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I have neglected doing this topic for the past two years due to laziness but I’m back to once again write up all the movies I saw at Sundance this year for anyone that might be interested in reading about them. I have a lot to write about so let’s get right to it! Day 1 Animation Showcase  Beach Flags The short opens noting that the sport known as "Beach Flags" is the only beach related sport that Iranian women can actually participate in (probably due to them being able to do so while covered up). After an abstract intro in which the male dummies the lifeguards are practicing on drag them down underwater we get into a more traditional narrative where a beach flag team is training and seeing who they should send to the Olympics. Tensions rise as a very skilled ringer is brought in making the previous favorite question her chances and work even harder. There’s not many surprises in this short overall but there doesn’t really need to be I guess. The animation is very nice, it focuses on an interesting little niche of a culture I don’t know much about and the ending made me smile. It’s not an amazing short but it’s a very good one that I can’t find much fault in. Here is a trailer. Palm Rot This one was just rad as gently caress. An old man exterminator going around the Florida everglades in a fan boat stumbles upon some jars full of bugs with funky and dangerous powers. Every pore of this just oozes style. Everything from look to the music is just fully awesome. There wasn’t a moment in here where I wasn’t just in awe of how cool everything was. It’s like a fully realized version of a 90s animated MTV bumper and I mean that in the best possible way. I wish I could watch this again right now. Here is a trailer Two Films About Loneliness The opening of this was a bit stiff but it quickly settled into an amusing little short, or rather two amusing little shorts that were happening at the same time, split by a divide down the center. Overall the concept of this was probably stronger than the execution but it was still good for what it was. Both halves of the screen had a different short by a different person. Both dealt with the concept of loneliness and also just generally trying to reach out in this online world of ours. The most amusing bits had to do with accurate portrayals of just how awful the web is. Eventually the two halves crash into each other in a way that is unexpected but not really all that interesting. I’m probably coming off a little more down on this short than I should. It was good for what it was and interesting but in the end I feel it could be a little bit more. Mynarski Death Plummet No real narrative to speak of outside of a gunner in a plane that gets shot down catching fire as he plummets from said plane. There wasn't much there but it was kind of cool to look at. The animation was all done with film developing chemicals making the whole thing kind of cool but not actually all that visually impressive most of the time. It’s admirable to animate in a really hard way but it also feels kind of pointless when you get a less than amazing result from it. Still, I didn’t hate this. While it felt kind of pointless it had a distinct Heavy Metal feel to it and as it got trippier the visuals did do some neat things. Bath House In Sweden, Bath Houses are apparently kind of a relic of the past. Going to a bath house used to be a big thing but as it’s fallen out of favor the nation is left with a bunch of depressing, run down bath houses. This short tries to capture this by just featuring a particularly not pleasant bath house on an increasingly unpleasant day. The whole thing just slowly unfolds and just gets more and more uncomfortable. Everyone there either doesn’t want to be there, is uncomfortable or is up to no good. The animation is nice, though the style (animal characters with human hands and feet) is kind of odd. The whole thing is an obvious labor of love to just try to get across a certain niche unique to Swedish society. It was well done and just a generally good short. Here is the trailer. The Sun Like a Big Dark Animal Shorts by the Miami based group The Borscht Corp tend to end up at Sundance alot and they tend to always be god damned awesome. Previous films of theirs include The Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke, #Postmodem and last year’s Year Book. This was the short that made it so Sundance this year and it did not disappoint. It’s kind of a reverse #Postmodem. Instead of humans trying to connect with their computers, this tells of a computer that is desperately in love with its human user, hopes that she feels the same way and wants them to become one. This is all told with odd and crude computer animation that gets trippier and stranger as the short goes on. It’s a short that evokes that “what the hell did I just watch” feeling that I enjoy so much. It was a strange short that seemed to want to be as trippy as possible but it was also grounded enough to be able to mostly follow along. Here is a trailer. Tupilaq I have seen this short so many times before and it just never interests me in the slightest. It’s a tale of a native of some old culture (in this case Greenland) who yearns for the old simple times of that culture but is overwhelmed by the evils of modern day society. The animation was kind of interesting I guess but there’s just so little here. It’s not just that I’ve seen this before but I’ve seen it done better and with more to say. What is here is pretty much just what I described and not much more. I feel no connection to this type of message so you got to give me something else. Here is a trailer. The Horse Raised by Spheres Finally one that’s online. I’ll just let this one speak for itself (it’s pretty awesome though I have no idea how it ended up in the program for a supposedly prestigious film festival). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6RgotgnHz4 Storm Hits Jacket This is the type of short that’s sort of hard to write about because while it was good and I liked it, it wasn’t all that remarkable either. It packs alot into its short run time. It’s a story with weird science, intrigue, romance and unexplained fantastical elements but because of its short run time it also is a bit rushed and muddled. It’s a story that doesn’t have much time to breathe at it rushes from plot point to plot point. Still, the animation was quite nice and as a whole it was very enjoyable so really not much to complain about either. Here is the trailer. Shorts Program 1  The Chicken This is a small but ultimately really effective and downright harrowing short. Taking place Sarajevo during the war is focuses on a mother and her two daughters just dealing with the horror around them while stuck in their apartment trying to celebrate the birthday of the youngest daughter. In general this just does a good job of showing what it’s like being a civilian in a war zone. The main plot revolves around a live chicken delivered for the birthday and the youngest daughter not wanting it to die. She just doesn’t understand why things can’t be normal and why the violence needs to happen. Still, there’s no real solution to the problem and anything she can does just makes things more complicated. This can all be taken as a metaphor with the civilian dealing with the war in general. On the surface it’s just a really well done look at a family in a horrible situation. It all feels very true and towards the end gets very really intense. It’s a short that makes something that’s hard for the more privileged of us to picture become very clear. Here is the trailers. Mulignans This is another one I can just show you so I’ll keep this brief. Basically the concept here is to have black people act towards gentrification like Italians do towards black people in gangster films. It’s a simple but it works and I thought it was pretty great. https://vimeo.com/117064492 Take Me All that really happens here is a disabled married couple who are living in a home for the disabled try to get intimate but need help from their nurse. That’s pretty much the whole short. Not a lot to it. It’s interesting in that it shows the lives of disabled people and the short gives them a certain dignity by showing the indignity they have to go through but overall for a short about disabled people graphically loving, it was oddly forgettable overall. Here's the trailer. Every Day Ugh. I admit that I have never seen a 30 for 30 and I’ve been meaning to fix that but this did not encourage me. This was a 30 for 30 short and it was nothing but the most eye rolling, saccharine affirmations in the form of telling the story of a slightly remarkable woman that I still don’t give a poo poo about. The subject of the short, Joy Johnson, like to run marathons but, get this, she was also old! I’m not saying there isn’t an interesting story to be told here but having a short overflowing with awful dialogue put into the mouth of a dead woman who in the end they make say she was glad died like she did was not a method that worked for me. Saturday Like The Chicken, this is a short that looks at a disaster from a smaller perspective. Taking place on the day of an infamous Soccer riot, the film focuses on the reactions of those far away from the action who are only getting scattered details. It further dilutes the clarity of what’s going on by mainly following a child who can get even less of a grasp of the situation as the adults do. I don’t mean to sound like an rear end, but the short still doesn’t do the best job of making me have reverence for this awful event. It's still it’s a well done short with some powerful imagery and it wasn't bad but I just still don't feel any emotional connection to this event. The way it dilutes the information does feel a bit forced at times and the reveal at the end of just what exactly is going on also feels a bit clumsy but overall it’s not a short I can find too much fault in, especially after the last one. SMILF There should be some sort of rule that there should only be one horribly awkward sex short per program. I didn’t really mention how awkward Take Me was but that was probably a given. This managed to be WAY more awkward. The short focuses on a young single Mom living in a small apartment that one day while her child is taking a nap, she gets booty call from an Ex and she decides to take him up on it for the purpose of getting him to tell her if her vagina feels any different than he remembers. The whole thing is pretty drat hilarious and also, as mentioned, horribly, horribly, horribly awkward to watch. In the end its kind of the typical indie story of someone who is reluctant to act their age and is trying to live the life they lived while they were younger but who cares? It was drat funny and went way farther than you'd expect it to. World of Tomorrow This is it. The thing I wanted to see most at Sundance this year. This is the new short by Don Hertzfeldt. Going into this it was hard to know what to expect. The last thing Hertzfeldt had worked on was the astonishingly good Bill Trilogy. While doing that he did the funny, violent short Wisdom Teeth. It was hard to know if he was gonna go back to having a silly funny short or still strive for something deeper and more profound again. The answer was he kind of did both. The short on the surface is pretty comedic. It involves a little girl being contacted by one of a clone of herself from the far off future. Throughout the short the clone tells her about the strange and often pretty terrible world of tomorrow and what it's like to live in this world. Most of it is very jokey with Hertzfeldt using his brand of humor in a focused way so it doesn’t have that random monkey cheese thing that turns some people away from things like Rejected. As the short goes on and we learn more about the clone, a certain sweet sadness starts to bleed through. The focus shifts to themes of the meaning of identity in a world where everything is being swallowed up by technology. This is fitting given this is the first short Hertzfeldt has done using computers. The difference between hand drawing thousands and thousands of frames on a tablet isn't that different from drawing on paper but it also made it so this was done in a short 9 months. He had stuck to his old methods for a long time but he has finally given up the charm of that old technology for the possibilities of the new. This kind of view is reflected in the short. The forward pushing of mankind isn’t seen as being evil or anything, just a force that overwhelms people and makes them struggle to see where they fit into this world where everything is constantly new. The clone in particular struggles to know if she is just the product of the technology that created her or her own person. It's still has some hope though because shows humanity manages to shine through, for better or for worse, no matter how much things change . I’m not going to say this short tops the Bill trilogy because that’s an unreasonable thing to say but it also, impressively, doesn’t disappoint either. This is the type of thing where I just sort of wanted it to go on forever and was sad to see it end. It will be available to purchase in March so just do what you can to see this amazing thing. Here is the trailer. Shorts Program 3  After the last shorts program I knew this wouldn’t be able to live up and it didn’t but it wasn’t all bad. Pink Grapefruit I think I get what this short was going for but overall I don’t think it pulled it off very well. I think the point is supposed to be a couple that aren’t really content in their relationship try to set up two of their friends who always screw relationships up in secret hopes that the whole thing will crash and burn and they’ll feel better about themselves. Unfortunately after and awkward start, the two hit it off and go off happily. I’m not entirely sure if this is even right and I’m mainly basing this on the official description talking about how the setup doesn’t go as planned. I dunno, I didn’t hate this short but a lot of it is just sort of awkward and weird for reasons that don’t work. There are some really good moments. There’s a part early on where the two people being set up are checking each other out and the camera lustily gazes over every inch of their bodies. That was well done but overall the short was just sort of there doing something that I couldn’t appreciate. I will also have to get Roger Ebert here and admit most of the reason I liked this short is because one of the actresses (pictured above) was the sort of big eyed indie girl that I just melt for. Here is the trailer Northern Great Mountain Earlier when I talked about Tupilaq I talked about a pretty basic short that comes up a lot with someone that’s separated from their heritage who then comes back to it in some way. This short also falls into that trope but its better made and just has some more interesting things going on in general. It focuses on an elderly woman Sámi woman who has renounced her heritage in favor of being Swedish and now holds a great hatred for her old culture. She is dragged home by her son for her sister's funeral and must face what she left behind. It’s a very pretty short with great mountain scenery. It’s also doesn’t explain much which might actually be to its detriment. While it shows a woman who has completely turned her back on her heritage it doesn’t really do anything to get into her head. We leave it not really know why she feels the way she does. The end where she shows regret has less impact because we never really knew why she did what she did in the first place. This is apparently a thing that happened amongst the Sámi but all this short does is present this