ReportWire

Tag: sundance

  • Daniel Kwan Calls for Coordinated Industry Response to AI: “An All-Hands-on-Deck Situation”

    [ad_1]

    Daniel Kwan has a lot to say on the subject of artificial intelligence.

    The Oscar-winning filmmaker — one half of The Daniels directing team behind Everything Everywhere All at Once alongside Daniel Scheinert — returned to Sundance in January alongside Scheinert and their producer Jonathan Wang to support the world premiere of Focus Features’ The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, which they produced for another directing team in Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell.

    Amid a busy festival schedule, Kwan ducked into the Pendry Park City to headline the THR x Autodesk AI and Independent Filmmaking panel presented in partnership with the Berggruen Institute on Jan. 25. The program also featured conversations with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, filmmaker Noah Segan, producer Janet Yang and Autodesk’s Matthew Sivertson in chats moderated by THR’s Mia Galuppo and Stacey Wilson Hunt.

    Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Janet Yang, Noah Segan, Daniel Kwan and Matthew Sivertson ahead of the THR x Autodesk “AI and Independent Filmmaking” panel at Sundance.

    Credit: The Hollywood Reporter

    Kwan kicked things off, but before diving headfirst into all things AI, the filmmaker looked back on a milestone Sundance anniversary. He and Scheinert made their Sundance debut 10 years ago with the Daniel Radcliffe and Paul Dano starrer Swiss Army Man, which was acquired out of the fest by A24 and earned them best director trophies.

    “Ten years is kind of wild,” Kwan said, before launching into a warning about the social media trend that inspired countless users to post retrospective 2016 photos on multiple platforms from Instagram to TikTok to Threads. “I’ve been thinking a lot about 2016 because of that trend right now. By the way, don’t do that. They’re using that to train their machines on you to show how people age. Stop it, stop posting stuff, OK? Just be careful, OK? Be careful with these things.”

    Actually, Kwan emphasized care, caution and vigilance throughout the nearly 30-minute discussion, which covered The AI Doc, the recently launched Creators Coalition on AI and the urgency to participate at this critical juncture before AI companies set the rules of engagement and leave various industries and the general public to pick up the pieces: “We are not ready for this and we are the collateral damage.”

    “We are currently in a transition,” Kwan acknowledged. “Things are coming to an end, but that also means something else is coming. If we can all agree that that’s true, we first have to mourn the things that are ending but protect what really matters in that mourning. Once we see what’s coming to an end, we can protect what matters and plant the seeds for what’s coming next. So much of my work is motivated by that one single principle, whether it’s in AI or the stories I’m telling, the movies that Daniel and I are trying to make as this old world ends. What can we protect? What can we fight for? What can we plant for the next world?”

    In the immediate future, they’ll be planting The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. The film is set for release on March 27, and Kwan said it covers all the main AI issues and features nearly all of the big names from the industry. What it doesn’t cover is his regret in making it.

    “A wonderful team worked for the past over three years on this doc, and we spent a lot of time just trying to figure out how do we show people what the main drivers are behind everything that’s happening? How do we get past all the bullshit, all the hype and all of that noise to show people some sort of way to regain some agency?” he explained. “Every other month I regretted saying yes to this project, if I’m being very honest. Honestly, I’m sick of talking about AI. Who else is sick of talking about AI? I don’t want to just be negative because this technology is both good and bad at the same time. Just like any other technology, every tool can be used for good and for bad. You can build things and break things with the same tool. The problem is with human nature, and entropy, in general. Oftentimes, building things is much harder than breaking things and, right now, the breaking things is much easier.”

    That said, Kwan noted how AI technology can both be “amazing” and “terrible” for filmmakers. “The one thing that we all have to agree on is that this technology is incompatible with our current systems, our current institutions, our current labor laws. It carves a bunch of lines through all these walls that we’ve put up over the last 100 years.”

    As AI carves those lines, Kwan said it is imperative that industries, like Hollywood, band together to help set the guardrails. “This is an all-hands-on-deck situation,” he said. “How do we imagine a world where this tool is not just something that we’re fighting but also something that can transform our industry to make it much better? Be honest, our industry is not perfect.”

    Kwan speaks during the THR x Autodesk “AI and Independent Filmmaking” panel at Sundance.

    Credit: The Hollywood Reporter

    The moment during the panel that generated the most laughter and response from the nearly 100 or so guests in the room came when Kwan used a “sex positive” analogy to describe the best response to widespread adoption of AI tools.

    “It’s a crude one, but it’s worth saying because it sticks,” he explained before launching into it. “We’re all sex positive here [so imagine if] you have a relationship with someone. They’re loving and it’s great, but they’re not always the best communicator. They say, ‘Hey, we’re having an orgy. We’re bringing a bunch of people over. Doesn’t that sound great?’ And you’re like, ‘Hold on. Who’s coming? What are the rules? What are the safe words?’ And they’re like, ‘No, no, no, no. Look at the tools and the toys we have. We’re going to have a dungeon.’ This is what the tech industry feels like to a lot of crew members.”

    [ad_2]

    Chris Gardner

    Source link

  • ‘Saccharine’ Review: Midori Francis Navigates the Hallucinatory Minefield Between Body Image and Body Horror in Messy Weight-Loss Freakout

    [ad_1]

    There’s nothing sweet about Saccharine, but just as it should be gaining traction, nothing terribly coherent about it either. Natalie Erika James throws a bunch of great ideas into her fem-horror riff on body dysmorphia, shame and the tireless quest for physical perfection in a culture obsessed with youthful hotness — following in the path of The Substance and Ryan Murphy’s latest dollop of high-gloss trash, The Beauty. But the storytelling goes haywire, to the point where you’re unsure what the Australian writer-director wants to say, though her game lead, Midori Francis, keeps you watching.

    James’ visually stylish film, acquired by IFC and Shudder ahead of its Midnight bow at Sundance, has some originality thanks to a subtle grounding in the Buddhist/Taoist folk tradition of the hungry ghost. But James never commits fully enough to the spiritual/supernatural side to add much dimension to the confused narrative. While the protagonist is Japanese Australian, the movie has a feel closer to Thai horror in atmosphere, if not in intensity or dread.

    Saccharine

    The Bottom Line

    Let them eat cake.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Midnight)
    Cast: Midori Francis, Danielle Macdonald, Madeleine Madden, Robert Taylor, Showko Showfukutei, Emily Milledge, Joseph Baldwin, Louisa Mignon, Annie Shapiro
    Director-screenwriter: Natalie Erika James

    1 hour 52 minutes

    Obsessively recording her observations in a journal and charting her progress on a graph, Melbourne med student Hana (Francis) is determined to get down to her goal weight of 60 kilograms (132 pounds). Her unspoken attraction to toned and confident gym trainer Alanya (Madeleine Madden) might be part of the incentive, given that Hana is queer more in theory than practice. She signs up to be Alanya’s guinea pig in a 12-week fitness program.

    While she’s out at a club with her student pals Josie (Danielle Macdonald) and Georgie (Emily Milledge), Hana runs into an old friend, Melissa (Annie Shapero). Hana doesn’t recognize her at first, until it clicks that Melissa is the svelte transformation of the heavy, bullied girl she knew in high school. Telling Hana that the girl from back then is dead, Melissa puts her astonishing weight loss down to a miracle drug she calls “the gray,” giving Hana a few tablets and urging her to try them.

    Melissa’s insistence is somewhat questionable since Hana looks like a normal-size young woman by non-Hollywood standards, even with some prosthetic enhancement. But perhaps that’s part of James’ point — that body expectations for women are so unrealistic that many, like Hana, are driven to starvation and self-loathing. Except that with “the gray,” Melissa swears she can eat as much as she wants and not gain weight.

    Which appears to be the case when Hana wakes up after a heavy night of clubbing with the messy debris of a large takeout assortment on her bedroom floor and yet somehow feels different. She’s sufficiently intrigued to analyze the pills in the university medical lab, discovering a compound of phosphates and … human ashes. Luckily, she has a cadaver handy, one of several people who donated their bodies to science and are getting cut up in class.

    The body assigned to Hana, Josie and their lab teammates is a corpulent woman cruelly nicknamed “Big Bertha.” Hana starts taking home a rib cage here, a few bones there, grinding them up with a mortar and pestle to make her own DIY version of the gray. The compound works, and while her gluttonous binges become increasingly uncontrolled — filmed by James and DP Charlie Sarroff like woozy Francis Bacon images — her weight keeps plummeting. That gets her an admiring comment, an Instagram post and perhaps a flicker of sexual interest from Alanya.

    But homemade meds can come with unexpected side effects — in this case, ghoulish visitations from the hangry Bertha, looking like a cross between Eric Cartman and Nosferatu. Visible only to Hana at first, in convex reflective surfaces like a kettle or the back of a spoon, Bertha does not take kindly to Hana’s attempts to kick the pill habit and start policing her food intake the old-fashioned way.

    In one of the funnier episodes, the spectral presence shoots candy bars from Hana’s rucksack across the room at her until she shovels them in her mouth in a rattled semi-trance state. It’s unclear whether Bertha is also enraged by Hana’s weight continuing to drop — she gets down to 45 kilograms (99 pounds) at one point — but girl, we’ve all been there with the body envy.

    James’ 2020 debut feature, Relic — a slow-burn chiller about three generations of women tormented by a presence in the family home — worked because the director never allowed her control of the material to slacken, even when the narrative was stretched a bit thin. But Saccharine slips off the rails, especially once Hana convinces Josie that Bertha’s spirit has latched onto her in malevolent ways, growing bigger and stronger all the time.

    The always terrific Macdonald (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You) is under-used, and the rebuke of confident, plus-size Josie to Hana for letting fatphobia curb her self-acceptance is a point made too hurriedly to register.

    Scenes with Hana’s parents seem intended to shed more light than they actually do, with some psych 101 subtext suggested by the fussing of her birdlike Japanese mother (Showko Showfukutei) and the remoteness of her mostly immobile Australian dad (Robert Taylor), who is steadily eating himself to death. But the parental elements just end up seeming like narrative clutter, with nothing gained by the teasing delayed reveal of Hana’s XL father.

    The climactic scenes toy with the blurred lines between hallucination and reality, but the logic falls apart; threads like Hana’s rash decision to undertake a dangerous surgical fix virtually evaporate without much payoff. And at just under two hours, the movie could seriously benefit from cutting some flab.

