Tallgrass turns 21 this year, can I reach 21 movies? Ehh.... it'll be close! Read on...
Sunday, 10/8
A light day to close things out, which prevented me from getting to 21 features, but I'll still call it a very successful festival. Congratulations to everyone involved!
The Judgment
We're told at the beginning of the film that the idea of witchcraft in Egypt is taken seriously, even if it's under the surface of a devout Muslim society, and that this blurs the lines of reality for people who entertain these ideas. It's a smart place to start, because putting us in that subjective space keeps us from trying to make too much sense of some of what happens in The Judgment, which is an effective slow burn of a horror movie about how much we can internalize oppression and suppression of who we are.
Mo is Egyptian but has lived nearly his entire life in the U.S. As we open, he returns to Egypt with his boyfriend (also Egyptian, and also from Alexandria, it turns out) to deal with some legal issues following his father's death. Mo has no contact with his mother, who cut off talking to him after he came out, though he'd desperately like to see her now that he's back in the country. Mo and his boyfriend have to pretend to be "just friends" back in Egypt, and his boyfriend's parents have no idea about their relationship or about their son's sexuality.
Mo talks a lot about how he doesn't subscribe to religion or superstition, but there's definitely something about him that makes us question that, and it becomes more and more clear as the movie goes on that he's taken decades of family and culture telling him he's a sinner and made that very much a part of who he is, causing a level of self-doubt and loathing that manifests itself in physical ways. And he begins to worry he's been cursed by his mother's housekeeper, despite his proclamations that witchcraft isn't a thing.
Director Marwan Mokbel uses sound in clever ways to create serious unease, and to express unarticulated traumas lying within Mo— one sound effect that's a constant throughout the film keeps us wondering what we're hearing, though when we learn what it is, it's less a surprise than an acknowledgment of Mo's pain. What Mo experiences is hardly unique to him, and it's not at all unique to one country or one religion. It's a frightening reminder of the devastation wrought on people by social and cultural structures that tell them that they, as people, simply by existing, are evil.
Three Birthdays
The festival's closing night gala film, and one that I wish had been a little more successful in the story it wanted to tell. And by and large, the problems arise more from the film's conception than from its execution (although more on the execution in a minute).
It's 1970, and social upheaval is in the air— Vietnam, the sexual revolution, and the women's liberation movement being the most relevant parts here, but of course that's not all. We meet 17-year-old Bobbie and her parents, both academics: her mother has written books on feminism, her father teaches socialism, both work at an unnamed progressive institution in Ohio. Bobbie is learning about her own sexuality with her college-bound boyfriend, though she's mostly supported in this by her parents, to the extent they know what she's doing. We learn her mother is sleeping with someone else, but we also learn that her father knows this, and is doing his best to be ok with it, in the name of being a forward-thinking man who supports women being free to make their own decisions. And we learn some other things, too, that complicate the situation.
Showing the complexities and difficulties behind a set of people trying to live their ideals while also acknowledging the messiness that goes along with being human is important and should probably be explored in movies more—we're not robots, and no matter what it is we believe in, people are never consistent in how they feel and behave. And this, I liked, it's a noble pursuit for a movie.
But a couple of things trouble me, one small, and one larger. The small one is surprising in how small it is, given it's the structure of the movie, although this is maybe also part of why it's a problem: it's not entirely clear to me why we need to be having all of the family members having birthdays, in quick succession over the course of a couple weeks. It's not entirely clear to me why anyone needs to be having a birthday at all, we could be telling the same story without it. So, why three birthdays? But this is pretty easy to forgive as someone simply feeling they need a structural gimmick when they didn't. The bigger problem is this: the movie climaxes with the Kent State shootings, when the National Guard opened fire on protesting students on the college's campus, killing four students and wounding a number of others (it's not a surprise in the context of the movie, when we're given specific dates leading up to the event, and as characters mention "Kent State" a while before we get there, which of course could not be a mistake), and this is absorbed into the story of these fictional people. This kind of thing never sits well with me, when we take real-life pain and use it to create drama in our fictional stories. It's not impossible to do well, but it's very, very difficult. I admit this is probably a philosophical difference between me and people who aren't bothered by this, but I can only speak for me, and it feels distasteful.
