And now, the thrilling conclusion of my OCFF 2024 adventures:
Day Three: Saturday
Day three got going in a much more low-key way than the packed crowd for, and raucous reaction to, Häxan. The second I walked through the door, I spotted a fellow Dallas critic picking up his fest badge whom I hadn’t seen since DIFF ended. We chatted casually as the OCFF volunteer fished for his press credentials and we discovered we were both headed to the same screening.
That screening was for Not an Artist, a delightful small comedy co-written and co-directed by the movie’s star, Alexi Pappas and Jeremy Teicher. Teicher formerly directed Pappas in Olympic Dreams, the first non-documentary film shot in an Olympic village. Pappas was a track star in college, and she represented Greece in the 2016 Summer Olympics, setting the Greek national record for the 10k distance.
Not an Artist barely hangs together as a movie at certain points, feeling more like a collection of improv sketches in which the actors involved riff on a theme. The story involves a morbidly rich man running a retreat for artists who are suffering from, as the movie’s description puts it, creative constipation. Wu-Tang Clan rapper and producer RZA portrays the mysterious benefactor as a Zen master, interested in helping his residency artists discover what makes them tick creatively.
His proposal is simple. At the end of the four-week residency, each artist will have either finished the piece they care most about and be rewarded with a $100,000 grant, or they won’t and, according to the contract they sign, they will be contractually bound to never attempt to make art ever again. He complicates things when he offers these artists ever increasing amounts of cash (starting with $10,000) to give up early and walk away from creative endeavors forever.
The strength of the film is in the performances. Pappas plays a woman who has a massive online following reading her fanfic stories on OnlyFans, but who desperately wants to create a wholly original story. Matt Walsh, who cowrote the screenplay with Pappas and Teicher, plays her father, who is suffering from separation anxiety from his daughter. He eventually shows up at the retreat when his plans to practice medicine remotely from various national parks goes awry.
Also in the mix is Haley Joel Osment as a young man desperate to step out of the shadow of his wealthy family; Rosalind Chao as a teacher ready to focus on herself rather than her students; and Clark Moore – the highlight of the film – as a self-important poet who doesn’t take his failures easily.
I connected with Not an Artist as a creator who saw my own struggles reflected on screen in a deeply personal way. The extended sequence in which the Pappas character endlessly rewrites the opening to her novel and eventually becomes so bogged down in each individual word choice that she completely freezes up was so real it hurt. Simultaneously hilarious and so accurate to my own experience writing film criticism, the film won me over on the strength of that scene alone.
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After running home to grab a bite to eat in between screenings – a film festival happening less than three miles from my house is amazing – I headed to the lackluster screening of Booger, a one-note body horror/exploration of grief that is essentially 78 minutes of the same scene over and over again. Booger tells the story of Anna, who is unmoored when her best friend, Izzy, dies unexpectedly. The cat that the roommates rescued together, Booger, bites Anna and the young woman begins to suffer a strange transformation. That’s essentially the whole movie. Anna’s hacking up of multiple hair balls is the disgustingly most effective bit of the whole thing.
Next up was what I thought was my last screening of the day. (Luckily, the texts from OCFF an hour in advance of each screening let me know that I had booked myself for four screenings on Saturday instead of only three.) Fantasy A Gets a Mattress is the most bonkers movie I’ve seen all year. Hell, maybe the last couple of years.
Shot on a mind-blowingly small budget of only $3,800, Fantasy A Gets a Mattress stars real-life autistic Seattle rapper Fantasy A and his attempts to find a mattress – and stardom – after getting kicked out of the halfway house he calls home. It’s a tale of crooked landlords, mysterious open mic proprietors, unscrupulous martial arts instructors, and big dreams.
The movie has a surreal dream-like quality, mostly due to the fact that all the dialog was post-dubbed because the Seattle shooting locations were too noisy to properly record the dialog. Perhaps the funniest running gag is the name and likeness of this downright Lynchian world’s biggest local rap star – Lil Rude Puss, which we see on posters again and again throughout the movie.
Because of budget concerns and the filmmakers’ desire to capture rarely filmed locations within their home town, Fantasy A Gets a Mattress memorializes parts of Seattle that have suffered from chronic underdevelopment and being starved for resources.
The one and only Fantasy A. (photo by the author)
Fantasy A is about as charismatic a screen performer as you could ever hope to find for a scrappy, low-budget opus like this one. The most mind-blowing fact dropped on the audience during the post-screening Q&A was the fact that the cinematographer cited the revered 1985 anti-war tragedy Come and See – included on numerous lists as one of the best films ever made – as an inspiration.