    Saccharine is more polished in its technical aspects than in its storytelling, from the queasy visuals (Sarroff shot Relic, as well as both Smile movies) and sickly lighting to composer Hannah Peel’s eerie synths to some impressively gnarly gore. Ultimately, however, the biggest plus is Francis, whose commitment to the central role is so unfaltering that she makes the script’s rough patches less of a deal-breaker.

    James has no lack of talent, but fans of Relic who were hoping this might be a return to form after the mixed-bag Rosemary’s Baby prequel Apartment 7A — either as a juicy serve of Cronenbergian feminism or a movie with something to say about accessible weight-loss meds — will likely be disappointed.

    [ad_2]

    David Rooney

    Source link

  • ‘Rock Springs’ Review: Kelly Marie Tran and Benedict Wong in a Fresh, Vivid Spin on Grief Horror

    [ad_1]

    After the death of her husband, Emily (Kelly Marie Tran) doesn’t know what to do. Her daughter Gracie (Aria Kim) hasn’t spoken in the six months since her father’s passing, and seems to be withdrawing more and more every day. Her mother-in-law, Nai Nai (Fiona Fu), copes with her son’s death through traditional Chinese spirituality, which she shares with her granddaughter. But Emily is Vietnamese and doesn’t speak the language. It’s just now that her husband is gone that Emily is forced to confront the cultural gap between her and those closest to her. Only showing her grief privately, Emily emotionally isolates herself, hoping that pushing forward will heal all the pain. But starting over in Rock Springs, Wyoming, proves to be more difficult than she could have ever anticipated. 

    Nai Nai warned against moving during “Ghost Week”, a time when the barrier between the spirit world and our world comes down. In Chinese culture, the mourning families must pray for their departed loved ones, guiding their souls to peace in the afterlife. Mourning is communal, and as families share their grief, they’re supposed to find healing together. But Nai Nai also warns Gracie about “Hungry Ghosts”, those who die scared and alone with no family members to guide them home.

    Rock Springs

    The Bottom Line

    A big swing that pays off.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Midnight)
    Cast: Kelly Marie Tran, Benedict Wong, Jimmy O. Yang, Aria Kim, Fiona Fu, Ricky He, Cardi Wong
    Director/Writer: Vera Miao

    1 hour 37 minutes

    When Gracie steals an old doll from a garage sale, it puts her in contact with a spirit she hopes is her father. But writer and director Vera Miao has other plans, using Gracie and her family to tell a multi-generational story of racism, grief and trauma. When Gracie disappears into the woods, past and present collide as she comes face to face with the spirits of dead miners. And what began as a small tale expands to become a confrontation with generational sadness and spiritual unrest.

    In 1885, on the same land where Emily chose to restart her life with her family, a tragedy occurred. A village of Chinese migrant men was massacred and their homes destroyed. At least 28 Chinese miners were killed that day, with other sources indicating a death toll of 40 or 50 people. Only 15 survived with injuries at the hands of angry white settlers who resented that the local mining company had employed them in the first place. These settlers were never prosecuted for what is now known as the worst mass shooting in Wyoming history. To many viewers, this film will be an introduction to this historic tragedy. 

    Miao takes us back to that day, showing us a tight-knit group of miners with Ah Tseng (Benedict Wong) and He Yew (Jimmy O. Yang) at the center. Before the attacks begin, they discuss their homeland and new identity as Americans. Though Ah Tseng has been in the country longer — having worked on the railroads — he seems to doubt the idea that the United States could really be called home. The murderous white settlers only solidify his doubt before his untimely death. The fallen men are piled into a mass grave in the woods right outside Emily’s new house.

    Cinematographer Heyjin Jun cuts through the sadness with breathtaking images of forest and landscape, showcasing the beautiful land spoiled by blood and hate. Tran gives a compelling performance as a young widow adjusting to single parenthood and suddenly being the head of her household. Since her breakout performance in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Tran has struggled to find meaningful roles that allow her to show her range. But she excels here as a woman haunted by her husband’s death and afraid to embrace the traditions that give her daughter comfort. She has great chemistry with newcomer Kim, a gifted young actress who manages to be expressive while rarely uttering a single word.

    Rock Springs is a big swing from Miao that pays off in the end, blending drama, horror and ugly American history to create a truly heartbreaking and hopefully healing experience.

    [ad_2]

    Jon Frosch

    Source link

  • A Farewell to the Sundance Film Festival—and Park City

    [ad_1]

    It’s true, the 2026 Sundance Film Festival hasn’t wrapped up quite yet. In-person screenings continue through February 1, and the fest won’t hand out its awards until January 30. But the crazed flurry of the event’s first weekend is in the rearview mirror—and now that its biggest titles have started to be snatched up by distributors, it’s time to take stock of what we saw, what we liked, and yes, what we didn’t.

    This week on Little Gold Men, John Ross, Rebecca Ford, and Hillary Busis chat about Sundance’s ups and downs: the narrative films that earned the biggest ovations, the docs that might have a bright future next awards season, and the reasons why we frankly are not overly upset about the festival moving from Park City, Utah to Boulder, Colorado next year. (Short answer: the food situation. Long answer: you’ll need to listen to find out.)

    Throughout the conversation, a few themes emerge. Charli xcx, who had not two but three films at the fest this year, might be the queen of Sundance—unless the title belongs to Olivia Wilde, who starred in two films there and directed one. The latter, a pitch-black comedy called The Invite, sparked a three-day bidding war that ended with A24 acquiring the film, reportedly for upward of $10 million. Sundance’s slate this year was filled with raunchy comedies, typically timely documentaries, and at least one star-studded ensemble film that met a more negative reception than its creators were hoping for. The group also talks about how the event unfolded even as the real world intruded on the festival bubble, in the form of both news about Minnesota and a violent incident at Sundance itself.

    Listen below for our full Sundance report, as well as a masterclass on awards show fashion from VF style correspondent José Criales-Unzueta

    [ad_2]

    Hillary Busis

    Source link

  • ‘Antiheroine’ Review: Courtney Love Comes Clean About Highs, Lows and Needing to Be Heard in a Rock Doc Both Raucous and Intimate

    [ad_1]

    Of the many insights into turbulent genius Courtney Love in Brit filmmakers Edward Lovelace and James Hall’s adoring biographical doc Antiheroine, the most captivating is the alt rock queen’s sense of humor about her reputation as a wild-child wrecking ball with an endless catalogue of messy transgressions. “Everyone has a Courtney story,” she says early on with a shrug. “She fucked my boyfriend. She stole my grandmother’s wedding ring. She ate my muesli.” Love is not interested in denying or confirming any of these claims, and it’s her unapologetic, unfiltered candor that makes her a great hang.

    If you’ve ever screamed along or jumped around in your underwear to “Violet” or “Olympia” — no, that’s not a confession — you are sure to find this exploratory step back into the spotlight thrilling. It’s an overdue reaffirmation of Love’s place in rock history with an intimate glimpse into her creative process, especially as a lyricist, while she works on her first album of new material in more than a decade.

    Antiheroine

    The Bottom Line

    An unholy icon sheds her celebrity skin.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres)
    With: Courtney Love, Michael Stipe, Melissa Auf der Maur, Eric Erlandson, Patty Schemel, Billie Joe Armstrong, Butch Walker
    Directors: Edward Lovelace, James Hall

    1 hour 38 minutes

    “I’m a household name stuck in 1994,” Love says, referring to the year that, within the same week, her husband Kurt Cobain died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, and her band, Hole, released the angry howl Live Through This, one of the best and most ageless albums of the ‘90s. Vilified by the press and detested by Nirvana fans, Love says that when the jokes started about her having killed Cobain, she knew that was going to be her whole life from then on.

    In allowing their subject to tell her own story, Lovelace and Hall make it clear that Love refuses to see herself as a victim. She owns the charges of being abrasive, rude, scrappy, ferociously ambitious and a complicated figure in music history. But the fearlessness and determination with which she pulled herself back up from the depths make her a survivor, one whose music served as her armor through drug addiction, illness, controversy and everything else the world could throw at her.

    Even when defending her talent, so often unfairly written off, Love seems unconcerned about being liked. Of the artistic intent behind Hole’s 1991 debut album Pretty on the Inside, she says: “It was me announcing that I was a great fucking poet, and me announcing my persona as a cunt.” Her longtime friend Michael Stipe puts her in the Marianne Faithfull school of women in music: “Fuck you, this is who I am.”

    The recap of Love’s early life is brisk but illuminating. Born in San Francisco in 1964, she grew up in what she describes as a countercultural household. Her father lost custody for giving her LSD at age four. She had her first drink at age 10, when a stepfather she calls “evil” deliberately got her smashed and made her sick for days.

    Her narcissistic mother moved the family to New Zealand in 1973, but Love was sent back to live in Portland with family friends after being expelled from school for bad behavior. At age 14 she was arrested for shoplifting a Kiss T-shirt and sent to a juvenile hall for a spell, where a counsellor gave her a copy of Patti Smith’s seminal Horses album, which Love says changed her life.

    All this is related first-hand by Love, and an occasional detail here and there gives the vague impression that too many fried brain cells have made her an unreliable narrator. It’s unclear at times if it’s the punchy edit (Jinx Godfrey, Dan Setford and Daniel Lapira are credited in that role) or Love’s attention span that keeps the conversation bouncing around.

    But the trajectory is raw and real, at times making you wonder how Love even made it into her 20s. And irrespective of how much her mind pings from one thing to another, often sparked by journal entries that bring the past to life, the doc leaves no doubt that her intelligence, humor and drive are what have kept her going.

    She shares youthful memories of hanging out with and learning from post-punk bands in Liverpool like Echo & the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes, whose frontman Julian Cope Love says taught her how to walk into a room and behave like a rock star.

    She started playing guitar in 1980 and moved back to San Francisco, already knowing how to get famous, in her own words, and just needing money and discipline to get there. The movie makes a cogent case that being a rock star was wired into her metabolism rather than something she methodically set out to do.

    Even brutal experiences became fodder for her creativity, like a near rape from which she ran in a ripped dress with one shoe back to her Hollywood Blvd. apartment, then picked up her guitar and wrote Hole’s 1990 debut single, “Retard Girl.” Hole has long been acknowledged as an important feminist band, which is validated by a back catalogue of unflinching songs about sexual politics, exploitation, misogyny and objectification. Love is the composer of “Doll Parts,” after all.

    She is forthright about her drug use and addiction, whether to heroin or fame, and credits Milos Forman with saving her life when he fought to cast her in The People vs, Larry Flynt and later in Man on the Moon, sending her to rehab to get clean before the first movie.

