Movie Review: Not much point in taking a trip to “Jobe’z World”

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He speaks in a dry, faintly effeminate monotone. And he speaks a lot. Guys who narrate their lives with an endless interior monologue do that.

Jobe “with an ‘e,'” “not the Biblical figure” lives and works in Manhattan, a 30something wraith on roller blades who makes deliveries — drugs, generally, “Molly” specifically — and ponders the nature of the universe — space, with its quasars and “all that s—”  because he needs to disconnect from his reality. He’s probably not using his product, in other words.

“It’s so mellow and trippy.  I’m actually making a sick manga about it.”

Sure he is.

“Jobe’z World” is dull and trippy day life in the life of a low-rent dealer, blading his wares to a collection of New York eccentrics — his regulars. It’s a decent enough idea, not the most novel or remotely as arty as this film treatment of it.

But it might have worked with a more compelling central character and a more fascinating performance of him by Jason Grisell.

The clients are given to pontificating, self-mythologizing and generally blowing Jobe’s mind on this rounds. There’s Ron (Stephen Payne), a not-quite-hermit survivalist, holed up in a bunker.

Jax (Jeremy O. Harris) is some kind of artist. I think. Rapper? His “flow” is something else. He’s seriously into his own head. Does he live with Jobe?

Zane (former child actor Owen Kline) is a would-be stand-up comic who just swapped his mother’s cookie jar for a fishing rod at the local thrift store. He’s imagining it as a “Southern lifestyle” thing, “Lake Woebegone” and all. He’s trying his luck in the East River.

Jobe needs to get through with work so he cook a meal for his mother, flying into JFK “literally any minute” now.

But the boss (Lindsay Burdge of “A Teacher”) has a special run for him to make. Jobe is to make a delivery to his idol, the lonely, faded screen star Royce (Theodore Bouloukos). And fanboy or not, Jobe’s wares make the bantering old man foam at the mouth and fade away. Well, the boss DID say the drugs he wanted were “worse than what killed MJ and Prince put together!”

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Jobe finds himself fleeing the cops closing in on him, paparazzi who want his picture and his own demons, musing about “swarm intelligence” and facing his reckoning  — “the worst music ever made must be faced.”

There’s virtually nothing to this short, thin yet (barely) feature-length dramedy. A few funny lines wither in the dark and minutes upon minutes of screen time burn off space imagery and Jobe pondering the nature of it in his addled head.

Think of “Jobe’z World” as you doing your duty to a friend trying to kick and you’ll get  through it. Not without browsing through everything on your phone, though.

1half-star

MPAA Rating: unrated, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Jason Grisell, Owen Kline, Stephen Payne, Jeremy O. Harris, Lindsay Burdge, Theodore Bouloukos, Sean Price Williams, Keith Poulson, Jason Giampietro and Kate Lyn Sheil

Credits: Written and directed by Michael M. Bilandic.  A Jobeworkz release.

Running time: 1:07

About Roger Moore

Movie Critic, formerly with McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, published in Spin Magazine, The World and now published here, Orlando Magazine, Autoweek Magazine
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