NEW WEST Review

Dildos, like farts, are always funny and there are plenty of both in writer/director/editor Jordan Mears debut feature(ish) film, New West. Well, to be honest, I don’t know that I can confidently say I remember any particular instances of flatuation but trust me - there are plenty of gags involving dicks, dildos, and...rubber horse masks? Different function for the word "rubber" than you might have expected given the previous few sentences, huh? Well, that's what makes Mears and company's trip down South all the more enjoyable: it's mostly unpredictable (and often pretty funny to boot). Whether in sight, sound, or purely by association the gags built around these "lewd" objects shaped like erect penises used for sexual stimulation along with a particularly sturdy rubber horse mask, New West is a frothy and filthy little excursion that takes sincere pleasure in delivering what so few trips to the cinema tend to offer these days in that it is a pure, unadulterated broad comedy. Speaking of unexpected word functions regarding this movie - don't expect to see "pure" in the same sentence as New West anywhere else. 

With the shift to streaming and the expansion of platforms for which content is being produced comedy is the genre that has suffered the most given different flavors of the genre have each found their niche in different silos of the culture, meeting the needs of multiple segments of the population, but no longer bringing us together as they once did so casually (or frequently). Now, I'm not saying New West is here to right the ship of the broad comedy or even that, should it see the light of day beyond the festival circuit, it will be for everybody but what I am saying is that it demonstrates there is a hunger for the communal comedy experience once again after the onslaught of negative world events and abundance of bad news that has hammered citizens of the planet from every direction for what feels like the better part of a decade now. With New West, Mears along with co-writer, composer, and actor Coty Greenwood have crafted what is clearly something they knew would make themselves laugh, something that they had a grand time concocting, and something that - while sometimes vile - clearly has good intentions and aspirations given those don't seem to stretch for anything more than bringing a group of friends and/or strangers together to make them laugh.