Given these things, by and large the movie is executed decently, with some effective moments between the family members as they navigate their feelings in a changing world, although the performance of one of the actors (no need to name names) is distracting in how much it doesn't rise to the level of the others, and bizarrely the filmmaking itself seems to be less interesting and accomplished when this person is in the scene. I can't explain that, but I noticed it, and I can't say that's a great thing to notice.
Saturday, 10/7
Another busy day! The festival also announced their award winners, a handful of which I'll talk about below...
Summer of Violence
The title refers to the summer of 1993 in Denver, and that's all I'd like to say about that aspect of the movie, because there are some pretty troubling aspects of the way that period was represented at the time and the law enforcement crackdowns that happened after, none of which is addressed by the movie, and I don't want to speculate on director/writer Nicki Micheaux's decisions there. So we'll just let that be.
This won Tallgrass' Outstanding First Feature from the festival programmers, and it tells the story of Naomi, who just graduated college and is expected to go to law school, but who maybe has other things on her mind, particularly her poetry, which doesn't please her father too much. On top of that, Naomi is Black and she's dating a white guy, which doesn't win her any points either. She makes the decision to move with her friend to Denver for the summer, where she can explore her creativity with other artists, and where she has to navigate the dangers of gang violence in the neighborhoods around her.
This is more or less a coming-of-age story that we've seen plenty of times, in this case as Naomi is also coming into her own as an artist and forming her views of the world, and in that, I do wish there had just been something more. But it's also true that Micheaux and her cinematographer, Benjamin Kitchens, have fantastic eyes— the movie's handheld photography is lovely to look at, and occasionally even lushly gorgeous (one scene when Naomi reads her poetry for the first time is shot in closeup and saturated with a fuchsia light and it's mesmerizing). And Micheaux's pacing is calm and relaxed, despite some of the difficulties (and tragedies) the characters face, which lets us simply slip into their lives.
Naomi often says surprisingly naive things about the violence around her, and it's never clear whether this is simply clunky dialogue ("We have to stop the violence!" ...well, yes) or whether it's important for us to know how naive she is when the people around her get what going on a lot better than she does (this also isn't something that's explored much). And I do wonder if we end up with a few too many dead people we care about in too short a period of time, on top of a few other overdramatic plot points, which isn't to say people didn't experience such things, but more that it seems a bit much for one stretch in one movie.
Still, Micheaux has a clear idea of how to shoot a movie, and a sense of style, and I'm plenty interested in whatever she's got coming next.
Great Photo, Lovely Life
This film shows us a gaping wound that's constantly been refreshed over years and years and years, and a woman trying to move the people bearing the pain toward some kind of healing. A content warning about sexual assault as I continue:
The documentary's director Amanda Mustard (who is credited with co-director Rachel Beth Anderson) shows us early on that her grandfather was a pedophile who assaulted what appears to be dozens of young girls over his life. At the beginning of the film, we see her ask her grandfather about this, and not only does he not deny it, he gives a few lines about how much various girls enjoyed it (he pays lip service to the idea that maybe these were things he shouldn't have done, but we don't really believe he believes it). And so the pit in your stomach forms, and stays there through the film, as Mustard talks to her family, her grandfather, and some of the women her grandfather assaulted when they were children, all in an effort to get some kind of acknowledgment for the people who were hurt, some kind of move to begin the healing process within her family (where her grandmother seemed to pretend none of this ever happened, her mother was herself assaulted, and her sister blames their mother for leaving her alone with their grandfather and the assault that followed from that), and some kind of... something from her grandfather, who everyone outside the family just seems to think is a pretty lovely guy (he is not).
It's an incredible mission to undertake, and a painful and raw and disturbing journey to witness, though part of us feels like if Mustard doesn't turn away, neither should we. The decades of abuse and lack of acknowledgment or acceptance are complicated by the family's deep evangelical Christian roots, and what that means when they interrogate the idea of "forgiveness"— it becomes incumbent upon the people who've been hurt to forgive, as if their inability to do so reflects a defect in them, as sin of their own, all while Mustard's grandfather can rest easy with the knowledge that, yes, God of course forgives anything.
Mustard uses her own camera, but also a whole ton of archival footage to tell the story, and she's able to express the complexity of having someone like this be in your family, and what that means for your feelings about them, and what your responsibility is to the people whose lives he destroyed. And even that archival footage doesn't flinch— at one point we see video shot by her grandfather at a traveling craft show, where he's clearly lingering far too long on young girls wandering around the convention hall.