situation and give it some forced catharsis rather than really exploring it. Symphony no. 42 This was a nice collection of kind of absurd animated skits mostly involving animals. It was just a weird setup and payoff done without dialogue over and over again. It reminded me a lot of one panel comic strips in the best way like something by from a darker Far Side or a light Charles Addams cartoon. Wish I had more to say but I don’t have a whole lot to say about it beyond that it was funny, weird and good. Here is a trailer Actresses Actresses! They’re so crazy! Am I right??? That’s pretty much this short in a nutshell. Not much more depth than that. The plot is an established off Broadway actress starts dating a young aspiring actress and just has to deal with her constant need for support and her insecurities as to if she is talented or not. It overall felt a bit one note and basic but it's a short so that's actually fine. I can’t say I wasn’t amused and I can’t say this is not sort of true, so I can’t complain too much. I did particularly like this exchange that I’m going to butcher by misquoting and putting in test form: Older Actress: Wanna go get drunk with me? Younger Actress: I’m Game. OA: Did you say that you’re gay? YA: No, I said I’m game like I would like to get drunk with you. *awkward silence* YA: Also yes Hole I know this is Sundance and all but I did not expect TWO shorts involving the sexual lives of severely disabled people. This one revolves around a severely disabled gay man that can give pleasure at his local glory hole but can’t get out of his wheelchair to receive it. I dunno, it’s not fair to this short that in my mind it just gets grouped with the other one but could that not happen? The disabled man in this has more freedom than the ones featured in the other short. He lives at home and has a nurse check on him a couple times a day who helps him with various things. It does show a different side to the whole thing but ultimately just sort of leads to the same awkward place of having someone need to get help from someone that shouldn't need to be involved in order to get sexual release. This short was well done enough and interesting in many ways but it was just unfairly diminished by the existence of the other short. Papa Machete Simply put, this is a short doc about a master of Haitian Machete fighting, a fighting style developed during slave revolts that led to the defeat of the French. Honestly what’s not to like here? You got a cool guy who fights with a machete talking about how to fight with machetes. The history is cool. The fighting is cool. Everything here is just interesting to watch and soak in. Really this is like Jiro Dreams of Sushi with Sushi replaced with Machete fighting. Here is the trailer. A Million Miles Away Holy poo poo was this just loving awful. Rarely do I just sit watching a movie getting angrier and angrier at it but that was my experience here. It’s hard to even know where to begin. This is partly because for the life of me I can barely remember anything about half of this almost 30 minute short. The beginning was kind of aimless with a bunch of random teen vignettes featuring really bad acting. At this point I was bored but I was tolerating it. Then about halfway through the title card came up and I realized that this still had a ways to go. It settles in, being about a frumpy substitute choir leader who gets a cryptic text from her boyfriend. The choir sings a not very good cover of “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’” which for whatever reason makes the substitute break down in tears. The teens help her with her text problem and it ends with them deciding they like the sub for some reason. All of this is just drawn out as long as possible and full of baffling, annoying things. There’s a scene where the sub takes attendance and we sit through the entire thing. It’s just long and drawn out. I think this is some sort of attempt to give the girls some character but it doesn't do a very good job at this because it only defines them in really broad ways and the characters suck anyways. We sit through the entirety of “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’”. It did not need to go on this long. It’s not a very good cover either which just makes it all the worse. There are bad little flourishes everywhere like the girls talking in a really fake looking behind the hand whisper which is given subtitles. This gimmick also goes one for a long time. Then there are the cat eyes on the subs shirt shooting out…for some reason. I just don’t know. The whole thing has a borderline Tim and Eric feel but it all feels accidental. The purposely bad and confounding things that Tim and Eric do are just sort of here as ideas the filmmakers had to attempt make their short interesting. This whole thing was painful to sit through and was the worst thing I saw at Sundance this year Here is the trailer Day 2 Chorus  Before we get tickets for Sundance, we categorize the movies by how much we want to see them so when I go through the schedule I know what to look for and try to organize it as quickly as possible with good amount of time to travel between venues. This was the lowest rated movie on that list that I still bothered to get tickets ahead of time for. The timing was good and there were no better options so a movie I wasn’t terribly excited for ended up being seen. This worked out very well for me. The plot focuses around a divorced couple who drifted apart when their only son went missing. Many years have passed and they’ve gone on with their lives, now living in separate countries (the mother stays in Quebec while the Father moves to a beach in Mexico) while each dealing with the loss in their own way while also not really dealing with it all that well. They are brought back together when a pedophile confesses to the murder and the body is found. The husband comes back to meet with the police, give his son a proper funeral and be there for his former wife. The movie is simply these two people going through this awful process in all of its painful details. This is a very French movie (it’s from Quebec but that’s close enough). It’s full of long shots of people staring at nothing in particular while dialogue or voiceover breaks the silence. Silence plays a very big part in the movie. No music happens that isn’t a natural part of the scene (other than one part) and as a result the movie is full of painful, long silences with nothing but ambient sounds to fill the gaps. It leaves you to deal with the depression without anything to really escape it other than what the characters themselves are using to escape it. It should go without saying that this is a really, really depressing movie. Rarely while watching a movie have I just felt sad, but at one point towards the end of this I just felt plain sad. Not in a visceral or reactionary way. It was just a deep depression that had crept up on me throughout the film. Everything had just built up and these fictional characters had been through so much that my emotions had somehow made it passed the visceral depressing reactions into something much deeper. That isn’t to say there isn’t some brightness in this movie but it’s all underlined by a child’s awful death and a love that still exists but can never work correctly again. The movie is pretty god damned beautiful to look at all the time. The thing that pushed this movie into being a movie I decided I wanted to see was that it was shot in black and white and that aspect did not disappoint. God drat more movies need to be in black and white.Of course the starkness just adds to the mood of the movie. So yeah this is a film that pretty much checks all the pretentious movie boxes (subtitled, black and white, unpleasant subject matter, slow, uses ambient noise, has ponderous voice over) but man, it’s still really good. It’s a movie where it probably helps to brace yourself for it and don’t see it first thing in the day like I did but still, it’s good and you should see it. Here is the trailer. Cop Car  Now for something that’s very different. After some brief opening credits set to some pretty rad music, Cop Car opens with a long shot of two young boys walking across a field. One boy says a swear and after a pause the other boy repeats it. This continues until they’ve made their way from one side of the screen to the other. This is a good indication of the type of movie we’re in for. It’s just two boys acting like boys, doing things that boys do when no adults are around. It captures this quite well. Eventually they come across a cop car in the middle of the woods and after some tentative poking at it and giving each other dares involving the car, they determine that it’s abandoned. Not only that but the keys are still inside and the car starts right up. This looks like the adventure they ran away from home to get into. Unfortunately they’re wrong about it being abandoned. The police officer (played very well by Kevin Bacon) it belongs to was off burying a body and when he comes back for the other body that was still in the trunk, he is not happy to find his car missing. The best was to describe this movie is it’s the story of two boys who run away from home hoping to have an adventure like in The Goonies, but instead end up in No Country for Old Men. It’s not quite that dark, but things do escalate pretty quickly. This movie is at its best when it’s just kids being kids. Those moments always feel really genuine and it lightens up a pretty dark movie while giving it an odd amount of heart. Honestly my biggest complaint is it doesn’t spend quite enough time with the boys. While it’s not like they aren’t featured, they often get forgotten in favor of Kevin Bacon’s character trying to get his car back. Don’t get me wrong, Kevin Bacon is great in this and he plays his character with a great layer of false cheer that hides something dark underneath. It’s just he still is the villain and a little too much time is spent on his side of things. Going in you sort of expect this movie to be a wacky fun adventure but the whole thing is better made and darker than you’d expect. The cinematography is gorgeous from the sweeping middle of nowhere vistas to the almost surreal look the movie takes on by the end when darkness begins to fall. It’s a still a fun midnight movie but probably not quite as fun as you’d expect from the description and that’s okay. White God  Oh boy... The biggest failing I’m going to have in this whole write-up is that I’m not going to be able to convince you that White God is a bad movie that you don't actually want to see. Like, right now I know almost everything I write down will sound awesome and there's nothing I can really do about that. If I hadn’t seen this movie and was told the things I was about to write about this movie, I would want to see this movie. Everything about this movie is insane and I like insane movies. It's just none of the insanity really works. It's just all sort of bad. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen but sometimes there's a reason certain things haven't been done. This is a very, very, very, very, very, very silly movie. Maybe one of the silliest movies I’ve ever seen in my entire life. That probably should be worth something but it isn't. I’m going to reveal a lot of this movie because it’s hard for me to really express my disdain without going deep into it but still if you don’t want to be spoiled just move on but just trust me in saying that this movie is really not very good. The main problem with this movie is tone. It’s too serious for the silly stuff to ever really work and it’s too silly to take the serious stuff very seriously. This movie is a whole bunch of movies that don’t belong together clumsily mashed into each other without rhyme or reason. While there are sections of the movie that do maintain a single tone, the movie constantly switches these tones back and forth making it impossible to really accept any given section of the movie. There was a point where I thought I finally understood what this movie was going for (which I’ll get into later) but then the movie changed again and again and yet again making my ability to parse this as an acceptable movie an impossibility. The first part of the movie is pretty much a Disney movie. There’s a girl who has a dog and she loves this dog. She’s enjoying a life with the dog until her mother needs to go somewhere and leaves her with her father who is a one-dimensional, bad father, rear end in a top hat that does not like dogs. His neighbor even more cartoonishly does not like dogs. Her music teacher also does not like dogs and makes her choose between class and her dog. Eventually the father forces her to get rid of the dog, abandoning it in the streets. The dog then goes on some merry adventures where he meets other dogs, goes to a meat market and is chased by a cartoonish butcher and is later chased by cartoonish dog catchers. All the while the girl is single-mindedly searching for the dog. This is all fitting of a bad children’s movie and while it’s shown in a slightly more gritty fashion overall, that’s pretty much how this plays on every level. After that the dog is taken in by a homeless man who promptly sells him for dog fighting purposes. The movie then becomes a brutal depiction of someone basically torturing a dog for the purpose of making him a vicious fighter. This obviously does not mesh well with all that came before it but it hadn’t fully lost me yet because this was actually the best done section of the movie. Meanwhile the girl is just getting sorta of depressed over not being able to find her dog. She’s giving up hope and there’s also this boy she likes I guess. She goes to a rave with him, he gives her drugs to hold, she passes out and is woken up being busted by the cops. This part has its own indie coming of age tone that really doesn’t mesh well with anything that comes before or after. The only thing is really seems to do for the plot is make the girl give up on the dog and magically make her father stop acting like a heartless rear end in a top hat for no real reason. Eventually the dog escapes after his first real fight and it briefly goes back to being a Disney adventure of dog and friends. That is short lived though as he gets captured by the dogcatchers and brought to the pound. There he doesn’t do well; snapping at people that get close. It’s not long before it’s decided he will be put down. At this point I thought I knew what the movie was going for. I thought it was some sort of deconstruction of the Disney narrative where instead of things going well the dog goes through the brutality of the real world and the girl just moves on. I could sort of get behind that. Then the last act happened. The dog escapes and frees all the other dogs. The dogs go on a rampage through the city forcing people into their homes. The main dog acts as a leader directing all of the dogs against the police and in getting revenge against all that have wronged him. It’s a mix of the last scene in a mafia movie and a horror film where the monsters are dogs. Meanwhile the girl magically knows that her dog is at the center of this and goes into a city full of rampaging dogs to try and put an end to this or just find her dog. It is extremely silly. I’ve already spent too much time talking about this and will have spent far more time on this than movies I actually liked so I’ll try to wrap things up but, as I said, this just is not a good movie. Every time I was willing to except it, it just got worse. There’s also a bunch of little things that make it hard to get lost in the silliness. There’s this repetition of Hungarian Rhapsody that just brings somberness and some sort of national