Thursday, 10/15
I caught last night’s opening film, the documentary Yo (Love Is a Rebellious Bird), but more on that in a second. First, full disclosure: I was on the jury for this year’s narrative feature films and narrative short films, so in the interest of taste (and maybe ethics?), I’m going to keep my comments on those films extremely limited, at least until the winners are announced Sunday evening, and then I’ll have more to say on those winning films. But, in reality, all of the movies I’ve seen so far have at least something to offer, and most of them have a lot more than just “something.” This is a really good program, and while only a couple of the movies will appeal to all tastes, you’ll be able to find at least one for most tastes, that’ll just depend on you making the right choice for you. Here’s a super brief rundown of the features:
Caity: This is a drama about a teenage girl dealing with a father who may be relapsing with his alcoholism, as the family runs a haunted house (more like a haunted farm, I guess) during the Halloween season. The movie is lovely and sweet and well observed, which may not be surprising given the director, Lindsay Calleran, dedicated it to her own father, and we wonder how much of the film parallels her own experience. The performances feel real and lived-in, and there are some really interesting technical approaches Calleran takes that give us perspectives we don’t often see.
Glorious Summer: This is certainly one of the stranger entries in the program, although that’s not a criticism on my part, and will be an attraction for plenty of festivalgoers. It’s also the only foreign-language film among the narrative features, coming from Poland, and it tells the story, such as it is, of three women who live in a sort of idyllic world shut off from the rest of society, where they have to think about nothing and worry about nothing. They don’t seem as happy with this as you might think. The photography here is incredible, and I’ve seen more than one person describe this as The Virgin Suicides by way of Andrei Tarkovsky, with a bit of Yorgos Lanthimos thrown in. As they say: if you know, you know.
Loves Company: You know what loves company? Misery, of course. And this is sort of a take-off on Stephen King’s Misery, or at least that’s the starting point, as Jack Plotnick’s washed-up former TV comic ends up recuperating from a car accident in the bedroom of Rachel Dratch, surrounded by an uncomfortable amount of memorabilia from Plotnick’s career. It all gets quite silly, which I support, and one thing it doesn’t do is to get terribly mean, which it easily could have. The performances have what may be a surprising amount of heart for a movie like this, and I always love to see Rachel Dratch.
Mallory’s Ghost: A young woman, Mallory, goes with her boyfriend on a retreat to the house of the boyfriend’s old writing teacher. The boyfriend is a playwright who used to do work with his ex-girlfriend, who the writing teacher knew well, and as soon as they get to the house, Mallory feels haunted by the idea of the ex-girlfriend, or at least her idea of her, as the woman seems to have been remarkable in all the ways Mallory feels she isn’t. But there’s a turn in the film that I don’t think anyone could have expected, and we go in a direction that’s incredibly fascinating, as we start to explore the nature of creation and collaboration, where inspiration comes from, and how we deal with our perceptions of ourselves and others, especially when those perceptions may not completely reflect reality. This move was a favorite from this year’s South by Southwest festival and it’s not hard to see why.
The Peril at Pincer Point: You might have to see this one to believe it—it’s about a sound designer who is on a quest to find a sound that no one has ever heard before for the director of a movie he’s working on, and it leads him to a remote island that may be haunted by a sea captain who captures souls to work on his ship. Or something like that. There’s a missing person mystery, and bizarre landscapes, and all sorts of strangeness, and an undeniable charm. It’s also a delight to look at, and I’d love to know how some of the scenes were created. This is the kind of thing Tallgrass often excels at, showing us a movie that makes the most out of its limited resources to give us a true vision, however off-kilter that vision may be.
Run Amok: Wouldn’t you know it, this movie was executive produced by none other than Tallgrass co-founder Lela Meadow-Conner, and it played earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. It certainly seems to have the highest production values of any of this year’s narrative features, and a recognizable cast, too, with Patrick Wilson, Margaret Cho, Bill Camp, and Molly Ringwald (!), among others. It’s also got an incredibly prickly premise, about a high school freshman whose mother was killed 10 years earlier in a school shooting (her mom was a teacher at the school she now attends), and who sets out to create a musical to commemorate the anniversary of the shooting as a means of catharsis. Oh, and it’s a comedy! You have to admire filmmakers who take big swings.
She Keeps Me Young: This one seems to hit people in a lot of different ways—it’s certainly a comedy, but some people find it to be laugh-out-loud funny, while others seem to feel more drolly amused, and I’ve seen some people even call it a kind of horror movie. It’s probably all of those things, although it’s more than that, too, as Blair Beeken (who also co-wrote the movie) plays Michelle, who befriends a high school photography student in a way that’s entirely innocent and above board, but that raises alarm bells with everyone around her. Beeken’s performance is just fantastic as a woman with a crippling amount of passivity.
Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird)
It must be terrifically difficult to make a movie about someone you care about deeply in a way that will still seem interesting to anyone who didn’t also know and love that person. Anna Fitch figures it out with this documentary (which she codirected with her husband and creative partner, Banker White), about her friend Yo (short for Yolanda), who* Fitch met at an estate sale when Yo was in her 70s and Fitch was in her 20s. The timeline is a little hazy, but it seems like Yo later died when Fitch was in her 40s, sometime in the 2010s, and it's taken a lot of time for Fitch to come to terms with this. The film is part of that process, as Fitch had a lot of footage of Yo simply telling stories about her life. And while Yo was clearly a fascinating person, and has interesting stories to tell, I’m not sure you’d call her life extraordinary (meaning, she’s not telling stories about scaling Mt. Everest or saving a bus full of children), which is an added obstacle for Fitch in translating Yo’s life for the rest of us.
What she does (and, again, what I think is also part of her grieving process) is to create a small scale-model version of Yo’s house, and to fill it with small scale-model versions of all of Yo’s things. And while we hear Yo tell her stories, we often see some other kind of visual representation of what we’re hearing—sometimes abstract, usually not—and what appear to be reenactments often reveal themselves to be shots taken inside the models Fitch has created, or animated versions of Yo’s stories (Fitch also creates a small model version of Yo herself). We see this along with old photos of Yo and all kinds of other artwork created by Fitch to tell the story, and while I don’t think we’d ever really be bored by hearing Yo talk, the way Fitch presents it here is often exciting in ways that can only come from a truly creative person who’s deeply invested in what they’re doing. What it all adds up to is a gorgeous tribute to someone who meant a whole, whole lot to a filmmaker who’s talented enough to make it mean a whole lot to us, too.
*I know this should be "whom" and I don't care.