The movie's been sold to HBO, and from what I understand is likely to be available later this year. It is exceedingly difficult. But how can we not tell these stories and expect to have anything change?
Letters Home
To call this a labor of love might be an understatement. Director Scott Roberts shot the movie in 1998, and then for financial reasons it simply sat on the shelf for 25 years, only recently being completed. It's undoubtedly autobiographical, although to what extent I can't say.
It's also what you'd call a little rough around the edges, and I don't think Roberts would disagree with that. It's clear plenty of the dialogue and audio was re-recorded (the audio is where the most jarring hiccups occur), the acting is generally of the "hey, they're giving it their all, can't fault them there" variety, and, well, you know this is a very low budget production.
It also has, I have to admit, kind of a goofy charm, telling the story of "Scott," an unassuming high schooler who realizes he has dreams of becoming an actor, and who starts to head that way in his life while also learning about girls, figuring out your dreams and disappointments, those things you do when you're a teenager. And for all that, you have to give Roberts credit, it's really, really hard to make a movie, despite what people might think. There are a few line readings (and one bizarrely surprising injury) that made me feel like I had no idea if they were supposed to be taken seriously or not, but in that, too, I suspect Roberts would understand. If this is his story, I'm glad he finally got a chance to tell it, whether you can see the seams or not.
Lost Soulz
A baseball metaphor, to begin: About halfway into Lost Soulz, I was enjoying it so much that I felt like my team was protecting a 5-3 lead in the playoffs, and I had an uncertain bullpen (in the playoffs? just go with me here), and no idea if we were going to be able to hold on until the end. Please, please, just hang on.
And then my metaphor fell apart, because the movie did a number of the things I was afraid it would do that I thought would sink the whole thing, but by that time they simply made sense within the rhythm of the movie. They turned out not to be mistakes after all, or if they were, the rest was so well done that they were easily papered over.
This is the movie that won this year's Stubbornly Independent award, which goes to a U.S. feature made for less than $750,000 (this used to be a much lower amount, inflation has affected everything, apparently), and it's far and away the best finalist I've seen for this category in the dozen or so years the festival has been giving it out. It's not a complicated film, but that's part of why it works so well, and much of where it gets its strength.
We meet Sol, who's a young aspiring hip hop musician in Texas, who's performing at a party one night when the cops bust the place up and he gets rescued by a group of musicians who are about to hit the road to tour the state. They ask Sol to come along, and it's pretty clear the guy doesn't have a lot else going on in his life, so he goes, though in doing so he leaves behind his best friend, who's just collapsed at the party.
And so we go on the road with them. And this is where we spend almost all of our time, and this is something that's been done before, and this is something that can lose its luster quickly. But director/writer Katherine Propper is either extraordinarily good at naturalistic dialogue and pulling performances out of people that feel wholly real, or she just let the camera roll while the young people in the tour van traveled the state, met people, had fun, found weird things to do, and just lived life. (These are both directorial skills, by the way, being able to trust your cast to do something like the latter, and then knowing what part of what you shot is actually good is very, very difficult and has failed many times). It is not always fun to be with young people who are mostly just kidding around and doing drugs and thinking and doing and saying the things many of us have already done, but so much of this feels like a peek into their real lives, and Propper paces it so well, that we simply begin to get with the movie's vibe, and we don't really want to leave. As a smarter person than I am once said, "Hey guys, hanging out? I'll hang out!"
And of course I worried all along that some manufactured events might pop in to cause some drama, and they do! And it doesn't matter. Because by then, we believe it. And when things really do get difficult later in the movie, we feel for Sol and for the people he cares about. Life is hard, no matter how old you are, but we can still hug each other.
Tokyo Cowboy
The festival's winner for Best Narrative Feature is gentle, and sweet, and nothing terribly bad happens to anyone, and darn it, sometimes that's just really nice.
The story is nothing groundbreaking, a fish out of water (although this fish realizes he may not have been in the water all along), as the company Japanese businessman Hideki works for is trying to figure out what to do with some assets they received as part of a company acquisition, and one of those assets (well, it's more of a liability) turns out to be a ranch in Montana. The Japanese company wants to sell it off to developers, but Hideki is convinced he can start to raise Wagyu beef there, so he travels to the ranch to tell everyone the good news.