message to it all. It kind of works because that song too gets very silly but that’s a metaphor I can't push very far. There are also off little moments like there are two shots of the very young daughter changing. They aren’t graphic or anything but their inclusion is still just weird to me. Just overall it wasn’t a very impressive movie despite the nightmare it must have been to make. The direction isn’t great and a lot of the bad tone just comes from badly done scenes. The opening of the movie is a shot of the girl being chased through the empty city by a huge pack of dogs and while this should have been an impressive and cool opening, it just failed to live up to that concept. I am also told that the camera is very shakey for no real reason (years of Found Footage movies have made me pretty much immune to shakey cam so that sort of thing is hard for me to notice). Despite all this I don’t regret seeing it. You don’t see a movie this bat poo poo dumb in such a unique that often. Watching this was an interesting experience and it was sometimes anenjoyable one but not in the way that I believe was intended.As I said, I’ve already written too much and, alas, I probably still haven’t convinced you this is a bad movie. You’ll just have to take my word for it, which is something I wouldn’t do if I were in your shoes. Side note: I did get to meet and pet the star. He was wearing a bow tie. That was pretty cool. Here is the trailer Hellions  Writing up movies like this is always the hardest because while this wasn’t bad, it also wasn’t terribly interesting. Going into any horror movie my standards drop. I am much more kind to horror films than I am other genres because I like them so much. In a way it becomes more about seeing how the movie plays with the tropes of the genre and how well it handles them. If it manages to do something unexpected that’s always a great surprise but that’s not necessary for me to enjoy the movie. This movie did things…okay I guess? It was interesting in some ways and not so much in others and it all just sort of cancels itself out and manages not to leave much of an impression. The movie, in a nutshell, is a clumsy and unsubtle abortion metaphor. I don’t really feel bad about revealing this because it becomes really clear really quickly. It’s not subtle about it. The movie opens with the teen lead finding out that she’s pregnant and from that point it’s pretty clear where this will be going. It also happens to be Halloween and she seems to live on a Pumpkin farm so you know some horror movie poo poo is going to go down. The lead, depressed by the pregnancy news, at first decides to stay home for Halloween. There aren’t many trick or treaters outside other than one really creepy looking kid wearing a burlap bag over his head. Eventually she changes her mind about staying in and decides to go to a party with her boyfriend, where she will break pregnancy the news. The boyfriend never shows up but that trick or treater keeps coming, every time with another creepy friend. It eventually becomes clear that these trick or treaters might not be human and since she doesn’t want her baby, they will gladly take it from her. The movie plays out pretty much like you’d expect it to. There are jump scares. People come to help just to go off on their own and die. Dead-ends are gone into in an attempt to escape. You know the drill. The only thing that really elevates this movie is just how god damned pretty it is. There’s a really surreal quality to everything at one point a blood red moon comes out senselessly bathing everything in infrared tones. It looks strange as hell and this aspect alone is honestly worth recommending the movie for. I mean look at that screenshot up there! It's gorgeous! I also did quite like the design on the little Hellions. They all are like children in crappy homemade costumes but taken to a really creepy level. The sound design was also pretty good, giving otherworldly and menacing tones to the Hellion voices with a childish Elfmanesque score backing the whole thing up . Everything else however is just sort of blah. It’s just so paint by numbers. I don’t mind the tropes but much of this feels like the movie just going through the motions and most of the clichés aren't executed terribly well. Worst of all, the movie just isn’t very scary. I never felt any tension. I’ve seen all of this before. This is done visually better than most but that’s about it. I didn’t hate this movie but I can’t really recommend this to anyone that isn’t a diehard fan the genre that, like me, can overlook a lot of shortcomings. It’s slightly weird and slightly surreal and while I like that I wish it had been really weird and really surreal. A movie about hellish children trying to steal an unborn baby on Halloween night shouldn’t feel this boring. Days 3 Animals  I’m not going to spend alot of time on this because I just saw it because tickets were available and I had a gap in the schedule with literally nothing else to fill it. While it wasn’t bad, it was probably the most forgettable thing I saw at the fest this year. This was simply two episodes of an indie cartoon series that was looking for some sort of distribution. It’s produced by Mark Duplass which was the only reason it was probably at the fest in the first place. The series was amusing enough. The show has the not terribly interesting concept of animals in the city acting like animals but talking like people, so yeah, not exactly the freshest concept. It’s also done like a show like Home Movies is, where the voice actors just have a basic plot outline and everything is improvised. It was funny but not amazing or anything. It also felt like it was trying too hard like many cartoons aimed at adults tend to. It was impressive that out of the two episodes they showed, one managed to have a crapload of transphobic humor. Still, I’ve always liked the improv sitcom style and this carries on the tradition well enough. If it ever gets to air I might watch it but I’m not going to even really keep an eye out for it either. Here is a trailer. The Forbidden Room  Hell yeah! This is the type of poo poo I go to Sundance for! The fact that I’ll probably end up writing less about this than I did about White God is sort of depressing. I’m not going to be able to fully get across what The Forbidden Room is like but I’m going to try. It is the fever dream that film would have if it were a person. It is a peak into the film afterlife where the souls of lost films end up. The whole thing feels like a living breathing organism made of film. The movie is basically a series of short films based on scripts and ideas found in researching old lost silent movies. The stories all connect but they don’t necessarily have anything to do with each other, that is to say there is always a transition from one story to the next but that transition isn’t always sensible. For example the film opens with a short on “how to take a bath” and that leads to the next submarine related short by zooming into the bathtub. The stories go back and forth between each other, like a Russian doll that's being taken apart and put back together again. Some layers last longer with others with the first three lasting throughout the entire film. The subjects of the films are all over the place with most being pretty ridiculous. There’s the aforementioned submarine one, where the crew suck on pancakes for extra air, a short where a bone doctor is kidnapped by lady skeletons and forced to wear a poison skeleton unitard, a short where a journalist crashes on an island where she has a lesbian tryst with a girl about to sacrificed to a volcano that’s been enraged by the theft of a squid, s a musical interlude about a man who seeks help for his obsessions with derrieres sung by a man with a blurred out face and many more. The shorts are from all over the map but they all have a weird dreamlike, nonsense quality to them. I tend to really like movies that have a fever dream quality to them. Those films are also pretty much all horror films. This is the first movie I’ve seen that has that quality but is more whimsical than scary. There are some weird and horrifying moments in the film, but the absurdity of it all is more often than not played for laughs. Still that fever dream atmosphere is strong, with strange things happening all around that are never explained or justified. We mainly are just expected to take the strange logic and events of these shorts at face value. Things are often presented as if we already know the meaning. It should be mentioned that the film is god damned gorgeous in its strange way. As I mentioned earlier, the movie has an alive feel to it with the images warping and breaking in a way that’s almost hypnotic (the moving poster above is sort of representative of how the film looks most of the time). The movie perfectly captures the look and feel of tattered old films and does interesting and weird things with this aesthetic. There’s one shot in particular, where magma warps into the shape of an old windmill on a hill to get to the next scene. It's simply jaw-dropping. The music goes well with the look, sounding like old movies but constantly twisting and warping. These two things can be seen immediately in the opening credits, a montage of various styles of old credits that are constantly warping and shifting into another style like a bunch of random bits of film spliced together badly and put on the reel. It’s probably the best opening credits since Enter the Void. This isn't going to be for everyone. While there is a narrative to follow along with, it doesn’t always make sense and it is often absurd and nonsensical. Things don’t really link together in any meaningful way and it’s often not clear if anything is going towards anything meaningful. However, if you’ve made it this far and this all sounds good to you, I can’t recommend this movie enough. Ivy  Ivy is the second Turkish film I’ve seen at Sundance. The other one had a really depressing description but ended up being overall forgettable outside of the fact that the subtitles were really badly translated. This one was actually really good, and they barely screwed up the subtitles at all! The movie takes place entirely on a giant cargo ship. The owner of said ship has gone bankrupt and a lien has been placed on the ship. The ship can’t go back to land without being seized so to avoid this it stays in the water with a small six man skeleton crew. The men cannot leave until some sort of arrangement is met. What is promised to be a quick job instead goes on and on with no end in sight. The longer things go the more tensions rise in the small but diverse crew as their supplies diminish and their sanity falters. The whole thing amounts to a tense, edge of your seat type of movie where not a lot actually happens. It’s mainly guys hanging out, sometimes doing work, doing what they can to stave of boredom and occasionally clashing with each other. Things are pretty peaceful early on and you just get some well written conversations that build alot of character. The tension comes from the interactions between the characters and never knowing who is going to be pushed over the edge. It's never a given how things are going to turn out because really you don’t know what type of movie this is going to end up being. Things teeter on the edge for the majority until the breaking point eventually comes and then things start getting strange in a magical realism sort of way. It's not clear if these strange things are supposed to be happening, are in the crews head or just there to represent something outside of the reality of the movie. In general it’s all very allegorical with the characters easily falling into different segment of the Turkish society. I mean you have a Muslim that is aggrivated that others don't respect how he wants to live his life and would prefer if others would just act as he does, you have a drug addict that causes trouble, a giant silent Kurd who keeps to himself, a captain that throws around authority but ultimately can't help anyone and so on and so on. It all seems like it must mean something but I don't know all that much about Turkey so I feel alot is lost on me. Still, me not getting the full picture doesn't make it a lesser film. This is a very good film that you should check out. It’s tense, well written and just generally enjoyable. The acting is good and the whole thing in general is well put together. It’s all just very grounded believable despite its allegorical nature and strange turns later one. Turbo Kid  I wanted to like this movie, I really did, but I can’t. It just wasn't good. The description made it sound awesome but even then I was at least a little wary. Unfortunately my worst fears were realized. Turbo Kid is pretty much an homage to the 80s. Its every pore excretes references to various aspects of the pop culture the filmmakers grew up on. The plot is that of a bad 80s kid’s movie and its action scenes are out of a Troma film. You might think these things seem like they wouldn't go great together and you would be right. The setting is a post-apocalyptic future with scarce water. The main character is a young man living on his own that idolizes and old hero named Turbo Man. One day he meets an incredibly cheery and somewhat dim girl who decides that they should be friends and puts a tracking (slap) bracelet on him. He’s annoyed by her at first but grows to like her until she is inevitably kidnapped by the evil guy. When going after he manages to find Turbo Man’s corpse and takes the costume for himself. It all goes pretty much like you’d expect. None of it diverts from the usual dull tropes and it just sort of goes from one expected scene to the next with a bunch of forced references thrown in along the way. Part of the problem is the lead actress isn’t that endearing at all. Her peppy optimism sort of plays like a parody of that type of thing but it's too into it to say anything about it. It’s always more funny than irritating. In general the kid’s movie aspect is played incredibly straight. I guess this would be alright but this is a really lovely kid’s movie. A lot of the movies this is paying homage to are just not that good. This isn’t a problem by itself but when you make no effort to improve upon the things you’re taking inspiration from, you end up with something tired and bland at best and outright bad at worst. The other part of the movie is the Troma side and this part works a little better. The action scenes are pretty amusing and usually managed to take me out of the bored trance I was falling into during the rest of the movie. The deaths are often brutal, funny and creative. Unfortunately, as indicated at earlier, they don’t fit in with the rest of the movie all that well. Put in the context of the kid’s movie is just feels like it's trying way too hard. The movie is also pretty bland to look at. Just a bunch of nondescript wilderness backgrounds (leaning more towards wastelands) with little effort made to make them look all that apocalypsey. You can feel the budget and these are not skilled enough filmmakers to elevate what little they have. The score was also really disappointing. I love me a good synth score and this was a bland, doing the minimum to get by synth score. Seriously though, how do you mess up a synth score? The biggest problem is that the movie just isn’t that funny overall. Constantly going “hey, here’s an 80s thing” is not really that interesting. I need way more than that and this movie doesn’t really provide that. If you’ve read this and were amused by the concept of a tracking slap bracelet, this might be the movie for you. Everyone else, stay away. Here is the trailer Continued in the next post!
