Tag Archives: independent film

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Harold and Awed

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For Madmen Only

by Matt Weiner

E. B. White warned us years ago against explaining a joke when he wrote that “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”

What then to make of For Madmen Only, a feature-length explanation of not just a joke but a unique art form created by a man who has to hold the title of greatest comedy legend that nobody has ever heard of?

Well, nobody outside of the comedy world. For Madmen Only seeks to correct this by documenting the story of Del Close, the improv comedy guru who brought form and structure to the genre and influenced decades of comedians, from Bill Murray and John Belushi to Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.

Director Heather Ross brings an ordered, mostly chronological approach to Close’s chaotic life, with a who’s who of talking heads to back up the thesis that Close forever changed the direction of modern comedy. Ross balances the interviews with a series of re-enactments, with James Urbaniak giving such an uncanny performance as Close that he deserves a feature-length companion.

For Madmen Only turns the history of a comedic form into a fully engaging suspense tale, that centers Close as a dogged Quixote trying to prove both the artistic and financial success of improv, even as his tumultuous lifestyle leads to setback after setback (and a few mental breakdowns for good measure).

The film also manages to walk the tightrope between hagiography and documentary. If improv performance attracts a special blend of weirdo – as the on-camera interviews persuasively argue – that might go double for audiences who regularly watch these risky performances and hold detailed opinions about their favorite UCB Harold teams.

Yet for a documentary on such a niche subject, Ross (along with co-writer Adam Samuel Goldman) hangs everything on a universal frame. Close is an artist first, and his medium just happened to be a new kind of sketch comedy. While a film dedicated to bringing Close to a wider audience is naturally in his camp, Ross sprinkles in enough counterpoints for anyone who thinks two hours of improvised comedy is too unstructured to be funny.

Where this treatment of Close does pull its punches is when it comes to any in-depth look at the very narrow type of diversity this comedy scene fostered, an issue the industry is still grappling with. But at least that gets a passing mention.

Completely absent is any look at the financial situation these theaters have created for participants. (A situation that has, not coincidentally, led to a comedy landscape where relatively privileged writers and actors can afford to pay large amounts of money to the theaters in big cities while paying their dues.) But these blind spots belong to the entire industry, not just Close.

In a fitting nod to improv, For Madmen Only is full of surprising detours and poignant observations. It would have been easy to reduce Close to tortured genius or entitled bully. It’s harder to embrace vulnerability and grapple with the answer: “Yes. And…”

Shudder Premiere, Slider

Somebody’s Knocking

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The Boy Behind the Door

by Hope Madden

Filmmakers David Charbonier and Justin Powell know how to do a lot with a little.

Earlier this year Shudder premiered their tightly packaged little horror story, The Djinn—very nearly a one-man, one-set show. Their latest to hit Shudder, The Boy Behind the Door, is slightly more expansive. A cast of about five knocks around one big, old farmhouse in the middle of an isolated, wooded area.

Two of those five are Bobby (Lonnie Chavis) and Kevin (Ezra Dewey, The Djinn), best friends who were kidnapped on their way to a little league game. Bobby wakes up in the trunk of a car without Kevin. He breaks free and makes his way clear of the house, but he can hear Kevin’s terrified cries and he circles back to try and save him.

The filmmakers leave it to Bobby’s sleuthing—and yours–to figure out what’s going on and how to end it. They make tremendous use of the hallways, floors and doors throughout their set, plus a well-placed wristwatch unnervingly ups the ante in a way the audience understands but Bobby does not.

There are times when the writing here hits too hard. I’m not sure the boys have to say they’ll always stick together quite so often; their actions speak to that. But the conundrums the filmmakers throw at Bobby as he tries to figure out what’s going on and how to get to his friend are believable.

More importantly, Chavis handles them with honest, childlike panic and courage. His performance would be enough to carry the film, but the adults around him offer supremely creepy turns.