And of course that's not how things go, as Montana ranchers are not so much interested in suited Japanese businessmen coming to tell them they're going to do everything differently (and especially when they literally can't do all the things Hideki wants), and so Hideki has to learn to balance his own visions with the people who are actually there, and to accept that he may not have been right about much of anything he's done despite his relative success.
So, you know: friction, effort, movement, understanding, acceptance, growth, all of those things. But it's all presented with such a soft hand that nothing feels forced— there are a few light jokes based around a Japanese person not being used to American ways, but they feel like, well, yes, this is probably what would happen, instead of trying to pull a few yuks from poking fun at people. In fact, most everyone is taken seriously as a person, no matter who they are or the role they play, and that makes so much difference.
And for what it's worth, I suspect you could plop a camera down and start rolling pretty much anywhere in Montana and it would look drop dead gorgeous, which is not to disregard the fantastic work done by cinematographer Oscar Ignacio Jiménez, but more just to acknowledge that man does it look good.
The Name of the Game
Far longer than it probably ought to be, but wild enough that any individual part is still entertaining, this documentary tells the story of Black male exotic dancers in Los Angeles, and the (sort of) warring factions that have defined the scene for a couple of decades. It's bluster and bravado and lots of bare chests and sometimes bare other things. Whatever else is happening, these guys are having fun.
We're introduced to quite a few dancers who've helped to make the scene what it is, with many of them nearing or past the end of their dancing careers, but of course they're the ones with the stories. And we learn how they came up, how they formed (along with some industrious women) the different dance companies, and about how very, very, very, very much money they've made.
It's a curious world, in that the men often form these financial relationships with the women they dance for that are very different from the much more casual, impersonal worker-client relationships people assume of women who do exotic dancing, and even more curious in that some of the men begin to feel entitled (and more than entitled) to the money they make from those relationships, as if they continue to exert control in a situation over which they maybe shouldn't have so much power.
There are so many stories that you'd be hard pressed to call the film focused, it often veers off on tangents that might be individually entertaining, but that make the endeavor feel scattershot as a finished work, and I don't remember ever once hearing about what role queerness might play in a world like this, which is, yes, another movie, but also it seems difficult to imagine it's something that never, ever comes up here. That said, what a wild world.
Friday, 10/6
Busy day.
Playland
I had never heard of the Playland Café, a famous gay bar in Boston for 60 years beginning in the 1930s, and I learned little about it from watching this movie. Which is not a criticism— that's not what the film is here for. What I did get was a feeling, the echoes of ghosts, the outlines of people and times that have passed, an elegy. If we have no context going into this film, as I didn't, we have to piece together what we're seeing and hearing— rigorously composed scenes of bartenders and cooks, drag queens and other bar patrons, with the occasional voiceover made of archival interviews, or occasional cuts to archival film footage. It's not always evident what a person is talking about, or if it relates to the Playland, to the gay community, or to anything at all. Other times, it's exceedingly evident that what we're hearing are the voices of the past, the people who've lived and celebrated and been hurt, and the people who did the hurting.
The film's approach is surreal and oblique, but it draws you in and allows you to shape your own narrative. There are undoubtedly too many stories to tell, and we can, as I did, read about all of this if we choose. This is about feeling. In the compositions there's a little bit of Peter Greenaway, a little Wes Anderson, a little Jean-Pierre Jeunet, a little David Lynch, and even some hints of the great Armenian surrealist masterpiece The Color of Pomegranates— all of these influences contribute to extremely tightly controlled images flecked with sounds and voices and old footage that give us blips and drips of memories and lives. This is not a movie that will let you get past the door without doing some work of your own, but once you're inside, you'll understand why people wanted to be there.
Secaderos (Tobacco Barns)
My favorite film of the day, and, to this point, of the festival. We're with three generations of a tobacco-farming family in the Andalusian countryside of Spain— the old couple has a house on the farm, their daughter and son have come to harvest the tobacco crop, their daughter's two daughters have come along, the teenager to help and the young girl to wander while the others work.
The tobacco barn plays a vital role in their lives— this is where the tobacco leaves are hung up to dry, as hundreds of plants are secured from the ceiling, from beams near the floor, as many as possible in the space provided. This is where the teenager passes the time with her friends talking about whatever it is teenagers talk about, and where she spends rather more intimate time with her boyfriend. Her grandparents may have done that, too, so many years ago. Outside of their own home, this is the most important building in their lives, the one that's necessary for their livelihood, but the old couple has now decided it's time for that to end— they've sold the barn to developers and plan to split the money between their two children.
