Rabbit

Pairing

Rabbit is a 13-minute short by (surely the West Coast's own) Carson Culver that debuted a couple months ago. It stars and was written by Jamie Granato, whom I might have given shouts to here in the past. He's a great actor with the engaged expressions and demeanor and all that makes this wild Welles a friend and one of my favorite performers/presences-on-screen in recent times.

Shortly into Rabbit I realized what we've got here might be a specimen of the trending film movement known as dogcore or sometimes dogwalkcore. Do you know it? A specifically Los Angeles-centric phenomenon for now, it might pervade any city that has a sidewalk-centric layout to accommodate pedestrians and cyclists, the kind of town whose expansion-needs and zoning/re-zoning legislation encourage exploration. Watching Panahi's Taxi last night even suggested Tehran. More kinship still exists with a paragon of the dogcarecore genre: last year's fabulous feature-length Dogleg by my and Jamie's friend Alex Warren. Alex carries around three cards in his wallet that identify him ten minutes from sundown as three variations on "Alex." For a while he used to go by online parts as "Al Warren." But in 2024 can you tell the difference between "Al" and "AI" without some wonky glyphology?

This planning-non-planning brings people to their feet; the walkers get to feel healthy and learned, and if the gimbaled camera sports some kind of subject-lock show the viewer/visitor/tourist some area-relevant geography, even when the cartography's logic's still and maybe forever unclear... That one will be out on Blu-ray in North America soon. And probably sooner still Rabbit will at your disposal in forthcoming festivals and digital download. •

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