Dewey’s less effective in this than he was in The Djinn, but it’s not enough to sink the film. The movie’s solid structure, paired with Charbonier and Powell’s gift for dropping clues and following up on threads make for a satisfying but never lurid horror show.

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An Aesthetic Is Born

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All the Streets Are Silent: The Convergence of Hip Hop and Skateboarding (1987-1997)

by Christie Robb

Jeremy Elkin and Dana Brown’s documentary explores the origins of what is now a mainstream aesthetic born from two distinct 90s New York City subcultures—graffiti artists/skateboarders and hip hop.

Tracing the ancestry, briefly, to NYC artists Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, the film credits the convergence of the movements to the prescience of the club management department at Club Mars, a multistory nightclub in the Meatpacking District.

In the early 90s, Mars had a weekly hip hop party that started in the basement and attracted a broad swath of NYC street culture. The bouncers let the skate kids in, even if they were all gross and sweaty and not dressed up. Their streetstyle was cool. And the cross-pollination began.

Out of this came:

  • Phat Farm, the first hip hop clothing line
  • Zoo York, the first skateboard brand out of New York
  • The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show, an underground hip hop radio show that introduced Biggie Smalls, Jay Z, Busta Rhymes, and the Wu-Tang Clan (among many others)
  • The independent movie KIDS, featuring the debut performances of Leo Fitzpatrick, Chloe Sevigny, and Rosario Dawson
  • The Supreme skateboarding lifestyle brand
  • The Zoo Mixtape video, with a hip hop soundtrack

As the film reminds us, skateboarding is now an Olympic event and a $2 billion per year industry and hip hop surpassed rock recently as the dominant music genre.

Elkin and Brown stuff their documentary full of interviews from the people who were part of the scene in the 90s like Kid Capri, Stretch Armstrong, Bobbito Garcia, and Mike Carroll. Archival footage was supplied by Eli Morgan Gesner, who had the presence of mind to shoot video of the skateboarders doing tricks and the rappers trying out rhymes. This grounds the film in the visual aesthetic of the period while the original score by hip hop producer Large Professor provides the aural vibe.

It all comes to resemble video scrapbook of the baby years of what’s become a mainstream aesthetic. And, while I’d prefer more coverage of the gradual gentrification of the aesthetic from an outsider scene to a branded “lifestyle,” that’s not really the project here. As a nonfiction narrative looking back on all the individuals and circumstances who mixed together in 90s downtown NYC, All the Streets Are Silent is pretty fly.

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Straddling Borders

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I Carry You with Me

by Hope Madden

If the final act of I Carry You with Me has a documentary feel about it, that makes good sense. Director/co-writer Heidi Ewing—known primarily for docs including Jesus Camp and The Boys of Baraka—takes on her first narrative feature by spinning a love story based in fact.

Ewing’s subjects, Iván Garcia and Gerardo Zabaleta, are NYC restauranteurs who fell in love in Mexico in the 1990s. Though Ewing grounds her fable in their present day, the bulk of the film waxes youthful and romantic back in Mexico.

Young, closeted Iván (Armando Espitia) dreams of putting his culinary skills to use so he can provide for his young son, whose mother rarely allows him to visit. He meets Gerardo (Christian Vazquez) and they fall in love, but dreams of the success that evades him at home propel Iván north.

And though the film’s title aptly captures the longing between separated lovers, it carries with it a great deal more. Ewing conjures the phantom ache that follows Iván the rest of his life without his son, his family and the home he knew.

Yes, the film, co-written with Alan Page, leads inevitably to the couple’s modern-day dilemma. They’ve worked their way up from nothing, lived and achieved the American dream, but are essentially caged. Iván’s son has grown up without him. He will never be allowed to come here, and if Iván returns to Mexico to see him he risks losing Gerardo and his American dream forever.

I Carry You with Me never feels like a blunt instrument. In much the way Ewing did with her documentaries, she weaves true tales with humanity and honesty so they resonate. A documentary’s best chance of affecting change is by helping an audience see themselves in the lives on the screen. Ewing did that with her many docs. She does it again here.