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Day 4 Shorts Program 4  Superior This short focuses on a pair of teenage twins that sort of have that creepy twin thing going on. They’re getting along fine until they’re dad brings a guy home from a bar because he needs a place to crash and one of the twins feels that this is love. This does not sit well with her sister at all. I dunno, this didn’t do much for me. I can’t really find much wrong with it but I just didn’t feel all that much either way. There’s one aspect in the end that was pretty cool but overall something about this just never clicked with me. Here is the trailer Oh Lucy! This was an odd one but I liked it. It focuses on a Japanese office lady that is getting a bit old to be an office lady. One day her niece calls her up claiming that she enrolled in some English classes but now wants out and they won’t give her a refund. She is wondering if her aunt can maybe take the classes instead and give her the money. The classes are in a sketchy place and in general are really weird, involving her putting on a blonde wig and calling herself Lucy. Still, she gets an odd enjoyment out of them. From the start it’s pretty clear that this is a scam, but it’s still hard to see where it's going. It’s just such an odd scam that it kind of draws you in. The whole thing is a bit too silly and foreign to me to resonate as emotionally as it wants to at the end but still, I enjoyed this. It was unique, well made and it drew me in with it's slightly off nature. Here is the trailer OM Rider This is an adult swim bumper that goes on for 12 minutes. That’s all really. The animation is sort of lousy and the whole thing is just sort of nonsensical. It's like something an animation major made when he realized the project he hadn't even started was due tomorrow. I’m not really sure what this was doing here. Here is the trailer Russian Roulette This is kind of sweet funny short that I don’t have to talk about because I can just link it. Not amazing but I enjoyed it and honestly pretty impressive for the 50 pounds it apparently took to make. https://vimeo.com/90733535 Making It In America Pretty typical short of an immigrant woman telling her story and what America means to her. It’s nothing I haven’t seen but I can’t really fault it at all. This is another one I can just link. https://vimeo.com/98902213 Greenland This was boring. Like it was 17 minutes of not a whole lot happening. It was a guy at home with his parents, just sort of doing chores and hanging out. At one point he gets hot pepper residue on his dick and has to take a shower. That’s it. I think there’s supposed to be this whole thing going on where he hasn’t been home for a while and we’re supposed to feel how different it is but I don’t know these people. I don’t know what it was like before. In a year I will be surprised if I remember having seen this. Myrna The Monster Myrna is an alien from the moon that was taken by an astronaut and brought to earth. At one point she escaped and now she lives in LA where no one really notices her because it’s LA. Now she’s just dealing with the same poo poo most people in LA deal with. This was good overall but not amazing or anything. It has a good concept but it’s not really better than the concept. I mean its funny enough. The puppet that they use for Myrna is cool and they always make it look nice and natural. Still, I feel something like this should wow me and while I enjoyed it, it was less special than its potential. Also contains a penis out of nowhere. I almost made it through a shorts program without a random penis showing up. Ah well. Here is the trailer. Welcome To Leith  Leith is a tiny town in North Dakota with less than a 100 people. The people that live there are friendly but they mainly come there for the peace and quiet that living out in the middle of nowhere brings. This peace gets disrupted when a loner named Craig Cobb buys a house in town. At first he mainly just keeps to himself but soon it is found that he is one of the country’s leading white supremacists. His ultimate goal is to move a bunch of his buddies to Leith and then get enough votes to take over the town council nice and legally. He wants to turn this little town into a haven for the white supremacist movement. The citizens of Leith obviously do not take kindly to this at all. This is the type of documentary that will make you really mad but because its good it will also make you think about why you’re mad and how correct your natural anger is. The white supremacists shown in this film, unsurprisingly, are all awful, button-pushing assholes. They do things to incite people and they often get away with it because they are well aware of the limits of the law. They are also pretty laughable. Eventually another family moves in with Cobb and the father is this ex-military scrawny little guy with this pathetic, pubey Hitler Mustache. It’s hard to look at him without just laughing at how dumb he looks. Cobb himself is pretty intelligent and sometimes even makes good points but he’s still has the level of insane, single-minded idiocy that’s required to be a white supremacist in the first place (side note: it is worth the price of admission just to hear Cobb, without irony, use the word “chutzpah”) . These are terrible people and you really don’t want to see them accomplish anything. However, the issue of free speech also manages to rear its head and it’s kind of hard not to see the white supremacists point sometimes (please do not take this quote out of context). Yes they are awful people but they are also harassed, mainly by people from out of town, throughout the movie. They have their tires slashed, people following them and stores refusing to do business with them. While they’re plans are vile, they don’t really actually do all that much throughout the movie. Is all of this stuff against them justified? Maybe. The movie doesn’t give any easy answers in this regard. It’s always the worst people that end up bringing up free speech issues and this is another thing that’s testing the limit of all that. This is a movie that really makes you question how exactly you feel about free speech and what your limit on that is. It's also a movie that shows how in the internet age, even the most local issue can become a national issue and once again it's hard to say for sure if that's good or not. Here is the trailer. ‘71  Holy poo poo this was good. Taking place in Belfast during The Troubles, ’71 focuses on a British soldier that gets trapped in hostile territory after a weapon search by his regiment goes horribly wrong. He must make his way back to friendly territory with danger coming from potentially anywhere. That’s basically it. I mean there’s more to it but nothing worth getting into in a quick overview like this. It’s a simple plot but it gets the job done. The action sequences here are absurdly well done. The mentioned scene where the soldier gets separated is one of the most intense sequences I’ve seen in a long time. It starts out intense with women and children making a racket to let everyone know that the soldiers are there, and then the tension just builds and builds and things gradually get worse and worse until it all just gets out of hand. The movie never quite tops this sequence but all the action set pieces are extremely well done. I don’t know how much this movie cost but considering it’s an indie film about The Troubles, not nearly as much as it looks like it did. The movie also has a great deal of shakey cam but unlike many movies that use this, you can almost always tell what’s going on (the almost is because there’s one sequence where things get deliberately muddled). No matter how violently the camera’s jerking around, there’s always a sense of where you are and where the characters are in relation to each other. It gets the intensity that shakey cam can bring while also having the intensity of actually knowing what’s going on. This is also a movie where you’re never quite sure what’s going to happen next. It establishes pretty early that no one is really safe from being horribly murdered and it never lets you feel at ease. The movie also makes every death count. Every taking of a life is given it’s due as the horrible act it is and most of them will actually stick in your memory. Politically this is pretty much a “gently caress everybody” kind of affair. Neither side are all that good or noble. Both sides do have good people but both sides also have people that are doing really bad things for what they think are the right reasons and they also have people that are just plain doing really bad things. No one here is a caricature though. Most of the characters are fully realized with their own motivations and desires that make them act how they do. So yeah, as I said in the beginning, this is drat good. It's in limited release as I'm writing this but I doubt it's gonna get the wide release it deserves. A movie like this shouldn't be coming out in March. Here is the trailer. Slow West  A dry yet wacky British comedy mixed with a western? Sure. Why not? Slow West isn’t an amazing movie but it’s sort of amazing that it ends up working as well as it does. It takes two genres that probably shouldn’t go great together and makes it work pretty seamlessly, though it’s also bound to disappoint some people that go in just wanting a western. The story focuses on a young upper class Scotsman that has traveled to 19th century American west to look for his lady love. In flashbacks it becomes quickly clear that the boy is extremely naive and the girl just was never that into him. This dooms his journey pretty early on. Along the way he meets an outlaw played by Michael Fassbender who kind of forces his protective services onto the young man. We soon find he has an alternate agenda in mind because the girl has a bounty on her head, further adding to the doomed nature of this journey. The movie is pretty much just these two as they make their way across the weird and violent world of the old west. As I mentioned the movie has a really dry comic tone to the whole thing. The world of the movie is that of a pretty dark, no nonsense western but none of it is taken all that seriously. It’s an odd approach but it works oddly well. You watch a movie where alot of awful, depressing stuff happens but, for better or worse, it goes down easier than it should. The movie honestly gets downright wacky at times, with some jokes that wouldn’t be out of place in a Naked Gun film. It really shouldn’t work but it’s all so enjoyable that it’s hard to argue with it. The performances are pretty strong all around with Fassbender being his usual great self and Kodi Mit-Mcphee holding his own. There’s also a nice a varied group of strange supporting people that keep things interesting. The movie is also very pretty to look at with its nice western landscapes. However it does feel a tad lifeless at times. Not much more to say. It’s an enjoyable movie. If it sounds appealing, see it, if not, you aren’t missing out on too much. Day 5 The Wolfpack  With all the talk about how violent media affects us, it is unfortunate with this movie we have a record of what it’s like to have someone whose only knowledge of the outside world is through movies. The Wolfpack is a documentary about a group of six brothers and one sister who for almost their entire lives have rarely ever been allowed to leave their small New York City apartment. They mention that they would go out maybe once or twice a year. Some years they were never allowed out at all. Their dad is a hippie Hare Krishna type who also is terrified of the outside world and its “evils”. One of the few things they are allowed is movies and as a result they watch them over and over again, and eventually start filming full recreations of their favorites. It’s all obviously pretty hosed up and the movie treats it all oddly lightly. My friend who saw it with me was greatly disturbed by the movie but it didn’t really get to me in that way. Part of this was because I was just sort of watching it anthropologically but the other is the movie just seems uncomfortable really delving into how hosed up all of this is. Like these children have pretty much lived their entire life deprived of things that are essential to become a well formed human being because their Dad is an idiot. There are also hints of much worse abuse going on through the years but no one really gets into that so it's never really gotten into. We also come into these people’s lives at the turning point. The fact that a documentary is being made about them shows that. Things from the start are gradually getting better and this gives the movie a hopeful tone that it might not fully earn. Still, it’s hard to deny that this is pretty hosed up. These are kids that literally define their world by what they see in movies. When they start going out later in the movie, they dress like they see characters dressing in movies. All of them seem to talk with different accents because they have all learned to speak from different movie characters. It's still fascinating and worth a watch but I guess it’s hard to know how to react to any of this but the movie just seems to treat this as a real life Be Kind Rewind rather than the real life Dogtooth that it actually is. Nasty Baby  This movie is hard to write about because something happens very late in the movie that really changes how I can talk about but it’s also like this unexpected last act thing, so I also can’t really talk about it either. I shall try my best but I still might end up revealing too much, so if that might be a concern for you, just skip this and take my assurance that this was really good. This is a movie by Sebastian Silva, who also made some other Sundance movies I liked, namely Magic Magic and Crystal Fairy. This movie is kind of a halfway point between the a little too true to life stoner comedy of the latter and a horror movie emerging from misunderstanding and idiocy of the former. In the movie Silva plays a gay, kind of terrible artist who is trying to have a test tube baby with his best friend (who is played by Kristen Wiig). It is found out his sperm is no good, so instead they hope to get his boyfriend to donate