As I type this, I’m getting ready to reserve my tickets for day three of the fest before making the short trek to the theater for day two’s first screening. On the docket for today is my first documentary, Scala!!!, a Fantastic Fest original found footage festival, two more 2023 releases, The Origin and What You Wish For, and I’ll wrap things up at midnight with a 1984 repertory screening of Blonde Death.
This will be a short one; day one of the fest is more like a quarter day, with the opening film of the festival – Macon Blair’s The Toxic Avenger – and a few other titles starting at 8 P.M. Other titles playing in the 8 P.M. block are The Animal Kingdom, Baby Assassins 2, #Manhole, and Messiah of Evil. There are three titles in the midnight round tonight, Sleep, In My Mother’s Skin, and Divinity.
It’s that time of year again! I’m ready to kick off Spooky Season 2023 in grand style with a trip to Austin, TX for Alamo Drafthouse’s Fantastic Fest Film Festival, which programs the wildest, most bonkers horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and cult genre films out there.
I have a friend – who shall remain nameless – who, I think, enjoys trying to wind me up every once in a while with a particular movie hot take. Every so often in my presence, this person will say a slightly different version of, “Any movie made before 1993 is basically hot garbage, right?” (This person is known for making incendiary and facetious statements, and it’s always in good fun. The sage observation comes from a third party (whom I’ve never met) who said that Demolition Man is the Rosetta Stone here.) Each time this little nugget gets trotted out, a half-smile appears on my face, and I respond with some variation of, “Yeah, it doesn’t matter how many times you say that, I’m never going to agree with you.”
If there is any single work to once-and-for-all incinerate the notion that “old movies are bad,” it’s Northern Irish documentarian Mark Cousins’s epic, 18+ hour magnum opus The Complete Story of Film, a meditation on the greatest art form ever invented.
Director Emma Seligman has made the next great teen sex comedy by parodying all the ones that have come before it. At the same time, Bottoms also wickedly satirizes David Fincher’s Fight Club. It’s unapologetically queer, giddily violent, and subversively hilarious. With her two stars, Rachel Sennott – who helped write the screenplay with Seligman – and Ayo Edebiri, the trio have crafted the kind of comedy that makes you laugh out loud at least once every scene by wielding a gonzo and cutting sense of humor.
We have a brand-new film festival in the great state of Texas. The It Came from Texas Film Fest will take an inaugural bow on October 28 and 29, right in time to help kick off what’s become known in the past few years as Spooky Season. That’s an apropos time slot, because, per festival director Kelly Kitchens, It Came from Texas will largely showcase campy drive-in double feature titles from the 1950s through the 1970s, offering up I-have-to-see-this-based-on-the-title-alone fare like Zontar: Thing from Venus, Beyond the Time Barrier, and Attack of the Eye Creatures.
Red, White & Royal Blue is a love story between Alex and Henry. Even in the best circumstances, the two men would be in for plenty of judgement and bigotry from people who refuse to recognize that love is love. The situation of this particular romance, however, is exponentially more complicated. That’s because Alex happens to be the First Son of the United States – in the alternate universe of the movie, his mother, Ellen Claremont, is the first female POTUS – and Henry is the spare heir to the British throne. The movie is a fun, whimsical rom-com fantasy that soars on the chemistry of its two leads, even as the uninspired direction and visual style leave much to be desired.
I can report that the newest iteration of the Heroes on a Half-Shell, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, is exactly what it needs to be, namely, fun. Since it seems we’ve all resigned ourselves to an entertainment future populated solely by established corporate franchise IP – as much as I loved Barbie, it does make me chuckle that it’s considered an original concept, even though it’s based on one of the most instantly recognizable bits of IP in American history – a fun time seems like the least that the Hollywood franchise machine can give us.
Talk to Me, the nasty, visceral horror film out of Australia, offers up plenty of themes for dissection, but there’s something to be said for simply getting caught up in its wicked charms. Twin brother directing team Danny and Michael Philippou, who are the creative minds behind the YouTube channel RackaRacka, have made a chilling feature film debut in Talk to Me. If you can handle its gruesome sensibility, their film delivers horrific imagery and a scare around every corner.
Hi, I’m a straight, white, cis-gender Ken. We all know that straight, white, cis-gender Kens have one super power: explaining things to people. When we aren’t out riding horses or beaching each other off, we Kens wield this powerful and unquestionable skill for the benefit of the Barbies in our lives. The most passionate of us scale this up, so as to explain things to millions of Barbies at once by gaining a modicum of influence in cultural, governmental, and/or media circles.
Instead of using my super power to enlighten Barbies about how amazing The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II are – don’t get me started on the travesty that is The Godfather: Part III – I’ve decided to use my precious gift to explain a few things to some Kens out there who just don’t get the new Greta Gerwig movie Barbie.
With Oppenheimer, filmmaker Christopher Nolan has made nothing less than the Lawrence of Arabia of the 21st century. Like David Lean’s 1962 masterpiece, Nolan’s picture is epic and grand in both scope and scale, while delicately humanizing a figure about whom most of the populace – myself included, at least, until I saw the movie – know little-to-nothing.
While the grandeur of recreating the first human-made atomic reaction has transfixed media coverage and those anticipating the film’s release, Oppenheimer’s true triumph is in unlocking the mystery of the man. By the time we reach its conclusion, Nolan’s film has given us a crystal-clear understanding of who J. Robert Oppenheimer was. We understand what drove him to unleash an unimaginable weapon upon mankind and how that work tortured him for the rest of his life.