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Maine Event

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Downeast

by Rachel Willis

Coastal Maine is beautiful country, but there is a seedy underbelly of drugs, gambling, and crime that’s explored in director Joe Raffa’s film, Downeast.

Refining a story written by native Maine resident Greg Finley, Raffa’s focus is on a lobsterman named Tommy (Finley). Following a life-changing incident in which he ran afoul of area mobsters, Tommy tries to live with his head down, following his own moral code. The return of his ex, Emma (Dylan Silver), reopens old wounds.

The ‘townies’ are wary of Emma, whose questions threaten the tenuous balance the mob holds over the residents. Even Tommy’s loyalty lies with the town over his budding relationship.

There aren’t many new stories to tell, and if this one sounds familiar, that’s because it is. However, the film boasts compelling characters and wonderful attention to detail that help keep us invested.

From a technical standpoint, this is a well-made movie. Edwin Pendleton Stevens’s cinematography juxtaposes the coastal vacation town against a gritty, cold world that feels lifeless when summer ends. The empty winter boardwalk seems sinister compared to scenes of a beach crowded with summer tourists.

The actors inhabit their roles so organically that often you feel like you’re sitting with them in the local watering hole. Finley is at home with his character, but the others alongside him are just as natural. The only one who stands out as different is Silver, but it works because Emma is an outsider to this world—she talks tough like the rest of them, but she isn’t one of them, and her world view doesn’t align with the townies.

The film’s biggest issue lies with the characters’ motivations. While things seem straightforward in the beginning, they take a turn toward the unusual. Characters’ decisions make zero sense given what we know of them. Even the background players behave strangely. Plotlines resolve in head-scratching ways. It all detracts from the strong chemistry the actors create as members of a close, if tenuous, community.

There is a lot crowded into the plot, so some characters are shallow compared to others. The mobsters are one-dimensional villains, and while a case could be made that’s the truth in real life, it doesn’t make for compelling storytelling.

Downeast shows how important a strong screenplay is because, without it, you’re left with a beautiful, forgettable film.

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Playing God

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The God Committee

by Rachel Willis

Based on the play by Mark St. Germain and adapted for the screen by writer/director Austin Stark, The God Committee seeks to provide insight into the fraught decisions behind who lives and who dies when it comes to organ transplants.

A new heart is recently available for the St. Augustine Hospital, a building in disrepair and under renovation, and the transplant committee convenes to decide who among three matches is the worthiest to receive the heart. The committee has a paltry 90 minutes to make their decision or else the heart will be useless.

The initial set-up alone is worthy of an entire film, but the movie isn’t satisfied to stay within the confines of a sterile boardroom. The timeline jumps forward seven years to check-in on our committee, primarily Dr. Andre Boxer (Kelsey Grammer), and how the implications of their decision on that fateful day have affected them.

By moving back and forth between the past and present, the tension of those crucial 90 minutes is often interrupted. However, by weaving the present into the past, we get to know the people behind these decisions.  

Grammer excels on screen as the pragmatic Boxer, basing his judgments on the medical data rather than emotion. As his foil, Dr. Jordan Taylor (Julia Styles) relies on her heart to guide her decision-making. Unfortunately, Styles can’t quite match the passion of Grammer. The other members of the committee, which include Janeane Garofalo and Colman Domingo, aren’t given as much to work with and don’t resonate on screen in the same way.

The play lends itself well to film, and Stark handily adapts the source material. There are a few moments that remind us this is an adaption of a play – mainly, characters who talk to the screen. This might have worked better had it been transitioned from audience-directed monologue into character-driven dialogue, as it would have heightened the conflict inside the boardroom.

The film touches on numerous thematic issues: the ethics of deciding who is worthy of a transplant, the conjunction of corporatism and life-saving medical research, the inequity of medical care across racial and class lines, black market trade in organs, etc. Unfortunately, The God Committee never settles on any of them, careening across multiple threads without any direction.

