How the hell have I never reviewed this?

I picked Crumbs for today’s review even though I have watched it at least a dozen times already. Why? Because it’s a great movie. One you can watch for free, now, on Tubi.

We all know that I love Miguel Llanso, director and producer of some of the greatest movies of all time like Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway. He has a new film out called Infinite Summer that I still need to watch. It’s going high on my list, trust me. But it’s fair to say that whatever Miguel directs, I’ll be there to watch. And I’ve been spreading his movies as far and wide as my stupid fingies can manage.

Crumbs takes place in a post-apocalyptic Ethiopia. It stars Llanso’s muse Daniel Tadesse as Candy, a man who like everyone else in the world is mostly existing to exist and survive. Candy lives in a bowling alley with his fiancé Sayat (Selam Tesfayie) where they seem to be as happy as you can be living in an apocalyptic Ethiopia. Candy is a scavenger of sorts in a world where your best bet is apparently finding relics of the past and selling them to a guy (Mengistu Berhanu) who will rip you off but also knows the history of everything. Or he probably doesn’t and is making it up.

But Candy wants a better life for himself and his soon to be bride, and he knows exactly how he’s going to get that. A spaceship that has been idly hovering above Ethiopia for a while now. Candy is going to get himself and Sayat a seat on the ship because if they can get a seat on the ship, the ship will surely take them to a better place, right? So he heads out on an adventure to find the chief wish granter, none other than Santa Claus himself.

The world of Crumbs is beautiful, and I love a movie where we get the tip of the iceberg view that leaves the rest to our imagination. What little we do know about the world in Crumbs is that presumably takes place very far into the future where society has collapsed and rebuilt itself multiple times over. The society of the film’s present exists to collect and trade artifacts of the past as a way of remembering its history. A history it doesn’t understand at all.

Who was Michael Jackson? According to the movie he was likely just a farmer who didn’t actually sing the songs on his albums, but they were useful at some point as motivation for troops in a future war. Birdy and Sayat pray to Michael Jordan because the people of several rebuilt civilizations ago revered him greatly so he must have been some sort of religious figure.

In the world of Crumbs people worship the icons of the past despite knowing virtually nothing about them, and it leads to some fantastic visuals. I’m amazed that Disney never sued over the Mickey Mouse ears adorning a gas mask wearing Nazi. The shop owner is always a treat when he shows up to exposit history because you know right away it’s complete nonsense. But his fake histories do harbor some real nuggets of truth about the world’s history and our future, so it’s still incredibly interesting.

It’s fun seeing a world inspired by a civilization it doesn’t understand and apparently has no written record of. Nobody knows what the ship is doing there, but they believe it holds the secret to a better life. And how do you get on board the ship? You buy your way on, of course! Because everything can be solved by throwing money at it. My favorite bit of all this is that, given the ship has been sitting idle for a long time now, there’s absolutely nothing logical that should compel the people of Ethiopia that the ship is even offering seats, let alone allowing people to buy their way on.

After all, what would aliens need with Earth currency? Crumbs is a slow burn at an amazingly short 68 minutes. It is absolutely worth every minute of its time.

Rating: A+