his sperm. In the meantime there’s alot of small things going on from Silva’s character trying to get together a baby related art project, to them dealing with a man a homophobic man with serious mental problems that keeps blasting his leaf blower early in the morning. It’s mostly a really sweet, really funny movie. All these character feel quite real and they’re all very likable. All the actors really pull together and make a likable bunch of folks that you’d want to hang out with, which is honestly a pretty dramatic departure from Silva’s last two films. It’s actually good to know that he can write likable characters. For most of this movie the audience seemed to 100% love it. What’s not to love? It’s the type of indie film that everyone loves at Sundance. Then the last act happens and the audience turned on the film really quickly. Rarely have I ever seen an audience turn as quickly as I have with this film. I don’t want to give it away but even by talking about the fact there’s something that happens that drastically changed how the audience felt is giving a big thing away. The ending feels like it comes out of nowhere. It feels like a giant tonal shift that doesn’t work. I’ve complained a great deal about tone problems and this is a movie where the shift actually works. The thing is the seeds for the ending are there, it’s just, like the characters, the audience brushes these details aside because they aren’t important to them. It works really well and makes for a really unique and jarring experience. I really like this movie and I really want to recommend it, but if you’ve made it this far you’re already going to go into a different movie than I did, so it’s hard to say what it’s going to be like for you. It’s hard to get across why this is good because I just can’t talk about an important part of it but maybe the fact that it’s so hard to talk about will peak your interest enough on its own. The Nightmare  Earlier when I was writing about The Forbidden Room, I mentioned that I like movies that have a fever dream quality to them. There is something about the illogical ways nightmares actually play out that I find inherently scary and interesting. This movie with its very concept seemed to promise it would deliver some of that and it didn’t disappoint. Made by the director of Room 237 (a documentary I didn’t like all that much), The Nightmare focuses on the experiences of people who suffer from sleep paralysis also known as night terrors. If you don’t know, when you go to sleep, your brain paralyzes you so you don’t hurt yourself acting out your dreams. When people can’t do this properly we get sleep walking. When the body does this too well and at the wrong time, we get sleep paralysis. In this state you feel wide awake and can’t move. Meanwhile things that you would be seeing in your dreams seem to actually be happening to you. The most common narrative for this is alien abduction. While this movie has one subject that has something that falls into that, most of the people fall under different patterns in what they see. The movie is made up of interviews of different people and recreations of what they saw. For better or for worse, the movie is not interested in the science at all. All it cares about is what these people saw and what they believe. Very little is done to question this. The lack of questioning I thought held back Room 237, but here it doesn’t get in the way too much. These are people that go through something that is pretty hosed up and while science seems to understand what’s happening to them, as of right now it also can’t help them overcome it. There is no cure all for this. As a result many of these people have shied away from the scientific explanation because it is of no use to them and they lean more to things that make sense to them. Because I find this is more interesting than just explaining to the audience how these people are wrong, it gets a pass for not caring about the science all that much. The actual nightmare footage gets the job done. It’s all kind of silly but that’s the nature of these types of things. You kind of have to meet this movie halfway. You need to put yourself in the mindset of people that are experiencing this to get the horror from the movie. Shadow men aren't the scariest of things but if you imagine that every night you clearly see them come into your room and stare at you, it becomes pretty unnerving. Still, this is all dream stuff and some of it is just silly (like a guy who as a child dreamed an old man was forcibly delivering an insect he had won to him), but that’s okay. That’s just the nature of the subject. Going in the thing I was most curious about was if this director could deliver on footage he had shot and I’d say he did a good job. The interviews are well shot and I like that the camera often seems to be peaking behind corners like it too is unnerved by what it’s hearing. The recreations get the mood right though the budget it low. There are some jump scares but mostly he just goes for an unnerved tone. He is also downright playful at times, seeming thrilled to be working with his own footage. This is a movie that delivered on what was promised. If you’re going in looking for a nice, scientific examination of night terrors, you will be disappointed but if you just want a movie that talks to people about their experiences and shows how dealing with this has changed them, this is pretty drat good. Day 6 Don Verdean  It’s weird to go to a movie and while it’s being introduced have something said that makes you think this might have been a huge mistake. That's what happened to me. The description of the movie seemed good enough. It starred Sam Rockwell, who I like, and it was a comedy about him playing a shady archeologist that supposedly unearths rare religious artifacts. Sign me up. However during the intro I realized that this was directed and written by the maker of Napoleon Dynamite. I loving hate that movie. Also, from what I can tell, everything that he’s made since then is supposed to be even worse than Napoleon Dynamite. What horrible poo poo show had I just got myself into? Well luckily it wasn’t THAT bad but it wasn’t that good either. As mentioned, the story focuses on a shady archeologist named Don Verdean that was big in the 80s but has fallen on hard times. He gets lucky when a founder of a mega church shows an interest him and wants him to find artifacts for the church so they have an edge over the mega church across the street. Things go well until he’s caught faking an artifact by an Israeli he works with and the Israeli demands alot in return for his silence. The movie is amusing enough I guess. I laughed. Still, there’s not much I can really remember from it. The movie is helped by being full of funny people. Sam Rockwell, Jemaine Clement, Danny McBride, Leslie Bibb and Will Forte all do a fine job and manage to enhance what’s written. The whole thing is just so forgettable though with a plot that really doesn’t do all that much interesting. Part of the problem is the movie just liked Don too much. They aren’t willing to make him go full scumbag. This really just needlessly holds back the movie and makes many of its punches feel soft. This feeling isn’t helped by alot of the Christian mocking feeling too broad. It feels so out there that it doesn’t feel like its can really be applied to what any actual Christian believes. I’m not saying I wanted this to be a long “gently caress Christians” rant, but by not really going after the movies central target, we’re left with a movie that doesn’t say all that much about anything. So yeah, not the biggest waste of my time but guess it does pay the learn the names of some directors I don’t like. Here is a clip. Advantageous  I feel mixed about this movie. On the one hand its indie scifi and it’s not really dumb. On the other hand I was pretty underwhelmed by this whole thing. Scifi, like horror, is a genre I go in wanting to like but this took a while to grab me at all and by then its issues had done their damage. The movie takes place in the not too distant future. The gap in wealth is pretty bad and it’s hard to get work, especially if you’re a woman. The lead works as the face of a company that is developing a technique that lets you put yourself in a new body. However, the company decides she is too old for the demographic they’re trying to reach and fires her. In the meantime her brilliant young daughter is trying to get into a good prep school, but the one she got into was too expensive even with the job and now things look bleak. The company offers to take her back and take care of her for life if she herself does through with the procedure. It’s an offer she can’t refuse. The overall story is pretty good and it particularly shines in the last act. The movie does a good job of creating a believable future and has some really nice effects for such a low budget film. The issues of the day are kept in the background and are there for you to pick up on without it ever really shoving them down your throat. They are mostly ignored by the characters just like people tend to do now so that feels right. The main issue in this movie comes with the dialogue. It is so god drat stiff that I sometimes could barely stand it. It just feels like someone trying to sound smart. Awkward big words are used when smaller, more natural ones would do just as well. It rarely sounds like people talking but rather people reading from the script. The acting doesn’t really help. The dialogue isn’t easy to deliver but the actors don’t really sell it. This is particularly bad with the main child actress who just doesn’t sound natural saying these things. For most of the movie, the things she says are not things that the movie convinced me any child would say, even a really smart one. James Urbaniak is the only one that really gets through the dialogue well, which is why I’m naming him by name here (and not just because I like Venture Brothers). It’s just annoying to me because there is a really fantastic scifi movie in here. The world of it is good and the themes are strong and interesting. I really wanted to like this more ebcause I like good scifi and also this is the even rarer beast of a movie with a mostly female cast. It’s potential shows through in the last act but most of it was just sort of hard for me to get through because the writing was just not good. Also, can scifi movies stop talking to me about motherhood? Like it fits here, but I feel I’ve just gotten my fill of that. Here is a trailer. I Am Michael  Oh hey a gay indie movie starring James Franco. Do I even need to tell you this was disappointing? Oh James Franco, some day one of your self-indulgent indie projects won’t suck (actually I can’t promise that). In this Franco plays a real life gay rights activist that writes for a prominent gay magazine and is in three way relationship Zachary Quinto and some other handsome guy. At one point, Christianity starts appealing to him and eventually he becomes Christian, claims to now be straight, meets a nice girl and becomes a particularly homophobic pastor. That’s pretty much the whole movie. The main problem with this movie is it’s just trying too hard to be even handed and ends up saying nothing in a really boring way. On one level, this is a movie that would play really well to the Christian right. Yes there are some gay sex scenes, but still this plays like a dream narrative to those people. In the movie they even point this out. In the end you still have a movie that shows a guy who managed to stop being gay and be a good Christian who who now sees the evils of his former life. This easily plays as propaganda arguing that being gay is a choice. Oddly enough the movie also has the exact opposite problem, in that it’s clear that no one making this movie believes any part of Michael’s experience. The act of conversion is kept at a distance. We never get a feeling of what Michael sees in this or why he rejects the gay lifestyle. The few answers we get feel forced and at least aren't presented in a convincing fashion by the movie. There’s no sense of spirituality in this movie and no desire is shown to understand what anyone can see in this stuff. The gay lifestyle looks fun and the Christian stuff is just sort of there being presented factually. The problem is the film makers don’t understand Michael and they figure because they don’t understand, getting into his head is just some mystery that no one can understand. It’s just a movie that fails to pretty much do anything. It just sort of presents a story in a not very interesting manner and presumes that will be enough. It’s a movie that doesn’t want to offend its subject but also doesn’t want to understand him. There might have been something else that could have been done with this story other than those two options but this movie sure didn’t find it. Finders Keeper  To be honest, at this point my lack of sleep from the festival was getting to me. While I didn’t fall asleep during this movie, there were times where alot of my concentration was going into staying awake. This wasn’t a reflection of the movie but still, there might have been some things I missed and in general my opinion of this might be a little less enthusiastic than it could have been because it wasn’t the best mind set for watching a movie. Anyways, Finders Keepers would kind of be a hard movie for someone to screw up. The subjects are so inherently interesting that this could have been a terrible production and it still would have been worth watching. The movie focuses on a man who buys storage bin from an auction. In that bin is a grill and in that grill is a human foot. They guy who used to be connected to that foot realizes that it’s missing and wants it back. However the guy that bought it refuses because he feels he bought it fair and square. He likes the small fame he has received from finding the foot and doesn't want to give that up. So yeah, as I said, it’s a pretty hard to mess up concept. The people involved are as much of characters as you’d expect. The guy who bought the foot is egotistical and a jerk but he’s also oddly charismatic in an obnoxious sort of way and he’s endlessly entertaining to watch. The guy who