The young girl walks through the forest, and is met by an enormous creature made of sticks and tobacco leaves, a creature that shuffles and hunches, that speaks in unintelligible squeaks, that only the young children can see. But, then, each of these generations has things only they can see: each stage of our lives brings different challenges and hopes and decisions, and the film reminds us that all of these are here, and they are all important.
One of the important parts of this film is that it allows us to spend time with these people and their work. It treasures their work, or at least acknowledges its importance, and gives us the time we need to understand what they do and why they do it. And we see how many different pressures are exerted on each of their lives, and the drastic consequences of overdevelopment, of climate change, and of other human-wrought disasters. This is a quiet, gorgeous portrait of people and their lives, and a big green leaf monster.
Head Count
An idea in search of a movie, wherein the movie ends up being far more successful than the idea. And I guess if you have to choose between the two, this is the way to go.
We know that Kat is being held captive somewhere, and that whoever has him has a gun pointed at his head. What we don't know, and what Kat is trying to figure out, is if there are any bullets left in that gun, a gun that was, until just very recently, Kat's. And so, Kat goes back and tried to remember every time he fired a bullet, and we go with him, and that makes up the structure of the movie, with a big counter starting and six and dropping each time a bullet is fired from the gun.
Kat's just out of jail, you see— we'll say he released himself on his own recognizance. And he's gone back to his hometown, which seems to be the worst place you could go, but old habits die hard. He gets mixed up in a thing or two, which seems to be what Kat does, and it all goes haywire in quite a few different ways.
This central conceit is wholly unnecessary and mostly comes off as a gimmick, and part of the reason for that (other than that it actually is a gimmick) is that the movie around it is genuinely entertaining and fun. There's a real playfulness to it, with plenty of camerawork silliness and some honest-to-goodness laugh-out-loud lines and performances (though the script and acting are wildly uneven, sometimes within the same scenes, and sometimes from the same people). There's no doubt everyone was having a good time.
And for all that, this is a pleasant surprise, if you're willing to ignore the problems— the romance is dull, it seems pretty clear they didn't know how to end the film (again, working out from an idea that wasn't an amazing idea to begin with). But, still: fun! And sometimes, that's enough.
Wilder Than Her
Like Head Count, this feels like it started with an idea and then was engineered to fit that idea, but unlike that film, which didn't appear to know how to end, it seems here they knew exactly how they wanted to end it, and then had trouble making everything before that make sense in the context of the ending.
Without giving too much away (though giving something away is necessary), Emilia is a school counselor who seems to be dealing with some grief of her own, or at least something is off, which we realize when she throws a piece of cake away but then eats it out of the trash (despite most of the cake still being on the table— to heck with cutting another piece, the trash cake is the important cake). We learn that she and three other women have been close friends since they were children, but that one of them has recently died. Emilia insists she and the other two remaining women go on the camping trip they go on together every year, where they meet a possibly creepy man who's camping alone in the woods, some secrets are revealed, and everything feels ominous.
The film plays a lot with its sound design, working hard to keep us off balance, and for a good part of the running time is paced well— we know something's really wrong here, but we don't know what, and we start to wonder how much the movie is making us think things that may not even be there. And about 2/3 of the way through, I began to wonder if this might all actually be a study of grief wrapped up to look and feel and sound like a horror movie without falling into any actual horror, which might have been a little bit brilliant.
Alas, we keep going, and things get murdery, and it turns out this is where we were headed the whole time, no stylistic head fakes here. And by that point, we start to wonder what all the rest of it was really for— where come from doesn't really seem to lead to where we end up, we just have to accept these are the things that are happening even if they don't really make a lot of sense in the context of what we've already seen. It's a disappointing direction to take after a promising first hour, and I just wonder how things might have been if they'd decided to be just a little less conventional in their horror.
Glue Trap
Here is a problem with movies about fighting couples: we have no reason to care that they once were in love but now can't stand to be around each other. All we see are how grating they are, and we wish they would just call it quits. Sure, everyone has gotten to that point in a relationship, but, to paraphrase Tolstoy, every unhappy couple is unhappy in its own way. All I know is that you can't stand each other, and by the way you're acting, I can't stand you, either.
