by ·Comments Off on Strawberry Mansion (2021, Albert Birney & Kentucker Audley)

It was a twitter post by director/star Kentucker Audley which first alerted me to the online nature of Sundance this year, both that he had a cool-sounding new movie, and that ordinary punters like myself could watch its premiere for a reasonable cost, so I felt I owed it to him to watch this… though at this point in the late afternoon, an overall Sundance skepticism had set in, and I’d lost my hopes that it would be great. Thankfully, it was great, or at least good enough to seem great after Mayday – a hundred times wackier than that movie, beautifully imaginative and very fun to watch.

A year-2035 dream auditor has to visit an offline old woman who still stores her dreams on analog tape, to calculate how much she owes in taxes based on the objects her subconscious summons – or how much her estate owes, since she passes away while he’s on the job. Her VHS dreams start bleeding into his own life, and are more pure than the auditor’s own dreams. This is because she knows that companies beam advertisements into dreams, and has developed a protective helmet as an ad-blocker.

The woman knows about the dream-ads because her son is in charge of the ad agency, and when he arrives after her death he determines that the auditor knows too much, and tries to burn him alive in mom’s pink house to destroy all evidence. Asleep in the flames, he bonds with a young dream-Bella on a small island, making this my second movie in a row about an island-bound dreamer needing to awaken to their dangerous real life. Scenes from earlier that felt randomly eccentric return as sense warnings. Despite his meaningless job working for the man, the auditor deserves happiness because he stops to save a pet turtle on his way out of the burning house.

Tyler Davis’s Vanity Fair review is good at noting what makes this movie special, while accidentally summarizing my own Sundance experience:

Like Ham On Rye, another recent fantastical low-budget film, Strawberry Mansion puts modern dread at the fore through a series of dynamic set pieces that reveal just how many obstacles are placed between us and our inner lives … The boundaries between our imagined lives and the ones we try to lead in the midst of never ending sales pitches has thinned to a sliver … It’s easy to mistake Strawberry Mansion for a simple parable about advertising and the federal government. But ultimately, it’s a strange film about art and its conditions … Increasingly, as we’re asked to look at more and more yet with less and less of our minds activated, all the watching becomes unbearable. Strawberry Mansion takes a wild swing at yanking its protagonist—and us—out of this predicament.

by ·Comments Off on Mayday (2021, Karen Cinorre)

“Feels good to fall, you know? The further the better.” After a dream of skydiving, Grace Van Patten (The Meyerowitz Stories, daughter of the Master Ninja guy) is working a shit job at a nightmare wedding, then ends the day by putting her head in an oven, so I guess the rest is an Over the Garden Wall near-death fantasy with a Peter Pan wonderland feel. She’s recruited as a sniper by the other women on the island she falls onto, never being well advised on wtf is going on, as they’re constantly being attacked by men whose planes they steer into rocks and storms using deceptive radio practices (and the Wilco yankee-hotel-foxtrot clip).

“Maybe we should capture some instead of killing them all.”
“We’ve tried that, that was exhausting.”

The woman are actors she glimpsed at the wedding, from bride Mia Goth to bathroom attendant Juliette Lewis, now a solitary motorhead badass. Eventually there’s a music sequence with a troop of men, and Grace believing that her old life could be better if only she could return by escaping this island. A good looking movie, but the thing about taking place in a fantasy world where nothing makes sense is that nothing makes sense. The widescreen ratio means the watermark with my email address never obscured the action.

Mia and Grace go Moonlighting:

Feminist murder gang:

by ·Comments Off on The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet (2021, Ana Katz)

My first feature at Sundance was one of the ones with uncomfortable covid-pandemic resonances. But first, it’s the neighbors griping at Sebastian (played by the director’s brother) that his dog cries too loudly while he’s at work… then work telling him that he can’t bring the dog into the office. We never hear the dog at all, until it cries out one time then is dead and buried, represented by drawings. In general the movie is crisp b/w, the cameraperson setting up still frames but stubbornly refusing to use a tripod.

Some unquarantine behavior as Seb scarfs a sandwich left behind on the train. He can’t find work, stays with his mom, and now he’s shaven and tending an old man who’s on morphine, and I’m not sure how fast time is passing. He joins a co-op farmer’s market truck that flees from cops (illicit veggie delivery), later dances with a hot girl at his mom’s wedding, then they’re having a kid together… and then the near-apocalypse comes. Cool scene, out in the field and everyone who stands up passes out… illustrations of a meteorite hitting, and we’re told that due to atmospheric changes, nobody can lift their head more than a couple feet off the ground without wearing a diver’s helmet. “In less than a year we’ll go back to normal, god willing.” A short movie that feels both slow-paced and full of incident.

by ·Comments Off on Sundance animated (and doc) shorts

KKUM (Kang-min Kim)

Our narrator says he doesn’t dream, but talks with his mom and experiences her dreams vicariously. This is brought to life with styrofoam-textured animation, all transforming objects, stop-motion-handmade-looking but from the lighting, dancing around and within the models, I assume it’s software… oh wow, no that was real styrofoam. Anyway, it’s an earnest appreciation of the filmmaker’s mom.