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The last screening of the night was Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted. This documentary tells the story of legendary Black recording artist Swamp Dogg and the way his home became a musical and creative refuge for both himself and his collaborators, musicians and producers Moogstar and Guitar Shorty.
The film itself is mostly standard artist biography fare, but the structure, centered around the titular figure getting a unique design painted on the bottom of his pool, is a fun and unique twist. (I won’t dare spoil the climax of the movie, in which we see what Swamp Dogg has commissioned for his cement pond; you’ll have to see it to believe it.)
There were two highlights of the screening itself. One was the exclamations from (what I’m assuming was) a rather inebriated fan of Guitar Shorty. Each time the master bluesman – he was once a winner on The Gong Show for doing back flips while perfectly playing the guitar – appeared on screen, this gentleman would cry out some variation on, “Tell ‘em Shorty! You tell ‘em!” This happened no less than twenty or thirty times throughout the course of the movie. The second was Swamp Dogg, who was in attendance and performed a rare concert after the screening, looking up at the audience during the Q&A and remarking, “There sure are a lot of white people here…”
Day Four: Sunday
I wound down the fest on the last day with only two screenings, but they were both highlights of OCFF 2024. The first was Seeking Mavis Beacon. If you don’t recognize the name, Mavis Beacon was the figurehead of a typing tutorial computer program in the late 1980s and early nineties. The documentary’s director, Jazmin Renée Jones, digs into the history of this iconic early computer software blockbuster and discovers that Beacon was a fiction invented by the software’s programmers. The movie covers her search for the Haitian-born model, Renée L'Esperance, who served as Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing’s face.
A still from Seeking Mavis Beacon.
Jones and her producer, Olivia McKayla Ross, who is herself a programmer and self-described cyber doula, explore the role of women in general and Black women specifically in facilitating a connection to technology for those unfamiliar with it. The term cyber doula is an attempt on Ross’s part to formalize this role. Seeking Mavis Beacon is part detective story and thriller and part rumination on Black representation in tech and how that representation has been coopted and exploited by the white people in power in this space.
I was initially drawn to the screening because of my own nostalgia surrounding the Mavis Beacon software, but I was delightfully surprised by the layered and nuanced exploration of its themes. Jones and Ross undergo an emotional journey in their search for L’Esperance. Many of their conclusions about predatory behavior against Black people at the hands of powerful white people is personified in scenes depicting some non-profit bros who initially donate work space to the pair before callously tossing them out of it.
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A24’s newest offering, Janet Planet, provided an exceptional close to the fest. Playwright Annie Baker’s feature film debut is a slow cinema wonder, full of coming-of-age profundities about taking the first tentative steps into the wider world.
The story, set during the summer of 1991, centers around 11-year-old Lacy, a girl who casually threatens suicide to leave summer camp early and who fakes illness to avoid the first week of school. Lacy’s mother, Janet, is a licensed acupuncturist who exerts a strange hold on anyone who falls into her orbit. We see three such people come into and fall out of that orbit over the course of the film, with Lacy observing it all from the center of things.
Janet Planet is a slice-of-life tale that shows, among other small wonders, our young protagonist learning to play the piano and being spellbound by a summer play staged in the Western Massachusetts wilderness. One of the funniest bits in the movie, which is illustrative of its quiet approach to comedy, comes when Lacy’s piano teacher praises her student’s dedication, remarking that she can tell Lacy has practiced hard in the week between lessons. “I actually didn’t practice much at all this week,” Lacy casually tells her teacher.
Zoe Ziegler turns in a phenomenally naturalistic performance as Lacy. Julianne Nicholson, as Lacy’s hippie mother Janet – who continues to impress after turns as “Weird Al” Yankovic’s mother in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story and Nicolas Cage’s befuddled wife in last year’s Dream Scenario – delivers a wonderfully understated central performance. This is as much Nicholson’s movie as it is Ziegler’s, and the two work together in beautiful complementary tandem. Will Patton, Sophie Okonedo, and Elias Koteas each provide excellent supporting turns as the three people who become entangled in Janet and Lacy’s lives.
There are bits of magical realism within Janet Planet. The most vivid of these each involve a character disappearing suddenly in the middle of a scene, but the real magic of the movie is the quiet study of a young girl’s first tentative steps into adulthood.
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As I’m sure you’ve noticed, it took me longer than usual to publish these last few pieces on my OCFF 2024 adventures. The state of the world and the current US political landscape has me struggling to find the energy to do much of anything right now. Still, I’m enriched and transported each and every time I gorge on movies at a film festival. As I work my way through some depression and anxiety, I cling to cinematic art as a way to make sense of the world, and writing about it as a way to be creatively fulfilled. I’ll take one or two weeks off, but I hope to get back into a regular weekly routine soon. Thanks for reading.
Movies are neat.