    The real meat of the doc, for many, will be Love’s thoughts looking back on her relationship and marriage with Cobain, captured in affecting archival images and home movies. Music, talent and mutual admiration were their magnet, and Stipe describes the couple as “these two intelligent, raw people riffing off each other in a beautiful way.”

    Love talks about the common experience of parental rejection that drew them closer; about the dream of their wedding in Hawaii like “being on acid;” and she tenderly recalls a tranquil period after the birth of their daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, when they retreated to Washington state and found a bubble of happiness out of the public eye.

    This idyll occurred because the family was forced to leave California — when custody of Frances was at risk after allegations emerged in a Vanity Fair profile that Love was doing drugs while pregnant. (Love points out that she took weekly drug tests throughout her pregnancy.) But that contradiction between public vilification and private peace is part of the mystique surrounding their marriage.

    There’s clearly still a lot of pain as Love speaks ruefully about how she ultimately was better equipped for fame than Kurt, who craved oblivion and found it too easily. Hole bassist Melissa Auf der Maur recalls heroin being everywhere when the alternative grunge scene was cresting, and the sight of people shooting up backstage was not uncommon. Cobain overdosed on Rohypnol and spent three days in a coma in Rome the year he died, while Nirvana was touring Europe.

    The torture of knowing Kurt tried to call her at the Peninsula Beverly Hills, and the desk staff failed to connect him despite Love’s instructions to put him through at any time, obviously still haunts her. She considers that the moment he died.

    Self-pity is not in Love’s vocabulary, but band members and friends talk about how the Hole touring schedule, right after Cobain’s suicide, gave her no time to grieve. There are moving accounts of her delivering 100 percent onstage and then crumpling backstage, “a broken, tortured person trying to overcome the pain of her entire life.” The lack of humanity from people determined to make her the villain left scars.

    The film drifts over much of the past two decades except to say that Love stayed clean, turned to Buddhism and rediscovered her need to write music after decamping to London. There’s a brief discussion of Frances obtaining legal emancipation from her mother in 2009, when she was 17, and the daughter’s absence among interviewees is conspicuous. Love volunteers that she was no picnic as a parent, though her joy at one point when she’s flying off to California to see her grandson hints that there’s been at least some degree of repair to the relationship.

    There are other notable absences, including collaborators like the Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan, who co-wrote several songs on the 1998 Hole album Celebrity Skin, including the hits “Malibu” and the title track, and helped smooth the band’s transition into a more commercial pop-punk sound. (Love amusingly calls it “my dark Fleetwood Mac record.”)

    But Lovelace and Hall make no claim of presenting an exhaustive chronology, mostly leaving it to their subject to go where her reflections take her. That predominantly becomes the new album, which is still in the works, with no news of completion or a release date. Stipe, who co-wrote some of the new songs, confidently calls the album a classic: “We’ll see how the world responds to it.”

    After years of sitting it out as other people told her story, at times with gross misrepresentations, Love just wants to get the album right and have her say in music, which she points out is the only way anyone will listen to her. The fragments of the new songs we hear — either tinkering away on them at home or laying down vocals in the studio, at one point with Auf der Maur in a gorgeous reunion moment — sound promising.

    Says Love: “I got kicked out of the party and now I’m coming back after a very long time.” I won’t be the only one rooting for her renaissance.

    [ad_2]

    David Rooney

    Source link

  • ‘The Only Living Pickpocket in New York’ Review: John Turturro Mesmerizes as a Small-Time Hustler Facing Obsolescence in Fine-Grained Crime Thriller

    [ad_1]

    Rarely does an opening song choice so precisely define the mood of a film like LCD Soundsystem’s exquisitely tortured anthem “New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down” over the opening frames of writer-director Noah Segan’s quiet knockout, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. James Murphy’s melancholy vocals capture the unlivable but unleavable push-pull of the city, wistfully looking back at its grubby past while lamenting the shiny soullessness and skyrocketing exclusivity of its present.

    Those sentiments seem to come directly from John Turturro as Harry Lehman, a nimble-fingered thief with a watchful gaze, always scoping a potential score on the streets or subways.

    The Only Living Pickpocket in New York

    The Bottom Line

    Contemplative, cool-headed and transfixing.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres)
    Cast: John Turturro, Giancarlo Esposito, Will Price, Tatiana Maslany, Steve Buscemi, Lori Tan Chinn, Kelvin Han Yee, Karina Arroyave, John Gallagher Jr., Victoria Moroles, Jack Mulhern, Michael Hsu Rosen, Aida Turturro, Mark Cayne
    Director-screenwriter: Noah Segan

    1 hour 28 minutes

    The song also suggests the movie’s pervasive subtextual nostalgia for the analog past — felt by the small-time career criminal, but no less by an old-school detective being shoved aside to make way for the clever kids in the cyber unit, by a crusty pawn shop owner fencing stolen goods or a steely crime matriarch, taking care of business and adapting to the times, but not shy about admitting she misses the bad old days.

    Turturro is unshowy but magnificent in his best film role in years, an honorable hustler who still carries himself with dignity despite a lifetime of regrets and a world gradually leaving him behind. At least until he unwittingly targets the wrong mark and has to think and act fast to protect the people he cares about and secure his own sorrowful redemption.

    Harry could be described as a counterpart on the other side of the law from John Stone, the wearily disheveled attorney played by Turturro in HBO’s riveting limited series, The Night Of — even if Harry has a greater appreciation for good tailoring. What makes Segan’s movie so intoxicating, however, is not just the depth of its inside-and-out central character study but the granular textures of the world Harry inhabits and the incisively drawn secondary characters played by a deep bench of very fine and impeccably cast actors.

    Segan has clearly been paying attention during his long association with Rian Johnson, who first cast him in Brick and has found roles for him in pretty much everything since. He moved into directing with a segment of the 2019 horror anthology, Scare Package, following in 2022 with his first solo feature, the Shudder vampire flick Blood Relatives. Segan’s latest is a complete swerve into more nuanced genre territory and more complex storytelling, not to mention a singularly great New York movie. The hypnotic, patiently held closing shot alone will strike a chord with natives, transplants and ex-residents alike.

    The opening scene is a model of narrative economy. A well-heeled businessman (John Gallagher Jr.) applies a spritz of cologne, slips on his chunky Philippe Patek watch and exits his upscale apartment building, heading for the subway when no cabs materialize. All we see is a quick shot of peak-hour strap-hangers packed in tight, with Harry close behind the guy. Cut to the end of a lunch meeting, when the businessman reaches for his wallet and finds it gone.

    Harry obviously has been at this game since he was a young man, when more people carried thick wads of cash. Still, he scrapes by, offloading resaleable items through his old friend Ben (an endearingly spiky Steve Buscemi) and laughing off the suggestion of tech-savvy young scammer Eve (Victoria Moroles) that he should shift to online theft.

    While he’s not exactly Robin Hood, Harry is an oddly principled man considering how he makes his living. He believes in circulating his stolen dough where it matters — whether it’s a healthcare worker at the facility that looks after his nonverbal, disabled wife Rosie (Karina Arroyave) during the day; or a neighbor in their Bronx apartment building who looks in on her when she’s at home and Harry steps out to ply his trade.

    Turturro gives Harry a sad-eyed appearance offset by a frequently jokey manner. But it’s the thoughtfulness and resourcefulness of a man whose cerebral cogs are constantly turning that defines him.

    One of the most poignant aspects of his performance is the way his face is transformed by love and devotion when he’s with Rosie — gently brushing her hair; carrying her up multiple flights of stairs and then returning for her wheelchair when the elevator is out of order; cheerfully nattering away in one-sided conversations; or spinning “Native New Yorker” on vinyl and goofily dancing around the room serenading her.

    Things go wrong for Harry when he unwittingly steals from the swaggering young scion of a crime family, Dylan (punchy live-wire Will Price), lifting a gym bag from the kid’s car that contains a luxury watch, guns and a USB card loaded with a fortune in cryptocurrency. Harry has no idea what it is and nor does Ben, whose dinosaur desktop is about 500 upgrades short of the capability necessary to read the thing. Ben sends him to another fence in Chinatown (Kelvin Han Yee), who takes the USB and a few other items off Harry’s hands.

    Dylan and his posse are well-connected, so it takes them relatively little time to track down Harry using CCTV footage. Threatening to harm Rosie if he doesn’t deliver, Dylan gives Harry just a few hours to retrieve the USB and return it to him.

    Watching The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, you are reminded of how rarely we now get to see movies fully shot on locations in the city and how there really is no substitute for the real thing.

    Cinematographer Sam Levy, whose long string of credits includes Frances Ha, Lady Bird and His Three Daughters, captures the bodegas, the subway trains and platforms, the tenements, storefronts and bustling street life with crispness but also a slightly rough-hewn, unvarnished quality, heightening the kinship with gritty New York movies of the ‘70s.

    Harry’s against-the-clock quest to ensure Rosie’s safety takes him back to Chinatown and from there to Brooklyn. Segan’s tight plotting amplifies the necessity for anyone in Harry’s profession of being able to come up with solutions on the fly. One such instance is an amusing bit of improvisation in which he gets backup by greasing the palm of a panhandler played by Aida Turturro.

    There’s also a very moving interlude during which Harry, claiming to be “in the neighborhood,” goes to Queens to see his estranged daughter Kelly, beautifully played by Tatiana Maslany as a knot of wounded anger. It’s that strong scene, and Harry’s contrition, that plant the idea of him preparing to make his exit. The encounter with Kelly — which reverberates in a lovely moment later on — is made even more touching by the heavily embellished account of it he shares with Rosie.

    The ways in which Harry’s detective buddy Warren (Giancarlo Esposito in fine form), Ben, Eve and Billy (Mark Cayne), a young pickpocket who gets tips from the old-timer, all factor into the closing developments demonstrate that Segan has a real gift for intricate plotting, not to mention a deft hand at creating a satisfying ending rich in emotional shading.

    The final scenes also involve a drive across the river with an extended cameo from a major-name star, whose character and Harry — in a duologue loaded with revealing insights — seem to develop an understanding, despite circumstances that could hardly be more unfavorable.

    This is a remarkably layered and rewarding story, especially for a movie running less than 90 minutes; editor Hilda Rasula keeps the pace steady and the transitions fluid. A big assist comes from Gary Lionelli’s full-bodied score, with jazzy retro funk riffs that add excitement to the early scenes and more bluesy, somber sounds in the later action.

    Even before the Cole Porter standard “I Happen to Like New York” comes in over the closing shot, it’s clear this is a movie very close to born-and-bred New Yorker Segan’s heart. It’s an adoring tip of the hat to the city and to the vast canon of New York movies. And it’s a gift to the wonderful Turturro, another native son, who imbues his role with a lifetime of personal history, underplaying everything with the most delicate restraint.

