Hardboiled

Few cinematic genres endure like the urban crime drama- or rely more on stereotypes. Hardboiled satirizes the language and macho posturing of the police procedural by placing it in a world of stop-motion animated food, recontextualizing the violence and power dynamics underpinning the mythology of the iconoclastic anti-hero in the most absurd way. Detectives Harry and Callaham, an egg and a grilled ham steak, tangle with their own boss, the Knishoner, as readily as they take on the criminal underworld while investigating a slew of disturbing eggicides. The tropes of fighting crime against a landscape of urban grit are comically skewered as our rogue detectives traverse the porous border between the law and the code of the streets. (Woodstock Film Festival)