Featured Film: I Like Killing Flies

Though his version of "No soup for you" would undoubtedly contain a few choice words unfit for prime-time, Kenny Shopsin, proprietor of the legendary New York diner which bears his name (and which imposes a strict set of rules on its diners), does bear more than a few similarities to Seinfeld's classic Soup Nazi character. Then again, it's tough to imagine Larry Thomas' severe television personality confessing that he used to believe that only path to change was through Freudian analysis, or to extend his ongoing battle with the flies in his kitchen to a metaphor for the war in the middle east and, in fact, the entirety of human conflict. Indeed, the central figure in Matt Mahurin's documentary I Like Killing Flies is about as complex and interesting as a subject as a film could hope for.

The loose story arc of the film, which follows the Shopsin family's forced relocation, due to a rent hike, from the corner location that they'd occupied for 30 years, could have easily been milked for all sorts of juicy big-picture documentary moralizing about the sadly changing ways of the world, but the filmmaker is wise enough to know that the real story here is Shopsin himself, whose string of seeming contradictions gradually begin to make a certain odd sense the longer you sit with them. The restaurant itself is certainly unique enough, offering a 10 page, 900 item menu with idiosyncratic menu items such as mac and cheese pancakes (born when a customer who always ordered one of the two titular components one day couldn't decide between the two), post modern pancakes (pancakes, cooked up, torn up, added back to the batter, and cooked again.) and Indomalekian Sunrise Stew (a traditional dish of a country invented by Shopin and one of his sons). But the restaurant, like the film, would be just another in a long line of perfectly palatable variations on a theme without the charismatic character that drives it. With him, however, both are unmissable experiences.