    [ad_2]

    David Rooney

    Source link

  • ‘Leviticus’ Review: A Sad, Frightening Conversion-Therapy Horror From Australia

    [ad_1]

    While the happy and only barely tortured gay romance of Heated Rivalry sweeps the nation, nay the world, it might be instructive, if depressing, to remind ourselves that there are many young queer people who have a much harder time realizing their desires. The new film Leviticus, from director Adrian Chiarella, is a solemn and frightening acknowledgment of that reality, albeit one allegorized into supernatural horror. 

    The film takes place in a dreary town in Victoria, Australia, a drab industrial backwater whose people — or, at least some of whom — flock to religion to give their lives the brightness of hope and higher purpose. Teenager Niam (Joe Bird) has just moved to town with his mum (a deceptively sinister Mia Wasikowska) but already yearns to escape it. He finds some deliverance, of the emotional kind anyway, in a classmate, Ryan (Stacy Clausen), a handsome ruffian with whom Niam shares a special bond. They have found love, or at least affectionate lust, in a hopeless place, just as many kids have done before them, since time immemorial.

    Leviticus

    The Bottom Line

    A stylish, urgent allegory.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Midnight)
    Cast: Joe Bird, Stacy Clausen, Mia Wasikowska
    Director and writer: Adrian Chiarella

    1 hour 26 minutes

    Chief on the film’s mind is what happens when the relative innocence of that blush of first infatuation — neither boy seems particularly troubled by his proclivity — is spoiled by outside forces, like family and the church. As a hardcore religious right gains traction around the globe, Leviticus challenges the notion, made too easy to accept by the Heartstoppers and Love, Simons of the world, that coming out isn’t really such a big deal anymore. It is still — perhaps increasingly so, in this moment of backslide — monumental and dangerous for plenty of young people, often plunging their lives into horror.

    Chiarella is particularly interested in the abuses of conversion therapy, which hideously imagines that something innate can be excised or, at least, wholly ignored. It is a form of torture, one whose effects can cause lingering and sometimes fatal harm. Such trauma is made manifest in Leviticus, in which these afflicted kids are stalked by a sinister force that, cruelly and perversely, takes the form of the person they most want in the world.

    It’s a grim and clever conceit, even if its rules don’t always make total sense. What the device does most effectively is force the audience to think about the real-world analog of these characters’ psychic (and physical) pain: the many young people who have been told that their sexual and romantic desire will destroy them, that a fundamental human attraction is something they must flee from in mortal terror. How heartbreaking, and how vile, that any adult claiming compassion would seek to imbue a child with that extreme allergy to their own self. 

    Leviticus has a enough gore and jumpy moments to qualify it as a proper horror film. But its true scariness is of the forlorn kind, as Naim and Ryan grow distrustful of each other, not sure if the needful, seductive person they see before them is real or a menacing specter who means to kill them. That doleful eeriness is the film’s best asset, adding a tragic queer love story to the template of youth-curse films like It Follows and Talk to Me. Both Bird and Clausen play this mounting nightmare with the appropriate ache and desperation, elevating the emotional tenor of Chiarella’s sad, frequently bleak film. Sure, Clausen is pretty enough that one wonders why he doesn’t just monetize his Instagram and flee to Sydney, but otherwise both he and Bird appropriately register as two small-towners trapped in a toxic community, starkly rendered in Chiarella’s drab austerity. 

    Though his metaphors are awfully on the nose, Chiarella convincingly insists on their power. He has made his argumentative trick work quite well, even if the movie’s messaging sometimes crosses into the obvious or didactic. And anyway, maybe we are at a time, yet again, when such simple lessons bear repeating, when it is not lame or dated to highlight the terrible violations of the most basic kind of homophobia. 

    There is also, perhaps, a slightly radical suggestion teased out toward the end of Chiarella’s film, one that harkens back to so many narratives of the past: Those stories told of uncles and sons and countless others who fled their oppression in search of something they knew to be true and decent, waiting for them in distant, glittering cities. Leviticus has the sturdy nerve and conviction to plainly state that sometimes home and family are irredeemable and worth abandoning. It is not so concerned with changing hearts and minds, but with saving lives. 

    [ad_2]

    Richard Lawson

    Source link

  • ‘Hot Water’ Review: Lubna Azabal and Daniel Zolghadri Go West in a Slight but Sensitive Mother-Son Road Movie

    [ad_1]

    A mother-son road movie more laced with humor than laden with trauma, Hot Water marks a warm and sensitive, if not entirely satisfying, debut feature from Ramzi Bashour.

    There’s an undeniable familiarity that nips at the heels (or wheels?) of the film as it traverses classic American landscapes alongside its protagonists, a tightly wound Lebanese woman (Lubna Azabal) and her turbulent, U.S.-raised teenager (Daniel Zolghadri). We’ve been here before — in this situation, with these types, against these backdrops. Every year at Sundance, to be exact.

    Hot Water

    The Bottom Line

    Warm and sweet, if not entirely satisfying.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (U.S. Dramatic Competition)
    Cast: Lubna Azabal, Daniel Zolghadri, Dale Dickey, Gabe Fazio
    Director-writer: Ramzi Bashour

    1 hour 37 minutes

    Luckily, the leads are good company, and there’s just enough in Hot Water that feels fresh and personal to lift it above dreaded indie staleness. Bashour has a light touch, an aversion to exposition, histrionics and overt sentimentality, that serves the material well.

    If the film’s modesty, its glancing quality, is a strength, it’s also a limitation. There’s a nagging sense that the writer-director is just skimming the surface of his characters, their relationship to each other and to the country they live in. The Syrian-American Bashour knows these people and their story in his bones — the movie has several autobiographical elements — but he doesn’t always translate that depth of understanding to the screen.

    The problem is an excess of tact — a reluctance to really dive into the ideas simmering here, to allow the central pair’s experience of forced proximity on the open American road to palpably complicate or illuminate their respective identities and points of view. As pleasant, and occasionally poignant, as Hot Water is, it never commits fully to either its comedy or the emotions that often feel assumed rather than earned. And Bashour is not yet a sophisticated enough filmmaker to conjure richness of meaning with the narrative and visual economy of a Debra Granik, a Kelly Reichardt or an Eliza Hittman, to name (perhaps unfairly) some American neo-realist touchstones to emerge from Sundance.

    Hot Water is Bashour’s third collaboration with writer-director Max Walker-Silverman: The latter is a producer here, while Bashour composed the music for Walker-Silverman’s quiet soul-stirrer A Love Song and edited his more ambitious but less affecting follow-up, Rebuilding. Theirs is a softer, fuzzier regional cinema than the aforementioned auteurs’ work, infused with a wistful belief in the redemptive promise of American community, as well as a reverence for the natural beauty we take for granted.

    In A Love Song and Rebuilding, the protagonists are rooted to the land in a way that Hot Water’s Layal (Azabal), a foreign-born professor of Arabic at an Indiana college, is not. Layal’s ambivalence toward her adopted home is a note of discordancy that the film never taps for its full dramatic potential — an example of how Bashour’s gentle approach veers toward a sort of frictionless amiability. The movie is full of fleeting interpersonal clashes, but deeper social and political undercurrents are left largely unexamined.

    The catalyst in Hot Water comes when Layal’s son Daniel (Zolghadri) attacks another student with a hockey stick, getting himself expelled from the high school that’s already held him back twice. Out of options and patience, Layal decides to drive Daniel out to Santa Cruz to live with his father and finish out his senior year. Cue the procession of sunbaked cornfields, plains dotted with wind turbines, snow-capped mountains, craggy red rock, and the neon pageantry of the Vegas Strip. The expected stops at motels, diners and gas stations are punctuated by Layal’s fraught phone calls back to Beirut, where her sister reports on their mother’s declining health.

    Hot Water ambles along agreeably, buoyed by the believably fluid dynamic between Layal and Daniel. The filmmaker and his performers don’t overplay the fractiousness; there’s tension in their relationship, but also teasing affection, respect and a push-pull of aggravation and amusement that is the near-universal dance of parents and teenagers. Daniel gets a kick out of winding his mom up and watching her go off; she chastises him for bad choices and ribs him for not speaking better Arabic. Bashour and DP Alfonso Herrera Salcedo favor straightforward two-shots to showcase that interplay, rather than close-ups capturing instances of individual reflection or realization.

    “Why are you so tense and bummed all the time?” Daniel asks Layal, a question that hints at the gulf that separates this middle-class American kid and his immigrant single mom. He has enjoyed the privilege of nonchalance, of messing up, while she has endured the stress of providing a good life for her son while navigating cultural bewilderments like “chicken-fried steak” and students demanding do-overs on botched oral presentations.

    I could have happily watched a whole film about Layal’s on-campus life teaching Arabic to mostly white students. A priceless, too-brief scene of her coaching a smiling, square-jawed bro through some challenging pronunciation indeed suggests Bashour doesn’t necessarily recognize what his most distinctive material is. Ditto a glimpse of Daniel, shirtless, rehearsing pick-up lines in the mirror — a seemingly throwaway moment that’s slyer and more intimate than much of the rest of the movie.

    Tossing Layal and Daniel into a car and onto the road is perhaps the least interesting, and certainly easiest, way into this story, allowing the filmmaker to push them into confrontation with each other, and with America, rather than coaxing out conflict organically. To his credit, and in keeping with the spirit of the film, Bashour exercises restraint. Layal and Daniel do more bickering than blowing up, and Hot Water doesn’t over-indulge in fish-out-of-water shtick or ambush them with rednecks and racists.

    Rather, their journey is textured with odd little encounters, some more compelling than others. Dale Dickey shows up as a benevolent, aphorism-dispensing hippie in an interlude that plays like filler. I preferred the unusually composed kid working the front desk of a motel (“I don’t know, I don’t eat meat,” he notes after referring a hungry Layal and Daniel to a nearby Jack in the Box). Or the run-in with a ripe-smelling hitchhiker, which at first appears to reveal a generational divide between mother and son before uniting them in revulsion.

    Azabal (Incendies, The Blue Caftan), alternating among English, Arabic and French with regal impatience, is the kind of performer who can convey fierce love and pride with a mere glance, through sunglasses no less. Layal is perpetually harried — her exasperated “Oh, Daniel!” when he sneezes with a mouth full of carrot cake is perfection — but there’s also a sincere wonderment in the way she looks at her son. Zolghadri, so terrific in Owen Kline’s Funny Pages, flaunts the same gift for note-perfect line delivery here, pivoting seamlessly from sarcasm to authentic feeling and back again.