lost the foot has a whole tragic backstory and a redemption arc to go with it. It’s enjoyable spending time with these people as they work their way through this absurd situation. While I’ve said this would be impossible to screw up, it is still very well made and very well researched. The only real issue I can think of with the movie is it sort forces the story into a more pleasing movie shape than is probably necessary. It gives this story a beginning, middle and end. That fact kind of makes things seem a little brighter than they probably actually are. There are things that are sort of glossed over in favor of getting to a place that feels like a satisfying ending, when we know these people’s lives will go on and every victory that is won by the end might just be an illusion. It simplifies the complicated nature of these people's lives to make it go down smoother. Still it’s a movie that delivers on what it promises. It’s not a movie that blew me away but I also can’t find much fault with it and I can’t deny it’s highly enjoyable. And yes we do get to see the foot. Here is a clip (just from the film in general, not of the foot). Day 7 Entertainment  Most people will not like this movie. Hell, most people I talked to that saw this movie, did not like this movie. It is not a movie that cares if you like it. It’s a movie that doesn’t give you any place to relate to it or its characters. It’s just sort of a journey through the world of a completely miserable comic and it just sort of wallows in that misery. Still, despite all this, I think I liked it. The movie stars Gregg Turkington who seems to be playing a version of himself. He is touring poo poo clubs and bars across America doing gigs as his character Neal Hamburger, who is a purposely terrible, awkward and antagonistic comic. I do find him amusing but I don’t feel good about it either. Along the way he meets strange people, sees boring attractions, plays rooms of mostly unresponsive people and spends a lot of time just silently trying to get through everything. This is basically an attempt to make the world’s grimmest crying clown painting. It’s the Pagliacci joke but no one finds Pagliacci funny, which sort of ruins the joke but that’s sentiment fits well with this movie. This is just a road trip of pure misery. Turkington starts out depressed and despondent to the world around him and just gets worse and worse as the movie goes on. He doesn’t handle anything well but he doesn’t really react to much either. He tends to react in the same blank way to some weird Lynchian stuff that happens to him as he does to dull roadside attractions. The only time he gets worked up is in regards to some part of his act going wrong and even then it’s a long, directionless, uncomfortable, whiney rant to no one in particular. I haven’t seen the director’s other film (The Comedy) but I feel this film’s title is to it as that one’s was to that. It’s a film that goes out of its way to not be entertaining. Early on we get some comedy bits with Neal Hamburger and some moments with John C Reilly but even stuff like that fades as we’re just left with this man and his extreme misery until we get to one of the most pathetic, depressing scenes I’ve ever seen. It’s not a fun journey but it’s an interesting thing to behold. I don’t want to watch this again but I still think I liked it, at least as much as that word can apply to this movie. No clip from the movie but here's a sample of Neil Hamburger. Stockholm, Pennsylvania  This is a really dumb movie. I don’t use that term lightly. Earlier when I was talking about White God, I just said it was silly. This movie is really silly too (though not White God silly). It’s also really dumb. The movie tells the story of a girl that was abducted when she was a little girl and was kept in a basement by the man for 17 years. She has been found and he’s been arrested and now she is back home with her parents who she doesn’t even remember. The transition does not go smoothly. Initially there are some aspects of this movie I found interesting. The concept of a girl moving back with her parents who are strangers to her is interesting as is watching her adjust to a world she’s been isolated from. For a while the movie kept me entertained and kept me from really thinking about anything. Unfortunately it could not keep this up and the filmmaker’s lack of understanding of pretty much any aspect of their movie’s central topic became really clear. In the Q+A afterwards the filmmakers noted that they studied no real kidnapping cases. They did this deliberately because they didn’t want to “take someone's story”. This is incredibly dumb and makes the movie incredibly dumb. The movie really does play out like someone just sort of badly guessing how someone in this situation might react. Nothing here feels like it has any connection to human psychology. I don’t know how else to say this other than just saying this feels like a movie made by a dumb person. There are just so many aspects that don’t really work. The main girl acts more like a robot than she does a girl traumatized. Well, she wasn’t really traumatized all that much I guess because every time we see the kidnapper, he’s a really nice guy. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and for us to see the evils this guy did to her, but that never happens. He was a super dad that kidnapped a girl and never let her out of his basement. She is also not bitter about this because I think that’s how this movie thinks Stockholm syndrome works or something. I don’t like complaining about characters not acting like real people but it’s just so separate from any form of reality that it’s hard not to. There are just so many moments that took me out of this movie. There’s a scene where she goes to visit her kidnapper in jail and I just can’t ignore the number of ways this is absurd. This isn’t even getting into the really silly part of the movie which involves the mother in her increasing desperation to make her daughter love her. That part gets really dumb but I won’t get into that because it’ll spoil the later parts of the movie. I will note that the ending itself is probably the dumbest part of all. I feel dumb just talking about this movie. I hate just ripping apart plot details and the ways characters act for not feeling authentic but everything that happens feels so silly and so devoid of any meaningful connection to how humans work that I don’t know what else to say. Seeing this after The Wolfpack was especially jarring. It Follows  I hate when the fest makes me wait this long to see the really good horror movie that I can get hyped about. This movie loving ruled. It’s the unholy love child of an 80s slasher film and The Ring stripped down to the most basic elements. It’s a deconstruction almost in a culinary sense in that it takes the base elements of something well known, does them really well and puts them all front in center without anything muddling them. It takes tropes that are mostly unquestioned in horror films and just runs with them. It’s pretty cool. The setup is pretty straightforward: a girl sleeps with her new boyfriend for the first time. In their post coital state he chloroforms her and ties her up. When she wakes up he tells her that because she has slept with him, she will now have a thing coming after her. It will come at her as slow walking speed thing and can take any form. If it catches her, it will kill her. If she dies, the thing will go after him again. If she sleeps with someone else, the thing will then go after that person. If that person dies, this thing will once again go after her. The monster in this movie is essentially sexually transmitted. That setup is most of what we get for plot. It never explains what this thing is and why it does what it does which is the way I like it. The movie is just spent with the characters trying to deal with this thing and find a way around just passing it off to someone else. The characters are all pretty much what you’d expect from a horror movie (the main character girl, the sister, the out of the main character’s league childhood best friend, the cool neighbor, etc…), but they all have more depth to them than those tropes indicate. I’m not going to say that these are amazing characters but they’re likable enough and they act in a way that’s believable given the ridiculous circumstances. The movie in general is just really well made with a very dynamic camera that sets up some really good scares. This is a movie where even the jump scares are creative enough that you can’t be too mad at them. The movie has an odd thing where it seems pretty tame except when it’s not. It’s mostly not that violent but when it’s violent, it’s really violent. Despite sex being a central plot point, the main character never actually get naked, but the thing that’s pursuing them is often in various unsettling states of undress. It’s a movie that knows how to use its sex and violence and as a result doesn’t use them cheaply, which is rare. The movie also contains one of the more unique synth scores I’ve ever heard. Done by the guys who did the music for Fez, It’s really jarring and often kind of distracting, sometimes to the point of being comical, but it also sort of rules really hard. It’s hard for me to really judge it because it’s really unique and I’m not sure if it’s so awful that it’s awesome or it’s just awesome. So yeah, see this movie. It rules. I loved it and my friend who doesn’t like horror movies also liked it. I’ll be surprised if there’s a better horror movie this year. Here is the trailer The Score can be heard here Day 8 H.  Finally we’re at the last movie and unfortunately I’m not going to have all that much to say about it. I liked it I guess, but I can’t really fully justify it. The movie focuses on two women named Helen who live in Troy, New York. Yes, I know that’s the dumbest thing ever but it’s not really important to anything so it can easily be ignored. One of the Helens is an elderly woman who is obsessed with these life-like dolls and she takes care of hers like it was a real baby. Her husband puts up with it. The other Helen is an artist with her husband and they’re expecting their first baby. Then an object falls from the sky and strange things start happening throughout town. The first Helen’s husband disappears and the second Helen’s baby is shown to have been a false pregnancy. In general people in town are starting to act weird. Some are sort of zoning out and just staring into nothing like a waking coma and some are wandering towards the point where the object was seen. Just a lot of general weirdness starts happening and it doesn’t really add up to anything and that’s the movie’s main problem. I found it really interesting to watch and I enjoyed the ride but in the end I’m pretty sure none of it meant a god damned thing. I mean there are themes here but even those don’t really mean much. It’s just sort of this abstract weird story that exists because it can, if that makes any sense. Still, as I said, I enjoyed the ride. It’s a mostly very well shot movie with interesting imagery. The acting is good all-around and the score is god damned fantastic. It’s a movie I enjoyed but didn’t get alot out of and will probably forget by next year. Still, there are worse ways to spend an hour and a half. Here is the trailer. So that's it. I know this is late but at least I got it done. If you have any questions, just let me know. And yes I know this thing is probably riddled with spelling mistakes. I try my best damnit.
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Mar 1, 2015 20:03
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Why not say what happens in Nasty Baby and spoiler-tag it? The reason why everyone abruptly turned on it is pretty important context for that info; it could either be something I desperately need to see or something I desperately don't want to see. e: a review of Nasty Baby posted:The Bishop wakes everybody at 7 a.m. with his noisy leafblower, then harasses folks at night by “helping” visitors park their cars. He’s an unpredictable, half-unhinged wild card the likes of which one only finds in big cities. No one wants him around, yet there’s no easy solution in terms of how the characters are supposed to deal with him — though let’s just say that if their fates were reversed, this would potentially be the most upsetting movie ever to play Sundance. Hoo boy. WeedlordGoku69 fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Mar 1, 2015 |
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Mar 1, 2015 20:26
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Okay, Yoshifan also asked about how Nasty Baby turned out and I sent him the following: Okay just warning you: these are spoilers for like the very end of the movie. I also put a tl:Dr at the bottom if you just want the very basics. For most of the movie it's a very likable comedy full of likable actors playing likable people. The plot involves a gay guy trying to have a baby with his best friend. His down count is low so they use his boyfriend instead. The only bit of menace in the movie comes from a local man who literally had severe mental problems and as time goes on his behavior gets worse and his homophobia comes out. Very late in the movie he starts following the lead home and harassing him. The guy had had a bad day but he tries to ignore him. Eventfully he can't take it anymore and he punches him and for some severe damage to what is essentially an old man. He realizes what he's done, helps the man to a stoop and then goes up to his apartment to call for help. The old man follows him up grabs a knife and goes at the main character. There's a fight and the old man gets stabbed in the neck. He bring him to the bathtub and obviously at this point the old man is yelling and screaming. The guys friends come home, they see what has happened and their not sure what to do. One of the guys relatives is a judge and they know the whole thing looks really bad. They decided to kill him and they do by smothering him. Pretty much The rest if the movie is them disposing of the body. Tl;Dr: there is a murder by the likable sweet characters at the end of the movie pretty comes much out if no where.
