Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de)
"Porzingod" is a 3-minute live action (very) short film from 2016, so pretty new still, and this has to be one of the most known efforts by writer and director Conor Byrne. Its rise in popularity can be explained with the fact that one of the 2 actors in here is John Leguizamo from the Ice Age franchise. The other is Gert Fröbe lookalike Adam Mucci and not too many will recognize him I guess despite some pretty big blockbusters he appeared in. In this one here we have this duo talk briefly to the God of basketball mentioning some NY Knicks history (and eventually their hate on Reggie Miller) before in the second half revealing their shrine for Kristaps Porziņģis, a young Latvian player who is designated to become the one who could make the Knicks great again. It was a little goofy movie, nothing too funny, but solidly depicting the hardships of professional sports fandom if your team of preference was mostly on the loser side in recent decades and way behind its ambition to be a defining basketball team to one of the defining cities of the planet. Still I would recommend this one really only to big NBA fans and Knicks fans of course. Everybody else can skip it and they won't be missing much. I must say the script certainly helped the 2 actors here in getting away with shameless overacting. But it is still not as funny as I would have liked, so I give this project in its entirety a thumbs-down.
