DC Shorts Blog
Review: “PARKING GARAGE”
Director: Justin Lazernick
Running Time: 9 minutes
Genre: Comedy
Parking Garage is a comedy about a woman seeking her car with the aid of those who’ve taken shelter in the garage, having lost and been unable to find their own cars as much as 25 years earlier.
Anyone who’s ever had to deal with parking garages can understand the frustration of being lost in their labyrinthine dungeons of concrete and light, unaided by rent-a-cops who border on the sadistic. However, that understanding may have some difficulty translating in Parking Garage. The short seems uncertain of itself, at first appearing to be a horror movie about being lost in a cold, metallic world. From there it becomes the comedy it is about how attached we are to our cars and how lost and alone we feel when we have difficulty finding them.
The problem with Parking Garage as a comedy is that once it settles into that role, the inspirational speeches and shows of camaraderie begin and audiences run the risk of getting lost. Even so, parking garages are often threatening, scary places, a reality the short capitalizes on to the full extent.
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Reviewed films were randomly selected from the hundreds of entries to the 2009 DC Shorts Film Festival. The reviews are written by Bryan Koenig, an intern with an interest in film review and journalism. The opinions expressed are his own, and not that of the independent judging panel, the DC Shorts Film Festival staff, or the staff and Board of the DC Film Alliance.
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