    The leads are so strong that the movie’s reliance on cutesy shorthand — Layal’s constant hand sanitizing and her compulsive clementine-eating as a replacement for smoking, Daniel and Layal exiting their motel room in a slow-mo strut (have mercy, filmmakers: no more slow-mo struts) — registers as an unnecessary distraction. These actors don’t need things in boldface to build out their characters.

    The final section, with its minor twist and succession of heart-to-hearts, seems calculated to surprise and stir, but underwhelms. It’s the offhanded bits of Hot Water that land most potently — the ones that hint at aches and yearnings beyond the immediate needs of the plot. “Did you say bye to the house?” Layal asks Daniel as they prepare to pull out of their driveway and hit the road. “The house has no ears, mom,” he mocks. Then, when she gets out of the car to grab something, he gazes up at the home he’s about to leave behind, and whispers: “Bye, house.” That kind of moment, tiny but casually heart-piercing, makes you impatient to see what Bashour does next.

    [ad_2]

    Jon Frosch

    Source link

  • Quirky Comedy ‘The Gallerist’ Asks a Bold Question: Can a Dead Body Be Art?

    [ad_1]

    If you were at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2024, you might have noticed a surprising face amidst the art lovers and buyers. It was Natalie Portman, attending the festival to research for her role in The Gallerist—a dark comedy in which she plays a desperate gallerist who attempts to sell a dead body as a piece of art.

    Though already an art lover, Portman didn’t know much about the nuances of the contemporary art world—and its colorful characters—before joining The Gallerist. “It’s almost like ideas are art, which is kind of incredible. It’s almost like a marketplace for philosophy, in some way, which can obviously lead to sometimes bullshit and sometimes really incredible, revelatory stuff,” the actor says. “It has depth and can be ridiculous, which is kind of the best combination for when you want to tell a story.”

    Portman stars in the film as eccentric gallerist Polina Polinski, who is trying to make a name for herself and her new Miami Beach gallery. She begrudgingly invites an art influencer (Zach Galifianakis) to see the work of an emerging artist named Stella (Da’Vine Joy Randolph)—but soon finds herself scrambling alongside her assistant (Jenna Ortega) to sell a piece of art that features a corpse.

    Yan, seen here on the set of The Gallerist, first went to Sundance with her 2018 film Dead Pigs.

    Roger Do Minh.

    It’s fitting for The Gallerist to have its world premiere on January 24 at the Sundance Film Festival, where real-life buyers (and influencers) are prepared to potentially throw millions of dollars at the films they deem worthy. Cathy Yan’s biting, funny, and surprising satire revels in the clash between art and commerce. “There were a lot of really interesting ideas and themes that I personally related to as an artist, as a creative, as someone that just really wanted to explore the creative process and collaboration and the inherent tension of creating art—not just for yourself, but for the world,” the director tells Vanity Fair.

    Yan is deeply familiar with this subject matter. She made her feature directorial debut in 2018 with the breakout Sundance film Dead Pigs, then jumped into the world of superheroes and DC Comics to direct 2020’s Birds of Prey. The Gallerist marks Yan’s return to non-IP-based filmmaking. “It’s hard to define what inherent value is in the art world, and so much of it becomes in the eye of the beholder—and also in the stories that are told about it, in the context and the marketing,” she says. “I always found the collision of the business and the art itself to be absolutely fascinating.”

    [ad_2]

    Rebecca Ford

    Source link

  • ‘Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!’ Review: Japanese Comedy-Drama Dances Through Grief With Heart & Absurd Whimsy — Sundance Film Festival

    [ad_1]

    In Josef Kubota Wladyka‘s Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!, the co-writer/director tells a beautifully relatable story of life, love and loss with some Fosse-quality dance numbers and just the right amount of whimsy.

    Set in Tokyo, the comedy-drama follows Haru (Rinko Kikuchi) after her happy life with husband and dance partner Luis (Alejandro Edda) comes to a halt when he dies suddenly in the middle of a ballroom competition.

    After nine months, Haru is in self-imposed isolation until her friends Yuki (Yoh Yoshida) and Hiro (YOU) drag her out of the house and to a dance class, where she’s immediately smitten with her instructor Fedir (Alberto Guerra) — an impromptu dance number breaking out to humorously emphasize the character’s reconnection with life, one of a few.

    Hiring Fedir for private lessons, Haru soon learns that he’s in an open marriage with his own dance partner. Uninterested in the concept of non-monogamy, she plays along and lies that she has an arrangement with her husband, whom she says is still alive. A brief but passionate fling ensues between the pair, before Fedir’s wife sparks some deliciously unpredictable jealousy in Haru.

    Meanwhile, Haru is stuck grieving Luis, unable to move on as his ghost periodically visits her in a giant crow costume, ready to dance with her. It’s a heavy-handed metaphor that ultimately earns consistent laughs throughout, albeit the playfully absurd surrealism is sure to make some audiences in Middle America roll their eyes.

    Kikuchi shines in a painfully complex role of a woman trying to regain touch with her appetite for life, selling the character not only through her heartbreaking acting, but through her dance moves, which personify every emotion she faces with the utmost humanity.

    YOU also delivers a hilarious supporting performance as the wry divorcee who pushes her friend with the wisdom, “It’s OK to get messy. That’s life.”

    All big productions with stunning set pieces, none of the dance scenes feel too forced, representing Haru’s big emotions in certain situations — one grand number on a train uses practical effects to create a beautiful illusion. Granted, there is one Japanese re-creation of Dirty Dancing after several nods to the 1987 movie, which might come off cheesy, but seeing it through Haru’s eyes manages to recapture some of the tingly feelings from the Swayze-Grey classic.

    A tribute to his own ballroom-dancing mother, Wladyka paints a beautiful picture of life and love, grief and closure, using dance as a universal language to express all of the above, with help from a talented ensemble of Japanese and Latin actors.

    Producers are Kimberly Parker Zox, Mao Nagakura and Wladyka, with executive producers James Hausler, Kikuchi and Kenji Ito.

    Title: Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!
    Festival: Sundance (U.S. Dramatic Competition)
    Director: Josef Kubota Wladyka
    Screenwriters: Josef Kubota Wladyka and Nicholas Huynh
    Cast: Rinko Kikuchi, Alberto Guerra, Alejandro Edda, YOU, Yoh Yoshida, Damián Alcázar
    Sales agent: CAA
    Running time: 2 hr 2 min

    [ad_2]

    Glenn Garner

    Source link

  • The 16 Films and TV Shows We’re Most Excited to See at Sundance 2026

    [ad_1]

    Courtesy of A24.

    The Moment

    A.k.a. Charli xcx’s hyperpop mockumentary, helmed by the most in-demand creative director in music right now: Aidan Zamiri, channeling Charli’s humor for a satirical take on the music industry. Set to be released by A24 at the end of the month, the film includes appearances by everyone from Rachel Sennott to Kylie Jenner to Alexander Skarsgård. The trailer is funny, there’s no bigger star than Charli in pop music right now, and she’s also a noted film buff—so expectations are high for this film. Let’s hope it delivers during its premiere Friday night.

    The Musical

    A recently dumped middle school theater teacher puts together an avant-garde original musical in secret as a way to exact revenge on the school’s principal, who is dating his ex-girlfriend. This dark comedy from first-time feature director Giselle Bonilla, with a script by Alexander Heller—in the vein of Summer Heights High, but not filmed as a mockumentary—has a wild reveal at the end, when the audience gets to see the musical performed onstage, embracing the role of spite in the creation of art.

    See You When I See You

    One of the kings of Sundance, Jay Duplass, returns to Park City with a new film that follows a writer coping with PTSD after the death of his sister. Based on Adam Cayton-Holland’s memoir, Tragedy Plus Time: A Tragi-comic Memoir, the film also stars two more Sundance darlings, Cooper Raiff and Kaitlyn Dever. Duplass has done a lot of acting work in recent years, and he’s always showing up as a producer on independent films—but this movie marks his return to the festival as a director.

    The Shitheads

    Dave Franco and O’Shea Jackson Jr. star in Macon Blair’s Sundance follow-up to I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore. Blair won the festival’s US Dramatic grand jury prize for that film in 2017. Here, Franco and Jackson Jr. play drivers trying to transport a rich teenager, played by Mason Thames, to rehab. This job proves harder than expected, and things get out of hand quickly as the trio goes on an adventure that includes run-ins with supporting cast members Kiernan Shipka and Nicholas Braun.

    Undertone

    Is it even Sundance without an A24 horror film premiere? In writer-director Ian Tuason’s debut feature, the host of a podcast focused on paranormal activity begins to receive recordings of a haunted nature. This one has all the signature A24 horror tropes—an unsettling tone, a female protagonist struggling with depression and loneliness, and a Sundance midnight premiere.

    Worried

    This television series, with a pilot directed by Nicole Holofcener and written by Lesley Arfin and Alexandra Tanner, is entering the festival without a network or streamer to call home. Centered around two young women, played by Gideon Adlon (yes, she’s Odessa A’zion’s sister) and Rachel Kaly, the show is giving Girls vibes. Holofcener rarely misses; it’s also interesting to see a television series take an independent-film model and look for distribution at a film festival.

    [ad_2]

    John Ross

    Source link

  • One Lesson in Leadership from Robert Redford

    [ad_1]

    As an Academy Award winning director, actor, producer, and the founder of Sundance Film Festival, the late Robert Redford, 89, was undoubtedly an impressive individual. But what made him a great leader was his “generosity to incubating new talent,” according to Michelle Satter, the founding senior director of Artist Programs at the Sundance Institute, who worked with Redford for 44 years.

    Satter penned a homage to Redford’s leadership style in TIME Magazine, where she noted that despite his many talents, Redford was very “humble” and a “good listener.” At the beginning of their professional relationship, Satter admitted she struggled with being in the presence of someone so accomplished.

    “It felt like the most important person in the world was sitting next to me,” Satter wrote. “I would often wonder to myself, how could I just be me, authentically, around someone of that stature? But Bob was uniquely humble. I quickly discovered that he only wanted us to be ourselves, and be completely present.”

    Evidently, Redford was aware of how nervous he made aspiring filmmakers, and other types of professionals trying to break into Hollywood. So how did he make these folks feel comfortable? He listened, Satter said. Perhaps business leaders can take a page out of Redford’s playbook to build the next generation of talent.

