The Stranger

The first feature film by hometown hero David Russo, Little Dizzle is a weird, nocturnal fable about druggie janitors, clandestine market research, and addictive cookies that cause men to give (painful) anal birth to small, blue creatures. Dizzle is packed with Russo’s inventive animation and time-lapse cinematography (as well as his omnipresent rage against the machine—really, all machines). The star is Russo’s team of ragtag night janitors, and especially Vince Vieluf as an aggro philosopher/frustrated artist/janitor named OC. Russo worked as a janitor for many years, and gives those scenes a deeply comic, deeply rich texture. As OC tells Dory—the lead character, a mild-mannered kid—the word janitor derives from the Roman god Janus. “And,” OC says, pointing at his dick and then a urinal, “like Janus, we stand in the place between where exits meet entrances.” That’s the core of Little Dizzle—the liminal, twilight world where crack addicts fuck on corporate conference tables, paper fish swim through the city, and nobody’s innocent. By Brendan Kiley