Riveting, innovative and provocative are just three of the adjectives that never occurred to me while watching the documentary “Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles.”
Remember how fascinated you were when you noticed tiles embedded in pavement in several American cities that read: “Toynbee Idea in Kubrick’s ‘2001’ Resurrect Dead on Planet Jupiter”? Yeah, me neither. This dork-doc follows an uninteresting Philadelphia nerd with too much time on his hands as he tells us everything he has learned since he started studying these tiles in the late 1990s.
He finds out a lot, such as that David Mamet once wrote a play that touched on the same themes as those mentioned in the tiles. Several enthusiasts attempt to create a “Twilight Zone” episode out of this “mysterious phenomenon” — really, just an unusually dedicated graffiti campaign.
The geek pack seem to hope they’ll stumble upon a secret society, or maybe even a cool meeting between the Incas and spacemen. Visually, the movie consists almost entirely of talking heads, would-be eerie re-enactments (of knocking on unanswered doors, etc.) and “dramatic” pans over the text of e-mails.
Oh, and the movie concludes by running into a dead end. The real mystery is this: Even if you find this guerrilla art project utterly fascinating, why would anyone bother to release an incomplete film about it?