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The Fire Next Time (Renaldho Pelle)

2D-looking, mostly wide shots without legible dialogue, city scenes following some young guys at a distance while a blackness slowly encroaches. During the night’s police riots the blackness catches up and they fall into sunken place. If it’s meant to be a James Baldwin adaptation, it’s not credited as such.

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Ghost Dogs (Joe Cappa)

In 2D squigglevision, a roomba does a poor job cleaning after a party. Dog is locked in the laundry room while weirdly human-handed ghost dogs which look influenced by Chris (Simpsons artist) take over the house, levitating tennis balls, stealing food and masturbating to a dog food commercial on TV. This is the second short in a row to enter the sunken place. After a psych freakout the lone dog escapes, discovers satanic horrors in the basement, destroys the dog skeleton bone throne, I guess freeing the ghosts and himself as the malfunctioning roomba sets the house on fire.

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Misery Loves Company (Sasha Lee)

Very short… fun flower-headed dance animation set to an autotuned track about being too cowardly for suicide and wishing a meteorite would destroy the planet.

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GNT (Sara Hirner & Rosemary Vasquez-Brown)

Extremely Adult-Swimmie vagina-humor instagram girls, argh.

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The Fourfold (Alisi Telengut)

If I’d made this sand-art visualization of shamanic spiritual rituals, I’d be pretty steamed to be programmed after the vaginal fungal infection thing instead of say, Ghost Dogs or the earnest one about maternal dreams. Pretty hypnotic.

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Trepanation (Nick Flaherty)

A sunken-place hole opens inside a GTA apartment… holey creature rises, doing that 1999 horror movie twitch. I guess the human becomes the twitchy thing and vice versa, then they both jump into the hole.

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Souvenir Souvenir (Bastien Dubois)

The filmmaker’s scratch-textured family-memoir thing contains another animated film in a different style, an Earthworm Jim exaggerated-cartoony war thing. He’s researching the Algerian war for a film project, trying to get his grandpa to talk about his own war experiences. But our guy doesn’t know how to make a film about war, and is bad at research. An imaginatively designed movie about the failure to make a movie.

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Little Miss Fate (Joder von Rotz)

When the tiger-riding hand-deity controlling the fate of a doomed dude takes a pornography break, its cleaning bird attempts to provide the guy a happier ending, but pushes the love button too many times leading to an uncontrolled devouring orgy-mass descending on the fate tower. The humor and animation are both extremely Superjail, therefore I enjoyed it.

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I started to watch Doc Program 2, but after the first four shorts my next feature was starting, and I never made it back for the Jay Rosenblatt, which was the one I wanted to see in the first place.

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A Concerto is a Conversation (Ben Proudfoot & Kris Bowers)

Concerto composer talks with his grandpa about his work… closeup interviews about racism in grandpa’s life growing up. Composer is playing the Disney symphony hall, and as the music he wrote rises inspirationally over the triumph-of-adversity stories, I got the feeling that all this was a Disney ad. The random shot of the great moment(?) when Green Book won best picture clinched it (ah nope, NY Times funded this).

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My Own Landscapes (Antoine Chapon)

Monotone narrator talks about designing plant life for simulations… she writes scripts in Alma for military battle sims, focusing on lush trees and landscapes as self-therapy after war experiences. Lot of slow pans up army men, alternating with game footage (incl the map editor)

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To Know Her (Natalie Chao)

Family home movies, wondering about a late mother.

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The Field Trip (O’Hara & Attie & Ojeda-Beck)

“I need my CFOs to stand up.” Children run a business town for a day. Pretending to do finance, being sent away from the bank for not having the proper documentation, entering deposits into a crashing computer app, is whatever’s the opposite of cute. Very pre-pandemic: these kids touch their noses a lot.

by ·Comments Off on Sundance 2021

I bought a day pass to the Sundance Film Festival. On one hand it’s cool to see all these premieres… on the other, this was just sitting in bed watching TV all day. And sure, fests are curated, but it’s nice to read the first round of critic reviews (like I’m doing right now with Berlin) and decide which few sound the most exciting, instead of relying on the one-paragraph plot descriptions like I did when choosing these.

I started the day with a TV pilot, a shorts series, a feature, half of another shorts series… and going into the next feature, I reloaded the schedule page and noticed all the non-premieres (the movies that had premiered a couple days earlier and were now on-demand) had changed status from “sold out” to “watch now.” Not sure which status was a bug, but I quickly made some adjustments. Catching Strawberry Mansion (and having to eat meals to stay alive) threw my schedule, and I skipped my reservation for We’re All Going to the World’s Fair in favor of Knocking, wanting to get in something from the Midnight section, oops.

