For a human being, the magic of alcohol can be a blessing, a curse, or both at the same time. A few sips have the power to bestow “liquid courage” upon a person, making them more confident, eloquent, attractive and uninhibited. Thanks to this voodoo potion silencing your inner voices of insecurity, there is nothing you cannot do. However, a few more hearty gulps in, and the magic becomes a more mischievous device. This is no longer fairy godmother magic, this is Bart Simpson-esque rascality. You could order 50 bags of beef jerky. You crash your bike into a Taco Bell drive-thru.
Or, in the case of this week’s Staff Pick Premiere, you could almost kill your dumb friends on a spinning carnival ride.
An audience killer at festivals like Palm Springs and Go Short Film Festival this year, “MERRY-GO-ROUND” is a hilarious comedy that made our team bigtime LOL, IRL. Based on real-life events, the film follows a group of men in sharp suits who got a tad too lit after the sun went down. Led by a wild man named Oleg Maratovich, the gang is barely able to cross a street, let alone embark on the adventure that their severely impaired colleague takes them on.
Waking an unmanned carnival ride from its sleep, Oleg makes a mistake that producer Sergey Yahontov says is based on a slew of true happenings: “The film is based on a city legend. A few guys have experienced this kind of ride so as a result city authorities decided to demolish the carousel. [While] the film was being shot, we were told that [this same thing has] happened in different cities all around Russia. The carousel model [seen in the film] was installed all around the Soviet Union.”
In two days of filming, the crew behind “MERRY-GO-ROUND” spent a “month’s worth” of time “shoot[ing] on a real spinning carnival ride.” The result is a darkly funny short with hilarious performances, minimal dialogue and a 12-minute joke that the whole world needs right now.
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