And so this starts any movie like Glue Trap at a severe disadvantage, no matter how hard it works after that. But, indeed, this is how we begin, as KJ and Dan are having trouble in their relationship and decide to accept a friend's invitation to have a quiet weekend alone at the friend's family's cabin, just the two of them, so they can unplug and relax and maybe write or read or play music, and hopefully rekindle something that (we're told) was once there.
Does this work? You can probably guess. But more than that, a young woman shows up at the door of the cabin claiming to be the friend's sister, saying she didn't know anyone was there this weekend, and can she please stay anyway? This woman is, let's say, energetic, and astonishingly cheerily irritating, and if she exists here to cause us to circle the wagons and begin to root for KJ and Dan, well, I'm not sure that happens, but I give them credit for trying.
You do kind of suspect something bizarre is going on here, although I'm not sure you can entirely guess what all of that is, and I'm certain you can't guess where it all goes. I absolutely commend the movie for trying to get us to a place of kindness and understanding, even if it doesn't completely feel earned, but that's a noble goal and I'd far prefer that to darkness and cynicism. Still, this is a movie, and I'm coming to it without the years of work and struggle and creation the filmmakers put into it, and I have to acknowledge that— the people who make the movies may be rooting for their distressed couples because they know them, they've spent all of this time with them in writing and shooting and acting and imagining. I have not, and all I can know is that I don't enjoy them much and they probably should have just broken up a bit earlier.
Penitentia
The best movie ever made about Wichita is, of course, Jacques Tourneur's magnificent 1955 film Wichita, starring Joel McCrea as Wyatt Earp in what amounts to a gun control western (really!). The best movie ever made in Wichita? There are not a lot of options! We're probably talking about King Kung Fu and Leif Jonker's Darkness, and with all due respect to Lance Hayes and my childhood love for a guy in a gorilla suit sort of doing kung fu, I'm going to have to go with all the exploding heads in Leif's movie.
But here is another, one with far more serious things on its mind than either of those films had, Penitentia, made by Chris Lawing, and inspired by the life and career of his father, Wichita attorney Jim Lawing. And at the very least, this one wins points on sincerity, which is no small thing.
It tells the story of Ale, an ex-con who's worked his way into a position as a lawyer at a high-profile local firm, but who's approached by a former prison buddy who asks him for help with his sister, who's in jail herself, facing inhumane conditions. Ale is apprehensive, knowing this doesn't fall in the purview of his job at the firm, so he takes the case to a friend, a much smaller-time local attorney who's more amenable to doing things because they're the right thing to do, rather than the lucrative thing.
It all gets twisty and turny in ways that I admit I couldn't always track, and probably in ways that aren't necessary. The real thrust of the movie is Ale's relationship with his good-hearted attorney friend and Ale's path to learning about the importance of doing good in the world. And whatever flaws a movie made on a shoestring budget like this might have, we can all appreciate earnestness like that. The movie is shot reasonably well (and if we're grading it on a Wichita-made-movie curve, it's shot incredibly well), and most everyone's acting is at least passable, if not better, with a nod particularly going to Michael W. Schwartz, as Ale's attorney friend Marvin— his is a performance that actually feels lived in, he feels genuine and honest in a way he must.
Thursday, 10/5
The People's Joker
Please give me a moment to catch my breath.
Wait, just one more second.
OK, whew. The People's Joker is a manic assault, with so many cuts and effects and non-sequiturs and jokes that your head starts spinning the moment the movie starts, and keeps on spinning for a while after it's over. It's also, given all that, surprisingly focused in its story, which is, at its core, about the film's director/writer/star, Vera Drew, coming to terms with her trans identity.
It would be a fool's errand to try to recount what happens in any real way, so we'll just say Vera Drew's "character," who eventually goes by the name Joker the Harlequin, lives in a Gotham City where comedy is outlawed (sort of), and Batman is kind of a jerk (and closeted himself), and there's a sort of underground network of Batman villains who want to start an alt-comedy scene. Kind of. Our hero (not Batman) rises to the top of this underground world while also sorting out the fact that she is not the boy everyone thought she was growing up, she's a trans woman, and she gets involved in a toxic relationship with a trans man (also a Joker, this one based on the infamous Jared Leto version) while also struggling with her mother not recognizing her identity. About four billion other things happen, too.
