by ·Comments Off on Spermworld (2024, Lance Oppenheim)

He’s outdone himself in camerawork and subject matter. Needs slightly less focus on megafather Ari, whose psychosis has already attracted other doc-makers. Finds an amazing source of cringe in having people read their text messages aloud.

Read: Mark and Rafa and Neil, but mainly the Filmmaker interview.

Lance:

I think there’s the bigger questions that the movie ended up becoming really about: What exists of me when I’m no longer here? All these people are chasing something bigger than themselves. They want to be bigger than life and feel in different ways that they haven’t achieved that sense of importance. I relate to that. That’s more or less why I make movies, right?

by ·Comments Off on Ren Faire (2024, Lance Oppenheim)

I should’ve done this in a TV roundup with The Sympathizer since I have nothing to say about it, but too late, I already created the post. Long doc about Texas Renaissance Festival founder “King” George’s half-hearted attempts to delegate and hand off power (and to date young women with natural breasts at the olive garden) and the employees and would-be successors whom he keeps screwing over. Lance shoots the hell out of it. Good enough to make us consider his sperm doc.

Lance is aware of the artifice and performance, wishes for a “documentary-subject performance” oscar in his Vulture interview.

by ·Comments Off on Some Kind of Heaven (2020, Lance Oppenheim)

Slick and professional, as it should be with its impressive opening production credits, with tight editing. Sets up like it’ll be an exposé of this perfect-seeming Florida retirement community, but I think they needed official community support to film there, and the subversive takedown never comes. Instead, we follow a Boston widow looking for a companion who hangs out with a parrothead called the Margarita Man… a van-dwelling parasite who ends up settling for whatever woman will let him stay with her… and a guy who gets into drugs then legal trouble to the consternation of his wife. Movie is in 4:3 with popping colors, the music too high in the mix where we sat. We thought the whole thing too surface-level, and I found The Mole Agent to be a welcome corrective. Appropriately, slicky professional band Loose Loose opened – Katy appreciated their cornet.