I like that the opening titles tell me to “please turn off all electronic devices,” even though I’m watching the movies on one. Since the Roku is on the fritz, I hooked the laptop to the TV and could therefore get screengrabs – funny that I can do this with restricted world-premieres, but can’t while watching The Saddest Music in the World on Criterion Channel. The intros must’ve been pre-taped… Ana Katz said “hello and good evening” at her movie’s noon premiere (2pm in Buenos Aires). I first noticed during Mayday that the picture looked film-grainy… but more like static than grain, and saw the same pattern on all subsequent movies, what was that all about?

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These Days

The pilot (from the “Indie Series” section) was chosen for costarring William Jackson Harper. Marianne Rendón (who recently played Patti Smith in a movie) is lonely, going on a series of bad quarantine zoom-dates when she meets charming Harper. But he’s only there to write a magazine story about lonely women who go on virtual dates, as we learn in his next call to his editor. His mom zoom-bombs them on his personal link, a dated detail thanks to the software update that sticks everyone in the waiting room. Marianne’s zoom dance is good, as are all of Harper’s line reads, but I dunno how this would sustain a series, nor who would fund it now as a hundred million vaccine shots are heading to the states. Director Adam Brooks, who wrote the Bridget Jones Diary sequel and is not the Adam Brooks who made The Editor and starred in the latest Guy Maddin movie, calls it “our film,” and says the whole cast was mailed camera gear and filmed their own scenes.

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In the Earth (Ben Wheatley)

I started this after Knocking, giving myself a midnight bedtime, so watched about fifteen minutes. So far, an unmasked guy got tested extensively by some park rangers before setting out on a journey with one of them joining him. They were pitching tents on their first night when I ditched, so it hadn’t gotten good yet… but why was everyone masked at the beginning except the outsider they were testing? Shouldn’t the rule be that he stays masked until he passes the tests? The poster shows a backlit axe murderer so I’ll surely get back to this at some point.

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Rachel Handler in Vulture, on pandemic movies:

I could conjure the 2019 version of myself that might’ve enjoyed them, but the 2021 version of me, who has the hair and temper of a cartoon Disney villain, could not find the patience for dreamy, moody movies where an imaginary sickness stood in for something else, where it was desperately mined for meaning … I wondered if every movie ever made had actually been about people being alone and sad and I just hadn’t noticed.

by ·Comments Off on Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror (2020, Ruiz & Sarmiento)

After finally catching up with Three Lives, checking out Ruiz’s latest posthumous release, completed by Valeria Sarmiento. Due to the vagaries of video releasing this lost/unfinished film from the mid-60’s is in better shape than the mid-90’s hit with the major movie star.

Iriarte is a gruff-voiced professor (the soundtrack was lost and all actors were re-dubbed in 2019), bottling sock water with his Jason Schwartzmann-looking nephew Joaquin. He visits friends Silva and Lola, tells them about his dreams, which involve a wig under the bed, rivers of blood, and the return of his late wife Maria. Finally, Iriarte can’t sleep, tormented by wigs, and shoots himself after writing letters to everyone he knows.

The second half is mesmerising, the scenes replaying in reverse with backwards dialogue and new thoughts via voiceover. Silva and Lola had appeared in Three Sad Tigers, and Joaquin joined them in Nadie dijo nada. Ghost Maria reportedly appears in a Sebastián Silva movie, and our main guy was in a couple Miguel Littín movies.

by ·Comments Off on Between the World and Me (2020, Kamilah Forbes)

Sometimes when you’ve fallen behind on the ol’ blog, you realize that thirty movies ago, you took no notes on a movie that consisted mostly of essay readings by powerful actors, with newly photographed and stock footage visuals, written as a letter to the author’s teenage son about systemic racism. Katy wanted to watch it in case her students, assigned the book to read, try to get away with only watching the movie. Good film – Forbes had previously worked on a doc miniseries on a slam poetry competition, and appeared in a Grand Theft Auto game.

by ·Comments Off on Dope is Death (2020, Mia Donovan)

Portrait of a NYC clinic that sticks pins in your ears to treat stress and addiction. Through interview and archive footage it delves into the history of how Black Panthers and other associated groups studied Chinese acupuncture and brought it back to help their community, then keeps returning from the archives to the present-day clinic and its patients. The founding leader was Mutulu Shakur (below) – I’m behind on the ol’ blog, no surprise, and now we’re watching the new Adam Curtis movie, following the story of Afeni Shakur, so really covering Tupac’s roots this year. The fatal armed car robbery that gets Mutulu imprisoned for life came out of nowhere in this story, and it’s not interested in explaining much about acupuncture itself, more of a history lesson and community portrait.

by ·Comments Off on Boys State (2020, Amanda McBaine & Jesse Moss)

I can’t tell if the movie pulled a fast one on us when the kid on the poster loses the climactic governor race to a kid we’ve never even seen before by distracting us with the speeches and strategies of the competing campaign leaders. Pretty impressed that the lowest-common-denominator guy lost running on a platform of dick jokes and then confessed to having underestimated the group and turned himself around. Really professionally assembled doc, and for once I mean that in a good way. Ultimately wouldn’t vote for any of these gun-rights Texans for any office, but after avoiding politics-in-movies for the last year, this turned out to be more harmless than we’d feared.