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Mar 1, 2015 21:02
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Okay, whew, that's a lot more interesting than where my mind was going. I was really, really, really worried that the way that plot thread was gonna resolve was one of the protagonists raping the guy, because the reviews, including yours, were basically stopping just short of saying the movie needed a trigger warning. That actually makes the movie sound dope as hell, though. WeedlordGoku69 fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Mar 1, 2015 |
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Mar 1, 2015 21:08
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Actually kind of excited about this thread now that I live in a city that plays these movies. I don't know how much overlap there typically is between Sundance and SIFF but It Follows is coming here in a couple weeks and I'm definitely pumped for that.axleblaze posted:The Nightmare oh jesus christ I can't even look at this
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Mar 1, 2015 21:57
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God drat I want to see the Forbidden Room
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Mar 1, 2015 21:59
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Yeah, The Forbidden Room was really awesome. The director, Guy Maddin, mentioned in a Q&A that he is involved in a project where you can watch randomly generated movies in the same style online. Basically they have all kinds of short segments finished and an algorithm will decide what segments can be nested into each other at what point. Following the theme of lost movies (all segments are based on lost movies) the film you watched online will be "destroyed" after viewing and the sheer amount of possible combinations guarantees that you'll never watch the same film again. I am looking very much forward to this. Thanks for the write-up, great thread! I hope I'll get the chance to go to Sundance one day. The Sundance movie I want to see most is World of Tomorrow but I skipped that part of your post to not spoil myself. true.spoon fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Mar 1, 2015 |
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Mar 1, 2015 22:13
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true.spoon posted:Yeah, The Forbidden Room was really awesome. The director, Guy Maddin, mentioned in a Q&A that he is involved in a project where you can watch randomly generated movies in the same style online. Basically they have all kinds of short segments finished and an algorithm will decide what segments can be nested into each other at what point. Following the theme of lost movies (all segments are based on lost movies) the film you watched online will be "destroyed" after viewing and the sheer amount of possible combinations guarantees that you'll never watch the same film again. I am looking very much forward to this. Oh my god, it's the film equivalent of Peter Molydeux. "Game that begins with 1 pixel. Each objective accomplished adds another pixel to the screen." "Imagine a Versus mode where player1 is trying to make a character younger whilst player2 is trying to make the same character older." "Making a game where you rate a robot, it will rate you the same. Rate it 5 stars and you are also rated 5 stars, winning the game."
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Mar 2, 2015 00:30
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Please do not compare Guy Maddin to Peter Molyneux.
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Mar 2, 2015 01:37
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Yeah, if The Forbidden Room is any indication he can deliver on his crazy loving promises.
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Mar 2, 2015 02:40
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Where can I watch these?
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Mar 3, 2015 03:18
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Also, you guys have, like, seen other Guy Maddin films, right?
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Mar 3, 2015 03:30
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Magic Hate Ball posted:Also, you guys have, like, seen other Guy Maddin films, right? This is kinda surprising me too. Dude's been making features for three decades; he's got multiple movies released by Criterion. Everyone please watch Careful as soon as you can. Maddin's great. I'm really interested/confused about White God. All the hype (if you can call it that) has been really mixed. Is it actually supposed to be reminiscent of a Disneyish Homeward Bound movie, or is it more that the writing is so bad that it may as well be?
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Mar 3, 2015 16:58
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thehandtruck posted:Where can I watch these? It depends wildly depending on the film. For example '71 is already out in a limited release, It Follows should be getting a release any week now and World of Tomorrow will be available to buy at the end of the month. Many of these movies will just slowly trickle out over the years depending on when their distributors, if they got a distributor, wants to release them. Then there are some movies that will never see the light of day. There are movies I saw the first year of Sundance that still have not received a proper worldwide release. juan the owl posted:I'm really interested/confused about White God. All the hype (if you can call it that) has been really mixed. Is it actually supposed to be reminiscent of a Disneyish Homeward Bound movie, or is it more that the writing is so bad that it may as well be? I'm not sure how intentional the Disney thing is. It's not really played like that but it still follows all those story beats while seemingly keeping a straight face. The problem isn't so much the Homeward Bound part of the movie (though it certainly isn't great) but more the ever changing tone of the movie following it and the fact that despite some really harsh things that come, it occasionally tries to dip back into being Disney. The movie is like Homeward Bound made by PETA (though PETA would never make this because they are against using animals in movies).
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Mar 3, 2015 19:23
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Glad to hear you enjoyed Entertainment. I loving loved The Comedy and seeing a version of that but with Tim's On Cinema co-host is a very exciting prospect.
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Mar 4, 2015 03:50
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I was with axleblaze, saw basically the same movies, and did my own writeups. They're much shorter, but they may be of use. Chorus Ten years ago, a child disappeared. His fate is revealed when his killer confesses and his remains are found. The parents, long separated, must now come together to support each other in their search for closure and a way to move on. The movie is brutal and relentless. The parents go through every horrible task -- seeing the remains, arranging the funeral, donating the old toys from storage - all while trying to figure out if they can continue their relationship. They also reconnect with their own parents, who have in some sense lost them: the father went to Mexico while the mother retreated into music. They need to confront the ways they dealt with the last ten years. Chorus is very Quebecois - the kind of Frencher-than-thou film where characters look longingly into the distance while their own monologue is read over. The gorgeous black and white cinematography embodies both the devastation and the hope of the story. And there is hope. This is an extremely dark film, but not because of fantasy or melodrama. Everything is real and everyone is human, which makes both the horrific pain and the possibility of recovery that much more meaningful. Chorus is one of the best films I've seen in the festival, and gets my highest recommendation. Cop Car Two kids are exploring the wilderness after having ‘run away from home’, when they come upon a cop car. Do they dare touch it? Is it open? Can they get inside?!? It’s all very funny and childlike. But then we see who that cop car belonged to and find out what he’s doing there - and things take a dark turn. The director has accurately described it as “kids set out to have a Goonies-style adventure, but they end up in something closer to No Country for Old Men”. I think it actually survives the comparison - it’s not quite as dark, but it’s shot almost as well. Especially considering the budgetary limitations the film must have faced. And while Cop Car may not be quite as good as No Country for Old Men, it’s still an excellent film. The cop is played by Kevin Bacon (for some reason), so hopefully people will get to see it. White God This is not a good movie, but it is a very interesting one. A young girl goes to live with her father while her mother is away doing research. Her dog comes along, but her father is resentful about his ex-wife and doesn't want to pay the fee on mutts. Once he throws it out, the dog must survive on the streets by dodging animal control officers, mean butchers and dogfighting trainers - all while trying to get home. Ok - so far, this sounds like an old Disney film. A children's film with utterly one-dimensional characters and silly situations. It's live-action, but that just means you get to see a very well trained dog go on an adventure. We even got to pet him after the screening - what's the problem? The problem is that the movie has severe tonal shifts. The dog leads other dogs on a violent rebellion against humanity, brutally killing all the people who wronged him; I'm pretty sure that didn't happen in any Disney film I've ever seen. There's also an uninteresting coming-of-age plotline with the girl, who has to find a way to stop the war. The one explanation I can come up with is that White God is mirroring the tone of the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, which it features prominently. axleblaze correctly said that anything we could have been told about the film would merely make us want to see it, and I'm sure this review has had that effect on some of you. So see it if you want a unique movie with some excellent animal acting - just not a good one. Hellions I was at the world premier! Too bad it was a boring, utterly uninspired horror film. There’s absolutely nothing here I haven’t seen a dozen times before, and I don’t even watch that many horror films. Some of the visuals were nice at least. The Forbidden Room A fever dream. A nightmare. A bizarre cascade of images relentlessly hammered into your mind. Let me be more specific: Roger Ebert once wrote that “If film noir was not a genre, but a hard man on mean streets with a lost lovely in his heart and a gat in his gut, his nightmares would look like Sin City.” Likewise, the Tim and Eric Show was accurately described as public access television’s nightmares. The Forbidden Room, then, is the nightmare of pulpy genre films from the 30s and 40s. The director was actually inspired by scripts of lost films - movies from the period that were never made. First come the opening titles which switch between different old-timey credit styles roughly twice a second. The movie itself begins with an instructional video about how to take a bath, then goes under the water into the story of a crew of doomed submariners, who find a woodsman on the sub who tells them of his quest to rescue the beautiful Margot from a group of cavemen bandits called the Red Wolves... What surprised me was that rather than blending everything together, the movie is quite rigidly structured. I counted a maximum depth of eight levels of stories within stories within stories, though I can’t be certain I caught them all. But the movie goes between them as cleanly as a call stack. That by itself doesn't make it any easier to watch, especially since the visuals are ever shifting flows of technicolor and film stock decomposition effects. What makes this watchable is that the stories are great. They’re silly and funny and generally unpredictable. One example is the tale of a motorcyclist who breaks a record number of bones in an accident - a bone doctor treats them all with his special touch, and falls in love in the process. But just as he’s preparing to meet her to propose, he’s attacked by… Women Skeletons! And they work for a Skeleton Insurance Defrauder! And it goes on from there. It’s not the kind of movie I can recommend to everyone, but it is a great experience if you can stand it. And I was at the world premier. Sarmaşık / Ivy Another wonderful world premier. A cargo ship is held offshore after the owner can't pay his debts. As the months pass and tensions rise, the manipulative captain tries to keep the skeleton crew under control. The whole thing is obviously a metaphor for Turkish society. But it's more than that - all the characters are great and their interactions and shifting power dynamics make for a gripping film. I really hope people get to see this one. Turbo Kid Another world premier. One part lovely 80s kids movie, one part awesomely gory GWAR show, three parts worthless 80s nostalgia. Decent movie overall, but I would have liked it far more if it either 1) had anything at all to say about lovely children's movies, violence or even nostalgia; or, alternatively, 2) had the visual design to match its attitude. The movie was shot at a quarry in a realistic indy style, with occasional cheesy special effects and a decent synth score. I know they didn't have the budget to do it any other way, but I really think that if this kind of thing is to be done straight, it needs to be overdone. Welcome to Leith What do you do when white supremacists come to town? Leith, North Dakota has a population of 24, very cheap land for sale and some nearby oil work. White supremacist Craig Cobb saw an opportunity and issued a call on a racist discussion forum: let’s all come to Leith and take it over! The residents weren't happy about this. There were also protests by local left-wing activists, Marxists, anarchists and a Lakota delegation. And, of course, the media ate the whole thing up. The racists were starving for attention, and it’s tempting to ignore them. They’re pathetic, of course; it’s hard to be scared of their limp heil Hitlers and aggravating antics - especially when only one other racist family moved to Leith and they couldn't even afford to get running water connected. When Cobb