I'm not sure if Shut Up Little Man! began as a short film or not, but if it did, it definitely should have stayed that way. The documentary's a classic example of a great joke told too often or played too long. It's hysterical for the first twenty minutes, then, it fizzles and dies out.
The film documents the ravings of Peter and Ray, two unlikely roommates living in San Francisco. Eddie and Mitch, their next-door neighbors, record these vulgar, drunken shouting matches. They essentially stick a microphone out the balcony to listen in on Peter, a flamboyantly homosexual man, and Ray, a raging homophobe.
When Eddie and Mitch record and distribute the ravings, Peter and Ray become, unknowingly, underground celebrities across the U.S. The film goes further into detail about how they swept through the underground music scene as filler tracks on mix tapes, but here the documentary runs dry, banking on the humor that, by the thirty-minute mark, has grown less funny and more depressing.
The story's distribution becomes the sole focus of a film whose characters are begging to be unearthed and discovered. Why is Peter a homosexual? Why is Ray a homophobe? Why did they move in together? These are the questions that should've been asked, but as Ray and Peter slip to the wayside in favor of Eddie and Mitch, these questions fall distinctly out of play. I just wish that, after watching 93 minutes of the film, I had a really good understanding of what was going on in that apartment. Instead, I feel like the joke's not funny anymore.