    “Watching him as a creative advisor guiding the emerging filmmakers was truly mesmerizing,” she said. “With an awareness of his own presence, he would intentionally start by listening and inspiring filmmakers to find their voice, their stories, and the confidence and skills they needed as directors and writers.”

    [ad_2]

    Kayla Webster

    Source link

  • Aubrey Plaza and Maisy Stella Go Tripping in ‘My Old Ass’ Trailer

    Aubrey Plaza and Maisy Stella Go Tripping in ‘My Old Ass’ Trailer

    [ad_1]

    Maisy Stella, playing 18-year-old Elliot Labrant, finds her future self at age 39 (played by Aubrey Plaza) in the trailer for Megan Park’s My Old Ass, which dropped on Thursday.

    The time-bending coming-of-age tale comes by way of a summer mushroom trip that Elliot goes on with her girlfriends while holidaying in cottage country north of Toronto before heading off to college. While tripping next to a campfire, Elliot meets Plaza’s character seated on the same log, only she’s two decades her senior — and full of warnings about what her younger self should or shouldn’t do.

    My Old Ass Trailer

    “You’re kind of hot for being middle-aged,” Elliot tells her older self at one point in the trailer, to which a defensive younger Elliot replies sternly, “I’m a very young adult.” Eventually, Elliott realizes her older self, or “old ass,” has her rethinking everything about family, love and a summer set to change her forever.

    After her older self warns 18-year-old Elliot about falling in love, everything gets complicated when she meets Chad, the person her “old ass” specifically red flagged. Soon younger Elliott opens herself up to what her future self might have to show her about life and love.

    My Old Ass also stars Percy Hynes White, Maddie Ziegler and Kerrice Brooks, and is produced by Tom Ackerley, Margot Robbie, Josey McNamara and Steven Rales. Park’s sophomore feature after The Fallout, which she also wrote, will get a limited run in theaters from Sept. 13, with a national rollout to follow. 

    [ad_2]

    Etan Vlessing

    Source link

  • Justin Bieber Signed Off on Aubrey Plaza’s 'My Old Ass' to Using His Song

    Justin Bieber Signed Off on Aubrey Plaza’s 'My Old Ass' to Using His Song

    [ad_1]


    Justin Bieber and Aubrey Plaza.     Getty Images (2)

    The My Old Ass team was pleasantly surprised that Justin Bieber gave the OK to use his song “One Less Lonely Girl” in the Aubrey Plaza-led comedy.

    “We weren’t sure Justin was going to let us,” director Megan Park said in a post-screening Q&A on Saturday, January 20, after the film premiered at Sundance Film Festival. “Once he gave us the go-ahead, we were thrilled. We leaned into it even more.”

    The film follows the story of a Canadian teenager named Elliot, played by Maisy Stella, who is gearing up to head to college. While hanging out with her friends, the group of small-town teens partake in mushrooms.

    During Elliot’s trip, she meets an older version of herself played by Plaza, 39, who warns her not to fall in love with her crush Chad (Percy Hynes White). At a later point in the movie, while Elliot is still high on the shrooms, she also imagines performing Bieber’s “One Less Lonely Girl” to Chad.

    Justin Bieber s Ups and Downs Through the Years 312 Feature

    Related: Justin Bieber’s Ups and Downs Through the Years

    Justin Bieber has faced his fair share of hardships since skyrocketing to fame after being discovered by Scooter Braun in 2007. Upon breaking onto the scene with his debut album, My World 2.0, the two-time Grammy winner was beloved by the world over for his boyish charm, famous hair “swoop” and age-appropriate love songs. However, […]

    “One Less Lonely Girl” has a special place in the hearts of Bieber’s fans. The song, which was released off his debut album One World in 2009, is a staple in the musician’s setlist. When Bieber, 29, performs the song at his concerts he typically picks one girl to serenade on stage.

    “Guys, Justin Bieber watched that,” Stella, 20, quipped at the Q&A on Saturday. “Justin Bieber watched that, which makes me so ill.”

    During the panel, Park, 37, explained that her Canadian roots heavily influenced the soundtrack for My Old Ass and that was the main reason why she wanted Bieber’s song to be a highlight in the film. In addition to having silly scenes in the movie, Park wanted her project to have moments that brought viewers back to special moments in their childhood.

    Parks and Recreation Cast Where Are They Now

    Related: ‘Parks and Recreation’ Cast: Where Are They Now?

    Pawnee forever! The Parks and Recreation cast filled homes with laughs and love during its seven-season run on NBC, but since the show ended, fans have still been able to see their favorite faces from the group in a slew of high-profile projects. Amy Poehler (Leslie Knope), Nick Offerman (Ron Swanson), Aziz Ansari (Tom Haverford), Adam Scott […]

    “I kept thinking about this idea: there was a time when you did something like play pretend with your friends, and then you just never did it again,” she explained. “That made me really emotional. I also wanted to immerse myself in a joyful film and something that made people feel nostalgic for an easier, simpler time in life. Because life can be hard and s—y sometimes. I wanted to have an escape.”

    Plaza, for her part, gushed about getting to work with Park and how she appreciated the director’s unique choice of transportation during filming.

    “Megan is the only director I’ve ever worked with who Jet Skis to work,” Plaza said before recalling how Park picked her up via a paddle boat for their initial meeting. “She paddled over me. And I sat there for a while just staring at her, inching along. I was like, ‘What the? What have I got myself into?’ And [then] I felt like, ‘This is right.’”

    [ad_2]

    Kaitlin Simpson

    Source link

  • ‘RHOSLC’ Star Lisa Barlow Calls Monica Garcia “Good TV” & Reveals If She Would Film With Her Again

    ‘RHOSLC’ Star Lisa Barlow Calls Monica Garcia “Good TV” & Reveals If She Would Film With Her Again

    [ad_1]

    Lisa Barlow, star of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, is known as the “Queen of Sundance” and stopped by the Deadline Studio at the Sundance Film Festival, where she spilled all the tea from the epic Season 4 finale of the Bravo series.

    Viewers and the RHOSLC stars were shocked when it was revealed that co-star Monica Garcia was behind an Instagram account that gossiped about the lives of the TV personalities. Barlow gave insight into what happened when Garcia was asked to leave the dinner table following the tense moment.

    “I was really angry because I’m like, ‘We let you in our space and this whole time you were going online and bullying every single one of us,’” Barlow said after Garcia was found out to be behind a social media troll account. “The way she was watching all of us and studying us, it felt so dark and creepy and so invasive.”

    Barlow recalled that during the season, Garcia brought up a story about Barlow flying in a private jet to meet Snoop Dogg, something she had only told her former co-star Jen Shah, whom Garcia worked for.

    “We figured out that [Garcia] was logging into Jen’s security cameras watching her for months,” Barlow revealed. “All of the videos that were going up about Jen on Reality Von Tease were downloaded from security cameras. That was so crazy to me.”

    Although Bravo has not announced which current RHOSLC cast members will be returning for Season 5, Barlow says it would be difficult to film with Garcia if she were to come back as “the trust is broken.”

    “That fact that [Garcia] can send her friends videos inciting her mother, and yelling at her mom, and demeaning her mother, I could never trust her again,” Barlow said. “I just couldn’t trust her. I don’t want her in my home. I don’t want her in my space.”

    Despite not trusting Garcia, Barlow said that she was “great TV,” adding, “It was hard because, for me, it was dealing with someone that’s very sophomoric. I like to argue smart. Heather [Gay] and I can dish and take. I think with Monica it was a little hard because her jeers were so low. I mean, how do you respond to someone that’s saying, ‘Fix your face, you’re ugly.’ You can’t respond to that.”

    Barlow also noted that the “season would’ve been good with or without Monica because there was so much that we had to resolve.”

    Another point of contention of RHOSLC recently is the reunion pirate ship set, and Barlow gives her take on it.

    Barlow also talked to us about how she got the title of Queen of Sundance.

    See photos of Barlow at the Deadline Studio below.

    Lisa Barlow at the Deadline Portrait Studio during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival

    Michael Buckner for Deadline

    Lisa Barlow at the Deadline Portrait Studio during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival

    Lisa Barlow at the Deadline Portrait Studio during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival

    Michael Buckner for Deadline

    Lisa Barlow at the Deadline Portrait Studio during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival

    Lisa Barlow at the Deadline Portrait Studio during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival

    Michael Buckner for Deadline

    Lisa Barlow at the Deadline Portrait Studio during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival

    Lisa Barlow at the Deadline Portrait Studio during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival

    Michael Buckner for Deadline

    Lisa Barlow at the Deadline Portrait Studio during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival

    Lisa Barlow at the Deadline Portrait Studio during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival

    Michael Buckner for Deadline

    Lisa Barlow at the Deadline Portrait Studio during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival

    Lisa Barlow at the Deadline Portrait Studio during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival

    Michael Buckner for Deadline

    [ad_2]

    Armando Tinoco

    Source link

  • Aubrey Plaza Symbolizes Doom to Come in Charming Fable ‘My Old Ass’

    Aubrey Plaza Symbolizes Doom to Come in Charming Fable ‘My Old Ass’

    [ad_1]

    The summer before I left for college, I couldn’t be bothered to spend time with my family. I had friends to say long goodbyes to, beer to drink in municipal parks, wistful solo drives to take while Eve 6’s “Here’s to the Night” blared on the radio. It was a magical summer, heady and intense—until, toward the end of it, my mom lamented that I had basically been a ghost and I realized I’d been ignoring two key people in all these preparations to fly the nest. I felt terrible, but didn’t have much time to atone before I had to move (to a dorm room fifteen minutes away from my house).

    I’d imagine that’s a common experience, one universal enough to have been made into a feature film: My Old Ass, a sprightly and wistful comedy that premiered here at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday. Written and directed by Megan Park, whose first feature was the sensitive school-shooting drama The Fallout, My Old Ass is about a heedless teen named Elliott (Maisy Stella) receiving a wakeup call by her 39-year-old self, played by Aubrey Plaza. This hallucination (or is it?) is brought about by a mushroom trip, in which Elliott is confronted by a shiftless, seemingly unhappy version of herself who encourages her to take stock of how charmed her adolescent life is and to take some time to appreciate those who make it so (her parents and brothers, mostly, whose family business is running a cranberry bog).

    It’s a clever setup for a movie, made even cleverer by Park’s keen sense of character and place. Stella was a regular on the show Nashville for a number of seasons, but vividly pops in this film like a breakout discovery. She makes Elliott a just-shy-of-annoying good-times gal, rude and rowdy but ultimately kind and decent. It’s a charming, high-energy performance that is finely attuned to the emotional undulations of the film. As she exhibited in The Fallout, Park is quite good at writing teenagers, conscious of their idiosyncrasies, the necessarily limited scope of their worldview. 