If the movie had stuck to a theme and a timeline, it might have been more impactful.

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Mr. Nice Guy

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Vicious Fun

by Hope Madden

Even serial killers need someone to talk to. Just hope it’s not you.

That, in a nutshell, is the premise of Cody Callahan’s latest, Vicious Fun.

In this 80s-era horror-comedy, sad sack Joel (Evan Marsh in kind of a Jon Cryer role) is a nice guy. He’s just kind of an idiot who can’t take a hint.

One evening he drowns his sorrows, passes out, and sobers up to find himself in a late-night support group for serial killers. He’s not a member—a fact the others sniff out pretty quickly—and shit goes south post haste.

Callahan’s script winks with a kind of embarrassed affection toward the horror nerd. Joel’s a screenwriter wannabe and is perhaps too proud of his position as horror journalist for a fan magazine.

The serial killers here are not so much your garden variety psychos as they are typical horror movie monsters. Vicious Fun shows no end of self-deprecating charm, and Callahan’s solid cast is in on the joke.

Earlier this year, Callahan impressed with the boozy Canadian hillbilly noir The Oak Room, where he took advantage of Ari Millen’s versatility and peculiarity. Here Millen dives more fully into his peculiar side, throwing shades of McConaughey at his most unhinged for a character who’s never quite what he seems but is always attention-getting.

The enormous Robert Maillet (Becky) fits his character, physically and emotionally, to a tee, while Julian Richings (Anything for Jackson) surprises in a dual role. Amber Goldfarb cuts an impressive presence as the film’s badass, and David Koechner is David Koechner, but when isn’t that fun?

There aren’t enough nice guys in horror movies. Hats off to Callahan for not only finding a unique and fun premise in an overcrowded genre but for appreciating the precious jewel that is the nice guy.

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Blood Brothers

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La Dosis

by Brandon Thomas

It’s harder to think of a more respected profession than nursing. This notion might be even more widely shared now, after the past year. Nurses are there during the worst emergencies, and they’re also there to help with recovery. We put a lot of trust and responsibility in them during our weakest moments. Writer/director Martin Kraut’s thriller La Dosis (translation: The Dose) examines what happens when that trust is breached in the worst possible way.

Marcos (Carlos Portaluppi) is a confident and experienced nurse with more than 20 years under his belt. His professionalism and thoroughness make him well respected in his department. Marcos has a secret though. For certain terminal patients, he uses the cover of night to administer enough medication to allow them to peacefully slip away. For Marcos, this is a way to preserve their dignity even if it goes against the ethical nature of working in medicine.

When Gabriel (Ignacio Rogers), a new young nurse arrives, Marcos finds himself threatened by the handsome man. As Marcos’s coworkers and superiors fall under Gabriel’s charming spell, the elder nurse begins to suspect that Gabriel might harbor his own homicidal tendencies.

If there’s one word I’d use to describe La Dosis, it would be deliberate. The film mirrors Marcos’s steady, pragmatic personality by slowly, and methodically, introducing us to the characters and setting. It’s the type of no-frills opening that makes Marcos’s first act of homicide all the more surprising while still seemingly mundane.

Things begin to heat up and get weirder once the character of Gabriel is introduced. Is Marcos’s distrust of the young nurse simply sour grapes or is there a more sinister reason? That’s the question the film plays with momentarily until it’s quickly answered. The suspense of toying with Gabriel’s true intentions is cast aside rather quickly.

La Dosis frustrates more than it captivates. The back and forth between Marcos and Gabriel has all the trappings of an exciting rivalry, except the film refuses to let it happen. Marcos yo-yos between being Gabriel’s adversary and his friend. The film tries to explain this away with tepid sexual tension between the two, but it’s never explored on more than a surface level. 

Portaluppi is the film’s bright spot. There’s an inviting casual sadness to the character that never strays into pity. Even when the script falters with Marcos’s questionable behavior and choices, Portaluppi does his all to make it work. 