This all comes at you very hard and very fast, as Vera Drew mixes media with abandon, throwing (purposely) bad computer animation, (purposely) bad hand-drawn animation, good hand-drawn animation, some really good hand-drawn animation, and tons of green screen work at the audience while also exploring her identity, the trauma of the comedy world, the glory of the comedy world, and the many, many effects of pop culture on our individual and collective psyches.
It's a lot! It's also, in its way, kind of brilliant, or at least very watchable, and the sheer volume of references to cultural touchstones within the Batman world, outside the Batman world, and wholly unrelated to the Batman world, saturates the movie so much you can only applaud it, along with Drew's willingness to be so open about her own experiences. She's quite aware of what she's doing in presenting this story in this frenetic, fractured way (you have to imagine it's somewhat reflective of what her own mind looks like, or at least as she's wrestled with these personal issues through her life— something like this makes you feel a lot of ways at once), and to be able to get it down on paper, much less onto a screen for all of us to see, is a pretty impressive feat.
Chasing Chasing Amy
This screens on Friday (10/6) afternoon, but I saw it early so I could talk to the movie's director, Sav Rodgers, and you can find our conversation here. That interview exists, so I'll be more brief here:
I admit a little skepticism going into the film, mostly because of how many documentaries are coming out these days where the movie's director is the subject of their own film (which is ostensibly about something else), and how that's usually the complete wrong direction to go. In this case, it's completely the right direction to go. Which is not just a relief, but, as with The People's Joker, a compelling and moving approach to a person coming to terms with his (in this case) trans identity.
Sav initially conceived the movie as a way to examine the complicated and conflicted feelings about Chasing Amy within the queer community, but over time he found himself becoming more and more pulled by his own (unexpressed) trans identity, and, as he told me, this began to seep more into the movie until it was clear this is what the movie was actually about. And so what we end up with is a movie about someone's journey that actually feels like a journey, and a deeply important and affecting one. His interview with Joey Lauren Adams is remarkable, and clearly pivotal for both the film and for Rodgers' own life, and it's rare we get to feel and experience something like that right along with a filmmaker. This film turned out to be a lot, lot more than I expected, and we're richer for it.
The Moon & Back
In a smart pairing, the festival played an animated short before this film called Rosemary A.D. (After Dad), in which a father imagines the course his daughter's life might take if he died flying a plane into the White House (it's a funny little movie, check it out), and The Moon & Back is a bit of an extension of that, in that we see teenager Lydia trying to navigate her way through the loss of her own father and the kind of aimlessness she feels as she nears another major transition, leaving high school and (maybe) heading to college. She's smart and sarcastic (a little too much, the snarkiness sometimes feels manufactured and forced), she can't find her way to cooperating with her mother on anything, especially their impending cross-country move, and she eats lunch every day in the school counselor's office for... reasons? She's not accepting any counseling from him, although she can push him around a little bit, which maybe helps her feel like she has some kind of power.
Her father left behind some VHS tapes he shot with his camcorder, which she watches often, seeing her parents' wedding day, scenes of herself as she was growing up, and whatever other day-to-day parts of life her dad decided to document. It's at least a way to stay connected to someone so important to her who's now gone forever.
Eventually she finds an old (terrible) screenplay her father had written, and decides to take her dad's old camera and turn the script into a movie, mostly to get people off her back about not doing anything, but also partly because maybe she can use it to get into NYU, where her dad also went. She enlists a nerdy childhood friend she's neglected to help her, and off they go, in a bit of a YA version of Be Kind Rewind.
It's sweet, and cute, and ultimately touching, but while I almost never say this, the movie might have been helped if it could have found its way to being just a bit longer. It hits a lot of the beats we've seen before in coming-of-age stories, but occasionally those beats come out of nowhere— she of course has a falling out with her friend, but it feels like there was a scene missing, as one moment everything's great, and the next he's mad at her single-minded pursuit of making this movie. We get why this might happen, but there's no transition period, we just go from 0 to 10 in the blink of an eye. This problem repeats itself a couple of times in other ways, just making us feel as if something got left on the cutting room floor that might have helped these bigger changes feel more natural.
That issue doesn't torpedo the movie, certainly, as everyone is enthusiastic about what they're doing, and the use of the VHS is a clever way to skirt budgetary constraints. Still, I'm all for a movie not overstaying its welcome, but sometimes it makes sense to stay a little longer.