    Park sets her latest credible creation loose in a specifically, gorgeously rendered place: the shores and islands of Lake Muskoka in Ontario, making My Old Ass a proudly, distinctly Canadian film. It’s as alluring as a pleasant dream, sun dappled and teeming with possibility. What a lovely location to receive such valuable life lessons; if Elliott didn’t learn to be grateful for it all, she’d be irredeemable. 

    But that nascent sense of perspective is only half the journey of the film, which eventually turns to confront that most pressing of teenage concerns: romance. Elliott dates girls, happily and hungrily, and pretty much considers herself gay. She’s confused, then, when she meets a cute and goofy summer worker at the cranberry bog, Chad (the utterly winning Percy Hynes White). He’s just so easy to joke with, and not so bad to look at in his appealingly lanky way. But he’s a boy. Further complicating matters is that older Elliott has warned teenage Elliott away from Chad. She won’t explain why exactly, but it seems that Chad must do something pretty bad somewhere down the line. 

    Teenage attraction is hard to ignore, though, and thus young Elliott pursues this Chad thing anyway, leading My Old Ass toward its most intriguing and persuasive thematic territory. What Park creates from the tension between this joyful, exciting present and a seemingly ominous future is rather marvelous, a big and sincere sentiment about the risk and reward of life, a message that is just as worthy for a middle-ager as it is for a kid. 

    If only there were more young-adult movies that are not so hung up on proving their timeliness, their generation-specific sense of savvy and instead focus on telling a good, dynamic story with perhaps slightly broader appeal. Which isn’t to say that My Old Ass doesn’t have a contemporary sensibility. Its jokes are relevant, and its compassionate, fluid approach to the vagaries of sexual orientation feels very of the moment—without slipping into Twitter-thread didacticism. 

    My Old Ass may be a bit patchy in its supernatural logic, and may hop from plot to plot a little awkwardly. But it is on the whole a winsome delight, a movie whose gimmick is used to surprisingly stirring effect. Maybe it was just the altitude making me susceptible, but I found myself crying for the last 15 or so minutes of the film, so convincing and bittersweet is its depiction of the liminal flash of time between one phase of life and the next. It’s a great and instructive movie for teens—and, I daresay, for the rest of us too. Some of us may be too advanced in years to greet the future with as much loopy optimism as Elliott, but we could at least maybe take our old asses up to Muskoka next summer in search of our own next adventures.

    [ad_2]

    Richard Lawson

    Source link

  • ‘Exhibiting Forgiveness’ Review: Art, Emotion, And The Journey Of Self-Healing – Sundance Film Festival

    ‘Exhibiting Forgiveness’ Review: Art, Emotion, And The Journey Of Self-Healing – Sundance Film Festival

    [ad_1]

    Exhibiting Forgiveness, directed and written by Titus Kaphar, is a thought-provoking film starring Andre Holland, John Earl Jelks, Andra Day, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, and Ian Foreman. Set against a backdrop of familial struggle and personal demons, Kaphar’s film navigates the complexities of forgiveness, accountability, and the resilience of the human spirit.

    Tarrell Rodin (Holland), a loving father and husband who resides in the suburbs with his wife Aisha (Day), a singer-songwriter, and their son Jermaine. Renowned in the American art scene for his haunting, personal work, Tarrell dedicates his days to his art studio, using painting to turn his nightmares into art. His devotion to art, coupled with the support of his family and his diligent work ethic, has helped him keep his ugly past at a distance. He aims to take care of his mother Joyce (Ellis-Taylor) and wants to get her out of the neighborhood she lives in, but she’s apprehensive as she wants to stay close to her church. Its only a temporary move nit deep down he hopes Joyce in hopes she can provide support as he struggles with old memories. 

    Life officially unravels when his abusive Father La’Ron (Jelks) appears in his life, free from drugs and alcohol and asking for another chance. Tarrell didn’t ask for any of this. Against his well, Joyce went behind his back to plan this reunion in hopes of putting their family back together again. Now, Tarrell must manage his emotion now that his abuser is back in his life, and put in the work to rectify the past in order to move on to the present to transform generational trauma, into generational healing. 

    There is something to be said for the level of denial that exists among elders in the Black community. Joyce is dealing with hidden issues that she is in denial about. La’ron with bible and explaining away his past. How is Terrell supposed to find closure when dealing with people who cant even be honest? 

    Black men are taught to be unfeeling, unemotional, work through the pain. Titus’s puts it on display to show how cycles of abuse perpetuate themselves, and how there is power in stopping that cycle. There is an appreciation for a Tarell who refuses to be gaslit, and sticks up for himself. Shows emotion when he feels it, and does all the things he wasn’t allowed to do as a young boy. 

    Exhibiting Forgiveness distinguishes itself with a soulful and contemplative score by Jherek Bischoff, and music by Andra Day mirror the nuanced direction of Kaphar. This artistic choice beautifully complements the performances of its talented cast. Holland, Ellis-Taylor, and Day, who are recognized as some of the finest actors in the industry today. Their portrayal in the film is both powerful and emotionally resonant, contributing significantly to the film’s overall impact.

    The issues lie in Kaphar’s narrative. The audience sits through so many traumatic moments and then is asked to find optimism in the experience which may work for some and not for others as it’s just not a simple choice. Maybe it would have worked for me if it were balanced by more levity, but it isn’t. It’s a constant beating. 

    Do those who have committed harsh transgressions have the capacity for good? Sure, but it doesn’t erase their past because accountability has to be taken somewhere. However, Exhibiting Forgiveness proves you do not need other people’s acknowledgement or approval to find forgiveness within yourself.

    It’s ok to find something like art or the bible that helps in the healing process, but that can’t be all. You have to do the work. Giving yourself that grace is so powerful because if not that pain will trickle into other aspects of your life and the cycle will continue. We have to strive to be different than those who came before us. 

    Title: Exhibiting Forgiveness
    Festival Section): U.S. Dramatic Competition
    Director(s): Titus Kaphar
    Screenwriter(s): Titus Kaphar
    Cast: Andre Holland, John Earl Jelks, Andra Day, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor
    Running time: 1 hr 57 min

    [ad_2]

    Valerie Complex

    Source link

  • ‘Love Machina’ Review: Provocative but Unfocused Doc Tackles Romance and Robotics

    ‘Love Machina’ Review: Provocative but Unfocused Doc Tackles Romance and Robotics

    [ad_1]

    If you follow the news, you’d think that AI is going to take over every activity we formerly thought of as “human,” perhaps by the time you finish reading this sentence.

    One of the great pleasures of reviewing documentaries, though, is that every few months a new film will pull back the curtain on the latest advancement in artificial intelligence or consciousness-infused robotics. Fairly consistently, the answer is: “Nah. People are safe. For now.”

    Love Machina

    The Bottom Line

    Intriguing but scattered.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (U.S. Documentary Competition)
    Director: Peter Sillen

    1 hour and 36 minutes

    For now.

    The latest documentary to enter this fray is Peter Sillen’s Love Machina, a jumbled and easily distracted meditation on artificial intelligence, robotics, love, immortality, transformation and a form of spirituality that combines all of those things.

    This is a subgenre in which any filmmaker will have to confront a series of what look like binaries, but increasingly aren’t: Visionary or crackpot? Science or science fiction? Utopian vision of the future or warning of an approaching dystopian nightmare? A storyteller can answer those questions or leave it for the audience to decide. Sillen falls squarely in the fuzzy in-between, both amazed by what he keeps uncovering and aware that there are counterpoints that need to be presented, even if he leans much more into the former.

    Whether this slightly wishy-washy form of curiosity is a feature or a bug will depend, as ever, on the predisposition of the viewer. But Sillen, like his documentary’s primary subjects, definitely leads with his heart.

    Our primary heroes are Martine and Bina Rothblatt, married for 40 years. They’re really, really, really in love, in a way that’s beautiful and just a wee bit creepy — especially when they refer to themselves with the portmanteau “MarBina” and describe themselves as, “Two bodies, one soul, forever in love.” It’s just intense.

    Now lots of people are intensely in love, but not a lot of people are as brilliant as Martine Rothblatt, who is a futurist, a lawyer, an entrepreneur, a biotechnology innovator and an expert in satellite technologies. She founded SiriusXM. Tapping into what is presumably an ungodly amount of personal wealth, Martine and Bina launched the Terasem Movement, a transhumanist organization with its roots in the work of Octavia Butler (because no school of thought based on the writings of a science-fiction author has ever been strange and problematic).

    The primary project of Terasem appears to be Bina48, a disembodied robotic head with a vague resemblance to Bina and an algorithmic intelligence based on Bina’s so-called “mind file.” The latter is a virtual upload of Bina’s thoughts, experiences and memories compiled from testing and interviews, and filtered through various AI systems, some proprietary and others not. Real Bina is smart, lively and deeply in love with Martine. Bina48 is a dead-eyed, strangely styled miracle, capable of affectless recitations of things that Real Bina told various engineers over a multi-decade process.

    Martine and Bina are certain that their future, and possibly the future of all humanity, is in the stars. They are convinced that if human consciousness can be captured on a hard drive, Bina will be able to live on either in a much more advanced robotic ancestor to Bina48 or in her own body, which will be cryogenically frozen after her death. What about Martine’s consciousness? The documentary gives no answers, but Martine is her own embodiment of the transmutation of human identity, as a trans woman, an interesting personal journey that Love Machina discusses, but not with the depth or intelligence it deserves.

    The Rothblatts’ certainty is unwavering. Terasem may not be an actual cult, but their techno-zealotry certainly has cult-like elements that make them frequently off-putting. Especially since they speak in a love language that is at least half jargon, jargon that then comes out of Bina48’s latex mouth. Is this thing they’re trying to do actually plausible? All evidence still points to “Not right now,” though Love Machina is also full of evidence that this is a realm in which the acceleration of advancement is nearly as terrifying as Bina48 herself.

    Sillen is able to find some people — Stephanie Dinkins, a professor at Stony Brook University is worthy of a doc all her own — prepared to speak to the practical limitations of believing that any quantity of data could ever reproduce consciousness, and willing to broach how problematic it is that Bina48 is an avatar of a Black woman constructed almost wholly by white men. That’s the “could” of the equation. Nobody wants to talk about the “should.” It’s like Jurassic Park never even happened.