says that the Jews have chutzpah (!) or “Do you know who I am? I’m one of the most famous racists in the world!”, it’s easy to think of white nationalists as harmless dumbasses. Welcome to Leith starts with a string of racist crimes; later, as our guard is lowered, it shows us that one of Cobb’s supporters murdered three people at the Overland Park Jewish Community Center shooting. The consequences are real. The civil rights issues brought up by the residents attempts to drive out the racists are sidelined by other developments, but the question of how to respond to the threat is still crucial. And while the situation depicted in Welcome to Leith isn't exactly the usual circumstance, it’s still very much worth seeing and thinking about. ‘71 A British army troop is sent from basic training straight into the Troubles. While they're supporting the police on a house raid, one soldier becomes separated in an IRA stronghold. As he tries to escape, his fate becomes tangled in the political machinations of republicans, unionists and British intelligence. gently caress, it feels cruel to talk about a movie this good when I don't know when anyone outside the U.K. will be able to see it. I saw it at Sundance, but it's been playing at British and other film festivals for a year and the director complained about problems with funding and distribution. I'll start with the camerawork. This is an action movie filmed with a hand-held camera; usually an awful sign. But despite my hatred for shaky-cam, '71 has superb cinematography. Every camera movement is clear and every shot shows you exactly what's going on. This is particularly important since the film treats the horrors of war and occupation seriously. Even as the commanders talk about how confusing and unclear the situation is to justify their own actions, the brutality of the occupation is never shrouded and every death is respected enough for its impact to be felt. And yes, as that last paragraph suggests, this film takes a "pox on all houses" stand. A little sympathetic to the IRA moderates as opposed to provisionals, and very sympathetic to the British army's rank and file as opposed to the higher command, intelligence or the Northern Ireland police. But even when the portrayal of the occupation is from the Brit's side the movie's still against it. The house raid scene is especially gripping as the police's brutality sparks a situation with its own horrifying, unavoidable logic. And hey, the director's aunt planted a bomb in Battle for Algiers, so there's that. Seriously, see this movie as soon as you can. Slow West A young Scottish aristocrat travels to and across the late 19th century American West to find the woman he loves. He joins a bounty hunter who discovers a price on her head - and wants to use the Scott to lead him to her. But other bounty hunters are also on the chase... The plot, setting, characters and even name of the film make it sound like a Western, but it really isn't - it’s more like a thoroughly British dark comedy merely pretending to be a Western. Actually, even the word ‘dark’ is misleading; Slow West is often comical and downright zany in that British comedy way of doing very silly things very seriously. People looking for a Western will probably hate it, but I found it hilarious and recommend it to anyone with the proper expectations. Wolfpack *shudder* This movie is hard for me to review because it really got under my skin. I have plenty of thinking left to do about it, but I don't want to do any of it. I didn't want to be watching it at the time and I'm certainly reluctant to tell anyone else to watch it now. Which is odd, in one sense; as far as outcomes go, Wolfpack is one of the most 'positive' docs around - behind the ones that literally prove someone's innocence and get them out of prison. It's about a group of children who were kept away from the outside world by their abusive father. Horrible, right? But the documentary only happened because the children, now in their late teens and twenties, already rebelled - starting with simply going outside, but eventually moving towards independence. They even changed the dynamics of their parents' relationship. And, of course, someone let in a documentarian. So that's all great, but the whole thing still had this horrible atmosphere of fear, confinement and isolation. Childhoods denied, decades wasted. The children lived vicariously through movies, and are shown recreating them extensively - but it feels more tragic than cute or hopeful. I think of Quentin Tarantino, who seemed to learn everything he knows about life from movies, and he would just be pathetic if he wasn't a successful filmmaker. How much worse off are people who learned about life from his movies? *shudder* It’s a very good documentary, but don’t watch it unless you’re sure it’s something you want to see. Nasty Baby A gay couple in NYC tries to have a baby with their friend, played by Kristen Wiig, while one of them is working on a one-man show where he pretends to be a ‘Nasty Baby’. Then, um… I guess I’ll say that things happen. I can state that the movie is funny and endearing, but in lieu of spoilers I’ll talk about the director. Sebastián Silva is one of my favorites, and I think it’s because of his humanistic style. All of his characters feel real, and all of this plots and dialogue seem plausible. Even when situations turn dark, as they sometimes do in his films, it still feels like a natural outcome of the way things develop. I saw two movies he made previously, both about American students visiting Chile and both starring Michael Cera: Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus and 2012 is about a bunch of what I think of as Western Mass type kids going out to get high in the desert. axleblaze describes them as Sarah Lawrence kids, and I’m sure there are plenty of other names for them. But either way it’s a funny and honest portrayal. Magic Magic is similarly sympathetic, and it’s one of the best films about mental illness I've ever seen. It’s nearly unique in that it takes both an inside and outside perspective. So see those, and then see Nasty Baby if you like them. The Nightmare Ever had a dream where you couldn't move? I haven’t, but it’s very common and it sounds terrifying. The Nightmare interviews eight people who have experienced sleep paralysis at least once and illustrates those interviews with cheesy but passable horror movie imagery. This lets people call it a “horror documentary”, which is interesting; there isn’t much ‘real’ tension when living people are recounting nightmares, but we still get some jump scares and the like. And the nightmares are often silly, as real nightmares are; the best is the guy who, as a kid, dreamt he “won the giant insect of the month club”. They have various explanations for what’s happening to them, but what’s missing is the scientific perspective: no neurologist, psychologist or anything. When people at the Q&A asked, the director said that you could make a movie about the science but that wasn't the movie he wanted to make. Which is fine, but it’s odd to see not just the subjects but even the interviewer refers to the entirety of scientific knowledge on the subject as “the Wikipedia page explanation”. In fact, the Wikipedia page on sleep paralysis is quite good, and worth reading not just for the relatively short pathophysiology section but also for the extremely large collection of myths and folklore from around the world. Though it’s funny that that the modern American sleep paralysis mythology, that of alien abductions, isn't listed as such. So should you see The Nightmare? I guess so. But if you start entering it into Netflix, The Nightmare Before Christmas comes up, and you decide you want to watch that movie more, then don’t feel too bad about it. Advantageous I've seen a number of independent science fiction movies, and this is one of the best. It's about a single mother who loses her job as a biotech spokesman since they're looking for someone younger, just as her daughter faces a crucial choice of prep schools in a future even more unequal than the present. However, the company does need someone to represent their new body-transfer procedure... The special effects are extremely well-done for an indie film, and it's great to see a women-directed, -written and mostly -acted film that deals with structural sexism. I can't ignore the stiff acting (except for James Urbaniak) and weak dialogue, but I can forgive it because the script is intelligent and actually cares about its characters, ideas and setting. Highly recommended. I am Michael James Franco plays an ex-gay pastor. It was OK. I think the main problem is that the film tries to be even handed, but it can't really sympathize with the guy. I can't either. Finders Keepers Suppose you buy a backyard grill from a storage auction. And suppose that when you bring it home and open it up, you find a mummified human leg. After calling the police, what would you do? Any normal person would get rid of it as soon as possible - but Shannon Whisnant is what you might call an entrepreneur… The fight between the leg’s loser and its finder is a media circus, which Finders Keepers goes through dutifully. But it also takes us through the the human sides of things; we learn how John Wood became an amputee, why he preserved the leg and kept it in storage, and what it means to him. We also learn about Whisnart, and his history with the Wood family. In the end there are some struggles far more important than a custody battle over a leg. Finders Keepers is a typical doc; the kind that plays soft piano music while showing people’s baby photos. But it’s thorough and evenhanded, and the story’s more than good enough on its own. Add the larger-than-life characters and delightfully hilarious southern turns-of-phrase and you have an absolute gem of a documentary. Entertainment This is a weird one. An old comedian with an extremely abrasive style plays a bunch of awful gigs on his way to LA. In-between his impressively vicious stand-up performances, he's shown feeling alienated in various odd encounters. I didn't really care for the actual plot, but I did enjoy the comedy. The comedian is played by Gregg Turkington as his "Neil Hamburger" persona, so check him out if you're in the mood for some inventively awful celebrity quips. Stockholm, Pennsylvania At 22, Leanne is returned home by the police after living in a basement since she was kidnapped when she was four and a half years old. Her parents are delighted to see her, but she doesn't feel at home. OK. An interesting premise, and a kind of counterweight to Chorus. Also reminiscent of Martha Marcy May Marlene, an extremely good movie. But Stockholm fairs very, very badly in comparison to either. Bad enough that I’m going to spoil it liberally, so stop reading if you wish. The movie actually tries to be even handed about the child abduction. Leanne clearly doesn’t know much about the world, and thinks she needs permission to do anything. But otherwise, she’s not shown as being negatively affected by her captivity. She repeatedly tells off the adults who feel sorry for her, reciting vague spirituality her captor taught her, and her memories of the basement are all positive. Her parents fight; initially because her father wanted to move on when she was missing. But her mother gets into attachment parenting and takes it very badly when Leanne doesn't go along. Then it gets silly; after her father leaves, her mother keeps restricting her until she’s locked up in her room under more rigid control than ever. In the end she escapes, looking menacingly at a child in the playground while her goodbye letter voiceover says she wants to get “something of her own”. Yeah. People at the Q&A, seemingly as confused as I was, asked the (first time) writer/director about it and she said she did no research whatsoever because she didn't want to take other people’s stories. I’m always annoyed by this attitude that writing about other people’s experiences somehow takes something from them. Is that a left-wing thing? I know about “Nothing about us without us” and all that, but that’s not how human culture works. I think a better attitude for artists is “I’ll deal with any issue I want, whatsoever, no matter what my personal experience, but I’ll try to know something about my subject since people will laugh at my ignorance if I gently caress it up”. I’m still working on the slogan. It Follows Here are the rules, as laid out in the first 15 minutes of the film: 1. It's invisible except to its targets, to whom it appears as a person they love. 2. It walks towards its target slowly but never stops. 3. If the target sleeps with someone, that person become the new target. 4. When it catches the target, it kills them - and then goes after the previous one. Of course, the story follows a group of teenage friends who ‘contract’ the thing and need to find a way to survive. With a horror premise this delightful, it would take a truly awful director to mess it up - but we're in good hands. We get a couple of jump scares but several slow, panning shots, where we look for a strange figure slowly walking directly towards the characters. The lack of speed gives the characters time to react and/or panic, and lets the tension build up. The excellent synth soundtrack keeps the tension going even when the characters get away. And while the movie is basically about an evil STI, it’s not even sex-negative. I've often wondered how much potential the horror genre actually has, when there’s so much crap out there. It’s certainly been a long time since I saw a horror film this well-made, original and just fun. See this one in a theater to get the most out of the audience reaction. H. Weird stuff happens in a town. That's it; that's the plot. There are stories that sort of connect, but it's really more about emotions, ideas and themes. (Not one coherent theme; just themes). The main characters are both named Helen; one is a pregnant artist, the other is older but likes lifelike baby dolls. They live in Troy, NY while some vaguely mythological poo poo goes down: a meteor falls from the sky, a giant stone head floats down the river, a horse acts strangely, and much more. I guess it's like a much weaker version of Magnolia, but it met my admittedly low expectations and the music was quite good. Fun fact: during the Q&A, the writer/directors said they deliberately didn't read The Iliad because they wanted to create their own mythology.
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Mar 9, 2015 05:31
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