The gleefully raunchy gross-out comedy of 2023 has arrived. Joy Ride sticks to a formula and its story beats might be a little too familiar, but the phenomenally talented cast, who are up for damn near anything, make the movie sing. It’s destined to be compared to 2011’s Bridesmaids, since both movies feature predominantly female casts and revel in their bawdiness, but Joy Ride, along with Bridesmaids, holds its own with some of the best hard-R comedies of recent memory, like The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Booksmart, another female-centered absurdist comedy.
I knew I was in for a good time as soon as the introductory scene pumped up Ants Marching by Dave Matthews Band on the soundtrack as a way to establish a predominantly white community. I’m as big a fan of DMB as the next guy – as long as the next guy is a hacky-sacking hippie – but I can recognize and fully understand why the band is gently mocked as something with which certain subsets of white people are obsessed.
Like Star Wars before it, the Indiana Jones franchise has escaped the hands of its original creators. What makes this fact notable is how aggressively this first – and perhaps last? – installment in the Indy saga without Steven Spielberg and George Lucas at the helm looks back to the franchise’s past. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny walks a fine line between honoring what’s come before it while forging a path ahead.
For the most part, it works.
The first time I saw Asteroid City, it was a disaster. I couldn’t connect with a single character. Each one felt like a collection of quirks hiding the fact that there was nothing below the surface. The story-within-a-story-within-a-story structure was too clever by half. After that first screening, I was ready to write off Wes Anderson’s latest effort as demonstrating a peak example of the idiosyncratic director’s style, but with none of those touching, emotionally charged moments from his previous works.
On the morning I was supposed to hammer my thoughts about the movie into a proper review, I decided to be lazy. A poor night of sleep and the siren song of the comfortable bed in the quiet early morning hours convinced me to bank more shuteye. It was the best decision I could have possibly made.
If you’re looking for the most self-assured, quietly transfixing debut feature of the year, look no further than director Celine Song’s contemplative Past Lives. I’m too old to describe her film as being “a vibe,” but that’s exactly what it is. Past Lives is like a series of emotions washing over the audience in waves. Song has taken autobiographical bits and pieces of herself to make an authentic, modern romance that feels hyper-specific to the immigrant experience and yet also universal to the human experience
It all started with an innocent enough question from my wife. She had no way of knowing when she asked it that the answer would lead to the both of us falling down a rabbit hole of cinema. (She’s been with her movie-obsessed partner long enough, though, to know that’s always a possibility. She knew who she was marrying!)
The two of us are always on the lookout for new shows we think the other would enjoy and that we can watch and discuss as we work our way through it together. Last fall, she mentioned a title she had been seeing on HBO Max for a few months – soulless media conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery, which now owns HBO, recently rebranded the streaming service to the obnoxiously titled Max.
“Do you know anything about this Irma Vep?”
The most unlikely man to coach an English football club – in deference to the Brits, who formalized play of the sport in the late 19th century, I’ll eschew the term soccer, although there is compelling evidence that it was our friends across the pond who invented the now-hated term in the first place – is seeing himself out. He’s doing so alongside characters from several other shows touted as the best of their crop of prestige television. In the last month, HBO powerhouse series Succession and Barry both took a final bow. Now, it’s time to say so long and farewell to the irrepressibly upbeat Ted Lasso.
The transformation of the show itself over the course of its three-season run irked some early supporters. What started as a lighthearted half-hour sitcom about a fish-out-of-water American football collage coach being hired to lead a team in a sport he knows nothing about blossomed into a heartfelt dramedy about human beings connecting with one another.
The most fascinating thing that happens during a screening of BlackBerry comes seconds after the closing credits start. That’s when everyone in the audience picks up the little $1000 computer that we all carry around with us, so we can check what’s come in while we were busy staring at a different screen for a few hours. This strictly observed ritual takes place millions of times in movie theaters across the country each year. I’m sorry to say there are plenty of people who simply can’t wait until the movie is over before worshipping at the altar of their personalized mobile device.
What makes this now-common act of servility to technology something of note when considering BlackBerry is that the audience has only seconds ago seen a story integral to explaining how things got this way. BlackBerry tells the story of, as one character in the movie puts it, the phone everybody had before they got an iPhone. Director Matt Johnson and his wonderful cast frame this story as a goofy comedy, at least until the pathos kicks in and things get unexpectedly poignant.
I sat in the comfy leather recliner at Violet Crown, waiting for the first screening of the day to start. I was surrounded on either side by older festival goers and we all struck up a conversation. The couple on my right were film festival fans who had splurged for the top-tier badge. The woman was looking forward to retiring within the next year; her husband was recently retired. The woman on my left and I chatted about how she had been to so many festivals that only a few minutes of talking to someone would determine for her if they had gone to film school or not. She said this after I described a movie that I had seen the previous day as being a you’ve-seen-one-you’ve-seen-them-all romcom.
I stepped into the DIFF hospitality lounge on day two of the fest ready to set my lineup. I had already sent my list of preferred screenings to the address I was given in my welcome email, but for some reason, no one responded. Neither were any of my selections linked to my account. After a few minutes of exceptional help from a hospitality volunteer, I was ready to go with fifteen screenings booked over the course of the remaining six days of the fest.