    Perhaps sensing that Martine and Bina’s romantic fanaticism is both the doc’s strongest aspect and potentially its most unnerving, Siller weaves their love story through the full film but keeps detouring for a depth-free progression down a futurist checklist. Robotics designer David Hanson, star of 2022’s very, very similar Sophia, is featured. Mike Perry, of cryogenics behemoth Alcor, is a distracting presence, especially if you know him as the gentleman who revealed a very shocking secret in the series finale of How To With John Wilson. Sillen is constantly introducing us to people who seem both fascinating and like they needed to be asked a lot more follow-up questions.

    Bina48 is described as a work-in-progress and Love Machina ultimately comes across as an idea-in-progress. It’s provocative enough to recognize a lot of the conversations we need to have now rather than after the robots have taken over, but not coherent enough to adequately have those conversations itself.

    [ad_2]

    Daniel Fienberg

    Source link

  • ‘Buffy,’ Fandom, and Identity Converge Powerfully in ‘I Saw the TV Glow’

    ‘Buffy,’ Fandom, and Identity Converge Powerfully in ‘I Saw the TV Glow’

    [ad_1]

    The writer-director Jane Schoenbrun is a child of modern media—much like the rest of the old-Millennial age cohort, those of us weaned on VHS and broadcast TV in the 1990s and perhaps too well-positioned as initial receptors of the internet’s advent. In their first film, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Schoenbrun dove, deeply and frighteningly, into the internet. For their second, the astonishing I Saw the TV Glow, Schoenbrun explores the stuff that came right before we had access to everything, when objects of obsession were less accessible and thus perhaps more special, more significant. In investigating pre-internet fandom, Schoenbrun finds a heady allegory for identity.

    I Saw the TV Glow, which premiered here at the Sundance Film Festival on Thursday, is about teenagers in the thrall of a television series. It’s called The Pink Opaque, a strange title in a movie full of strange material. But what The Pink Opaque is meant to evoke is plain: it’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it’s Charmed, it’s maybe even a little Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. It’s genre television of the sort that engrossed and made devotees of millions of kids who found meaning in stories of young people doing battle with supernatural forces out of higher, innate calling.

    It’s maybe mostly Buffy, though, a fact nodded to throughout I Saw the TV Glow, from font choices to a particular cameo. Buffy was, and perhaps still is, a particular talisman for queer and trans people, many of them adolescents when they first encountered the series. Rich in subtext and allusion, Buffy became a bible of teenage experience for those needing help interpreting their own lives. I Saw the TV Glow honors that history while also taking it to account; its story of fandom is as cautionary as it is, in its strange way, nostalgic.

    The film centers on Owen, a lonely 1990s teenager from a difficult home (his dad, played by Fred Durst, is stern and taciturn; his mom, played by Danielle Deadwyler, is dying of cancer) who bonds with a similarly isolated girl, Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), over their mutual fascination with The Pink Opaque, about two teenage girls tethered by a mystical connection that helps them in their fight against various monsters of the week. Owen is the noob while Maddy is the devotee, leading her younger friend into a world of mythology and hidden meaning. I Saw the TV Glow spans decades tracing the results and implications of that obsession, tipping into the sinister and surreal as Owen, first played by Ian Foreman and then by Justice Smith, struggles to understand his intense connection to the show.

    Through The Pink Opaque, Owen is perhaps glimpsing the possibility of another life, a truer self to be realized. The world as he knows it, and his own interior resistance, seem to deny him access to that fuller, more clarified reality. Maddy, who is gay, is the true believer, convinced of the show’s instructive power and eager for Owen to accept it. Here I Saw the TV Glow presents the gradient of, for lack of a more nuanced term, coming out. The film is not explicit about Owen’s identity, but in some ways it needn’t be. What is crucial and clear is that he feels displaced within himself, that he is wrestling with something internal and foundational that has been stirred by his friendship with Maddy and his ardor for The Pink Opaque.

    Coded in that narrative is an ingenious metaphor for trans identity, affected so profoundly by pressures exacted from within and without. I Saw the TV Glow is a sharp and honest film, generous in its excavation, in the way it guides the viewer through complicated psychology. It is also bitterly sad, a portrait of confusion and negation that offers no empowerment, no political triumph. The shibboleths of Schoenbrun’s youth, the cultural markers of identity that they seemingly valued so fiercely for so long, are rendered insufficient, useless, even dangerous. What was lost in all of Owen’s vicarious fixation? What could have been gained by engaging more with the actual, non-imaginary world?

    As it unfolds, I Saw the TV Glow—part mystery, part coming-of-age, part treatise on self—breathtakingly conjures up the particular feeling of being young and queer and glued to screens in that era, tantalized by a world just beyond reach. I am being vague about plot because Schoenbrun’s film is hard to describe, yes, but also because I Saw the TV Glow benefits from a blank, unbiased approach. It calls for fresh eyes and open hearts. The film is among the most profound—and, yes, important—pieces of trans fiction that I’ve yet seen, vividly staged with bold, declarative style while remaining beguilingly elusive. It is open for all kinds of assessment, containing multitudes of meaning. I Saw the TV Glow is a great film to talk about, to pick apart with a friend or fellow traveler over dinner afterwards, to study and reflect on.

    It’s hard to think of another recent film that demands and then allows so much of its audience, that tries and rewards our patience. Schoenbrun’s filmmaking is both withholding—dialogue is slow and stilted, sometimes agonizingly so—and abundant. I Saw the TV Glow is the rare (and precious) sophomore feature that resoundingly expands on debut promise, that confirms its filmmaker as a mighty talent whose creative engine is churning into motion.

    Schoenbrun is tackling huge matters that require no aesthetic supplement, but nonetheless they’ve found time to exquisitely compose each shot, to flood their film with gorgeous music and offbeat humor. I Saw the TV Glow is, one hopes, the thrilling announcement of a major artist, the way Boogie Nights was almost 27 years ago. Schoenbrun is a filmmaker for our era, deftly threading personal and cultural thought into a unique tapestry of contemporary life. Had the film existed in my 1990s teenage years, I’ve no doubt a bootleg video cassette would have been passed around with the same whispery awe that I Saw the TV Glow so strikingly captures and confronts.

    [ad_2]

    Richard Lawson

    Source link

  • Inside the Fascinating World of New York City Psychics

    Inside the Fascinating World of New York City Psychics

    [ad_1]

    Lana Wilson sees a lot of similarities between making a documentary about Taylor Swift and a documentary about psychics. “We all want to be understood—it’s very easy to watch people and to look at them and to judge them, but to really witness someone is unique,” the Miss Americana filmmaker says. “It’s what I get to do as a filmmaker a lot of the time.” Watching her poignant new film Look Into My Eyes, premiering next week at the Sundance Film Festival, it’s easy to see the connection play out. Wilson makes movies with uncommon intimacy, paving cinematic paths of self-actualization. How natural, then, that she’d look to the world of psychics for her next topic.

    Look Into My Eyes, which has been in the works for more than seven years, also signals an exciting step forward for Wilson, as she expands her gaze toward an entire community. Crafted as a unique portrait of contemporary New York, the doc bounces from apartment to apartment, park bench to park bench, and holds the camera on groups of people desperately seeking answers about themselves—both clients hoping to connect with what they’ve lost, and psychics grappling with loneliness and grief themselves. As Wilson follows seven unique, rigorous psychics across the city, she gains fascinating insights into why they’re suited to this work, how their personal experiences inform their approach to readings, and exactly what their lives look like. The final shot both literalizes the movie’s title and rather heartbreakingly demonstrates the power of a little person-to-person connection.

    Does the film come to any answers about whether the psychics really do connect with the other side? As Wilson explains in a wide-ranging interview with Vanity Fair, that question is very much beside the point.

    Vanity Fair: What made you want to make this movie? Where did it start?

    Lana Wilson: It’s been a long time. I’ve actually never worked on a movie this long. The idea came the day after Trump was elected in 2016. It was the morning after the election, and I was working as a TV writer, so I was waiting for my ride to go back into the city. It was like 8:00 AM and I was just feeling so devastated, heartbroken, grieving. I noticed this sign in the strip mall where I was standing, it said, “$5 psychic reading.” Without even thinking, I walked in. Never been to a psychic before. I pulled back this curtain and the room was empty. There was just a table and two chairs, but no one was there. I sat down and I immediately felt very emotional. I really felt like I was looking in a mirror at my desperation at that moment. And it was very powerful. And then, this woman came in. She gave me a reading. She was very comforting and kind. I don’t remember what she said, but I remember it was brief, but that I felt better afterwards. And I paid her five bucks.

    As I was leaving, she was like, “What do you do for a living?” And I said, “I’m a documentary filmmaker.” She said, “Oh, what are you making movies about?” And I said, “Well, I’m finishing this one about a punk rocker turned Zen priest who tries to convince people who are suicidal to keep on living, but he kind of destroys him in a way.” And she was like, “Sounds like my life.” I was like, “What?” And she said, “Yeah, you wouldn’t believe the situations people come in here with. People come at these real crossroads in their lives.” That was the light bulb moment for me. I never would’ve expected that of a psychic. I didn’t know how serious and profound it could be.

    You follow a group of psychics in their lives. How did you build that network?

    It was when the pandemic began when I started to think maybe this is the moment to make the psychics movie that I had in the back of my mind for so long. It was coming from this very powerful place of being in New York during the pandemic—it was a scary place to be, of course, but then, it was quickly an amazing place to be because people were really there for each other. It was just incredible. I thought, probably, psychics’ business is going up, and I’m sure we’re less certain about the future than ever. During the pandemic, I started meeting psychics. We saw over 100 psychics as a [production] group. Eventually, maybe it was like four people total, five people total getting readings.

    We started out with the idea of maybe this would be storefront psychics, but I quickly gravitated towards people who do these longer sessions that are more at the intersection of psychotherapy. I just loved the long, deep sessions. The short ones felt more like someone reading a weather report; I loved what could be possible for an hour and a half. At the beginning, I thought, Maybe it’ll only be sessions, this kaleidoscope of humanity in New York during the pandemic. But as I got to know the psychics better, I became more and more curious about them. I learned about their own origin stories with being a psychic, which often began with them being a psychic’s client and having their life changed in some way—I realized they had a lot of shared experiences of loss and loneliness, and that I wanted more of that in the film. It became this kind of collective story of these seven psychics. There’s much more of the psychics in the film than I ever would’ve anticipated starting out.

    In the edit, you can see the way that their perspectives and their experiences are informing these sessions—and maybe even the way they’re understanding the people that they’re working with.

    [ad_2]

    David Canfield

    Source link