There’s also a level of dark comedy at play that the film never truly capitalizes on. The story is ripe for this kind of approach, yet the filmmakers continue to pull their punches. The hesitancy to go full dark comedy or even full medical thriller hobbles the film in the end. 

La Dosis tantalizes with interesting character beats and odd tonal shifts, but in the end, doesn’t quite reach a satisfying conclusion.

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Hillbilly Antidote

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Holler

by Hope Madden

It is incredibly rare to see a worthwhile film that deals with American poverty. Nomadland certainly broke through, and recent movies including Winter’s Bone, Frozen River and Little Woods also made the case that resilience and poverty need not condescend or patronize.

Hillbilly Elegy missed that memo.

Holler, the feature debut from filmmaker and Ohio native Nicole Riegel, sugarcoats nothing, patronizes no one, and does not need a Mamaw to explain the facts of life.

Instead, Ruth (a bristlingly confident Jessica Barden) figures things out on her own. A high school senior who spends most of her time collecting scrap metal with her brother – both just one step away from eviction – Ruth has very little time for contemplation, though.

Riegel’s Rust Belt winter offers a malevolent backdrop for Ruth’s coming of age, and the illegal scrapping—the tearing down of the disused industries that once kept Ruth’s family and town afloat—is eerily fitting.

Barden gives the film a grainy bleakness, Ruth’s red hat and her brother Blaze’s (Gus Halper) pickup the only bursts of color in the dreary Southern Ohio grey. Compelling and authentic, it all often feels mainly like a showcase for Barden’s talent.

That’s not to say that the film is in any way weak, simply that Barden’s performance is that strong. Willful and bursting with anger, her Ruth is a force—destructive, sure, but strong and powerfully determined.  

Barden’s not alone. Her supporting ensemble delivers nuance and grit in equal measure, from Halper to Austin Amelio’s sketchy scrap metal entrepreneur to a remarkably humane turn from Becky Ann Baker. Riegel’s script, dreary though the vision can be, hints at forgiveness and hope in nearly every scene.

If you seek an antidote to Hillbilly Elegy, Riegel has what you’re looking for.

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A Searing Indictment of Hollywood or an Anthropomorphic Cat’s Fantasy? You Be the Judge.

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Howard Original

by Christie Robb

This sophomore effort from director Natalie Rodriguez (The Extraordinary Ordinary) is unfocused and confusing. I felt like I was watching a made-for-TV movie about the #MeToo movement while on painkillers after recovering from some sort of dental surgery.

Rodriguez co-wrote the script – based on a 2017 short – with Kevin Sean Michaels (who plays the lead in a somewhat slapstick fashion). The film centers around Howard, an alcoholic screenwriter desperate to see his script Baby Space Cats brought to life on the silver screen. The movie bounces back and forth between black and white scenes depicting the evolution and devolution of Howard’s relationship with his one true love Hannah, and full-color scenes in the present, where Howard is shepherding “Baby Space Cats” through development while simultaneously spiraling in his addiction.

We are presented with a number of auditions for the role of “Fleaow” in which Howard sexually harasses the talent.  There’s a parody of the Kardashians TV show. There’s a dance sequence. Howard talks to a disembodied inner voice named Kendra. There’s a bit with some super racist banter. At one point Howard adopts a cat.

Late in the movie, it’s hinted that Howard might have been dead for the majority of the scenes that take place in the present. Or maybe he’s just a character in the cat’s screenplay. I don’t know, man. If this comes together in some way that I’m just not getting, I’m blaming the pandemic for blunting my cognitive abilities.

The best moments though, by far, are the original songs supplied by “Dave?”—who, according to IMDB, is a high school teacher turned artist. Gems like “Baby, How You Doin?,” “Butter Chicken,” and “Howard (Your Butt Stinks)” give some sequences a real Flight of the Conchords vibe, which made me smile and stop trying too hard to figure out what the point of this project might have been.