uncorking a lifetime of pent-up rage both shocking and perplexing. It is only as this moment that Barlam's mother finally appears, ostensibly a figment of his imagination, yet doubtless the matriarch of the household whether in her natural state, or that of the mysterious circuitry at the core of the home's electronic brain to which she lends her name. Climaxing with Barlam's moonlight mission to dispose of the fruits of his evident psychosis, the film presents a paradoxical twist perhaps only understood with repeated viewing.

written by Sonny Kay

TRIBECA 2010: THE SENTIMENTAL ENGINE SLAYER Review

by Ben Umstead

https://screenanarchy.com/2010/04/tribeca-2010-the-sentimental-engine-slayer-review.html

Opening with the strangling of a prostitute, and ending with something of an unwitting role reversal for our protagonist, THE SENTIMENTAL ENGINE SLAYER is a psychosexual nightmare leeching off of David Lynch existentialism... Or... by way of Jean Cocteau and LSD, a tragicomic spin on slacker/scenster woes. Whatever way you look at it, Omar Rodriguez Lopez has cut out an ambitious section of the cinematic cloth to draw upon, with this, his feature debut where he also writes, produces, scores and stars.

Though a lot of what he does may feel like rudimentary scribbles, doodling fragments of fragments, to the point of where the film gets truly uncomfortable in its shit, consider it like this; It is kind of like being a drug mule with a very mixed bag of narcotics shoved up your rear. It's painful, and maybe you don't want to do it, but man, that rainbow colored frenzy is going to offer a lot of possibilities. And that is what Rodriguez Lopez presents here - a lot of possibilities, and a lot of promise; the film showcases an intrinsic and bold cinematic knack and know-how that is not yet molded, nor wielded with finesse, but is there nonetheless.

And so it goes...  

El Paso, Texas twentysomething, Barlam sees himself as something of a social cripple, wearily traversing the florescent strip mall dichotomies and aimless grocery store clerk mythologies of the American Southwest. He's got friends and hobbies. Well kinda... He lives with his younger sister, addict Nati, and her gringo slouch of a boyfriend, Zack, in the house their parents seemingly abandoned when they split up years ago. He collects and builds model cars. Well really just one car over and over again: A 1967 Mercury Cougar.
And he's got friends... well at least there's that Puerto Rican High School kid he keeps stalking because he looks just like 'B'. And yeah there's his manger at the discount store, Oscar; the older guy with swagger to spare.
Boredom is already well past set in for Barlam, and now's the time for action, or else...

I suppose at this point (since some of you are thinking it) I should mention, yup, the Rodriguez Lopez here is "that" Rodriguez Lopez of the band The Mars Volta; a band I've heard of, but never heard. Apparently a downright musical acrobat, teetering on avant garde/progressive rock what-have-yous, I can't truly vouch for the music, but Rodriguez Lopez seems to carry the same tenacity he has in his recording career on over to his filmmaking.

Despite what sounds like a conventional set up, things are clearly weird from the get go, thanks to the unsettled, bouncy nature of the narrative technique - We may stick with one scene till it almost seems through and then suddenly shift away to an event that happened before or after (or maybe never happened at all) perhaps not returning to resolve the previous scene for a good five, ten or twenty minutes. And even then it may just be another neurotic blip on the radar of Barlam's distraught being, before we are whisked away again, backed by an incessant wall of sound, which drowns, drives, pulses through the picture like a techno, atomic jack hammer.

Rodriguez Lopez as Barlam himself, balances quite a feat, and while the performance isn't anything to scream about, what he does with the slightest suggestion is affective, readily backed by his own psychotropic directorial toolbox. Barlam seesaws between a harmless, ineffectual youth on a quest for existential and sexual deliverance, and a man tussling with the psychotic advent of a borderline incestuous, sexually ambiguous, madman.  .

It is clear then that SENTIMENTAL ENGINE SLAYER refuses to be anything expected. It is true DIY filmmaking, with all the pitfalls of self-indulgence willingly intact. And a film ready to take risks no matter what the outcome may be.

The Stranger | Seattle SIFF 2010 The Reviews

https://www.thestranger.com/features/2010/05/20/4106450/siff-2010-the-reviews

The Sentimental Engine Slayer

United States, 2010 (97 min.)

Dir. Omar Rodriguez-Lopez

This has all the pedigree of a terrible vanity project—starring and written, directed, produced, and scored by musician Omar Rodriguez-Lopez (guitarist of At the Drive-In and the Mars Volta)­—but it's in fact an impressive debut film from an apparent artistic polymath. Barlam (Rodriguez-Lopez) is an indeterminately young man enduring a delayed coming of age in the druggy, David Lynchian underworld of El Paso, Texas. Barlam might be murdering prostitutes (shades of the mass murders of Ciudad Juarez, which At the Drive-In drew attention to with the video for their 2001 single "Invalid Litter Dept."). He might be sleeping with his sister. But events unfold out of sequence, the imaginary bleeds into the real, and the effect is entirely disorienting. Adding to the unreality is the ghost of Barlam's dead mother, some hazy Hispanic-American mysticism, and characters who exist only in the half-life/light of computer screens, as well as Rodriguez-Lopez's expert use of hallucinatory auditory effects. (ERIC GRANDY)

Sentimental Engine Slayer, The  

by The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre

http://thelastexit.net/cinema/main.html

With so many surreal female coming-of-age films, I suppose it was about time a male version appeared. But why did it have to be so sleazy and violent? Barlam is a nervous virgin with various sexual or violent fears and fantasies. He plays with model cars, yearns to get laid, has a drug-addict sister and strange relationship with her boyfriend and his long-haired boss, hangs out with a goth-pimp and his whores to get his sister's drugs, and stalks a doppelgänger who hangs out in his neighbourhood. The movie shows all this in non-linear sliced up scenes, a structure that has no point other than to further confuse and disorient us in addition to the fact that half of the scenes only take place in his head in the first place. A story of a first-time sexual encounter that turned out to be with a transsexual becomes a personal encounter with a clown-faced cross-dresser that may or may not be real, bursts of violence and murder constantly fade into the background of his reality, and narrated tone poems add to the color. Mostly tiresome, confusing and grimy, but with an overall, minimally interesting, dream-logic effect.