Tag Archives: independent film

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18 and Life

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18 to Party

by Hope Madden

Does every crappy small town in America have a dive called Polo’s where mangey kids—many of them well, well under age—line up to try to get in?

Well, if not, writer/director Jeff Roda’s 18 to Party makes that and just about everything else seem universal. His Linklater-esque exploration of near-adolescence runs its course in a single evening, but that doesn’t make it any easier to forget.

Sure, the high schoolers are all lined up out front waiting for the sun to go down and the bouncer to start letting people in. But Missy, Kira and James, Shel and Brad, Peter and Dean are stuck out behind the club, wasting time and hoping against hope that night manager Rizzo is cool enough to let them in.

Eventually.

Roda understands small town socializing and boredom enough to know that most of the evening’s intrigue, and most of its memories, will take place in those hours before Rizzo makes up his mind.

It’s 1984 and Generation X is, as happened to usually be the case, unsupervised. Well, Shel (a standout Tanner Flood) is supposed to be at Brad’s (Oliver Gifford). Everyone else’s parents are at the town meeting about the UFO sighting.

Thoughts of extra-terrestrials, worries about getting in, general social anxiety and inevitable personality clashes take a back seat to the realization that Lanky (James Freedson-Jackson, really excellent) is back.

No one’s seen him since that thing with his brother.

Roda’s approach is lackadaisical, although the energy that comes naturally off a gaggle of 14-year-olds is enough to deliver regular explosions. Why doesn’t Shel want to fool around with Amy? What is Brad so mad about? Why is Kira so weird?

The film and the evening are loosely structured, allowing for plenty of riffs that occasionally provide a wink to the times (“U2 ripped off The Alarm,” Kira claims. “Check back with me in 5 years and we’ll see who’s still aroud.”)

More often, though, Roda develops darker threads that suggest the kind of doom that can dog you even before you start high school, kiss a girl or get into your first party.

Roda has a light, meandering touch, far more interested in a slice of mid-Eighties life than in the specificity of a John Hughes retread. Characters are familiar, the situation feels authentic, and the mixture of nostalgia, dread and optimism paint a fascinating if unfinished picture.

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Not So Happy Family

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King of Knives

by Brandon Thomas

I think most modern movie-goers would agree that the last thing they want to see is another movie detailing the mid-life crisis of a rich New Yorker. It’s hard to muster even the most sarcastic crocodile tears while watching a sad advertising executive drive his sports car through Manhattan. Cynicism aside, King of Knives might appear to be the king of cliches at first glance, but this is a film that has a few tricks up its sleeve.  

Aforementioned Frank (Gene Pope) is our through-line into a family that, on the surface, looks to be typical, albeit with a few rough edges. The light banter that permeates through a celebratory anniversary dinner early on is quickly smothered as a hint of tragedy manifests itself. As the fractures in Frank and his wife Kathy’s (Mel Harris) marriage begin to show, their daughters (Roxi Pope and Emily Bennett) struggle with their own wants and relationships.

King Of Knives toys with our expectations from the get-go. There’s a whimsical edge that engulfs the early scenes – a tone that doesn’t feel too far off from a winky Julia Roberts movie of the 90s. The tone begins an interesting transition when family tragedy, infidelity, and mental illness enter the fray. It’s in this transition that King of Knives shows its hand. 

Brutal honesty gives King of Knives its power. This isn’t a movie looking for an easy happy ending. Instead, the characters are going through the painful process of finding what truly makes them happy. For Frank, it’s finally owning up to what a terrible father and husband he’s been. It’s not about Frank searching for pity, or the film doing so on Frank’s behalf. Instead, it’s about seeing a character confront the choices that caused so much pain for the people he loves. 

It’s not all blue Mondays, though. King of Knives is genuinely funny. The cast has a natural chemistry that allows them to bounce off one another. The comedy isn’t about bits being paid off but instead comes through its characters. 

First-time feature director Jon Delgado might not have the sharpest visual eye, but he also knows that this material isn’t looking for a flashy approach. Delgado lets the story and performances shine without letting his more technically-focused experience get in the way.  

King of Knives isn’t going to change your mind about rich New Yorkers, but you might approach the fictional kind with a little more empathy next time.  

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And I Feel Fine

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Save Yourselves!

by Hope Madden

“The world is f*cked and we should stop pretending it’s not.”

True enough.

This piece of insight comes from Su (Sunita Mani), one half of the Brooklyn couple who’s disconnected to enjoy a week in nature, away from the distractions of a life spent too much online. Yes, Su has brought an internet list of ways to improve as a couple, but she handwrote the list into her notebook, so it’s OK.

Meanwhile, longtime (maybe too long?) boyfriend Jack (John Reynolds, Stranger Things) is jonesing to YouTube his tips for humanely trapping a rabbit. But he will not give in!

No, the two are committed to staying off the grid and offline this week, no matter the cost.

Naturally, this is the week the world ends.

Writers/directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, a couple themselves, create a comfortable, hipster vibe. Su and Jack’s relationship is funny in a way that feels less like cynicism and more like compassionately self-referential mockery.

Both performances are charmingly irritating, if that’s a thing. It is here, which could be hard to sell but it’s imperative in this film. The couple is lightly self-obsessed and overly sensitive—an affectionate rip on millennials—but they are sincerely fond of each other, and we are, in turn, fond of them.

Things get sillier once the threat exposes itself. The earth has been overrun by fuzzy little puff balls the couple refers to as pouffes. Yes, the harmless looking—adorable, even—mayhem does feel remarkably similar to those tribbles that caused the Star Trek crew such trouble back in the day.

That’s not the only part of the filmmakers’ feature debut that feels somewhat borrowed, but don’t let them fool you. Just when you think the film itself is selling out, promoting a status quo, nuclear family vibe that would sink the entire production, nope.

The lighthearted cynicism and dystopian dread that marks a generation rears its pessimistic but nonetheless delightful head for an end that’s an unsettling mix of optimism and desperation.

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Mr. Lonely

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Kajillionaire

by Hope Madden

Can a film be absurd without really being cynical? That might be the miracle of Miranda July, who mixes heartbreak and humor like no one else.

Fifteen years since her groundbreaking Me and You and Everyone We Know and nine years since The Future, the writer/director returns to the screen with a film every bit as ambitious but perhaps more contained and intimate.

In Kajillionaire, a miraculous Evan Rachel Wood is Old Dolio Dyne, 26-year-old woman-child who knows no existence other than that of the low-rent cons she runs day in, day out with her disheveled but wily parents (Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger).

Like Hirokazu Koreeda’s delicate 2018 film Shoplifters and Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 masterpiece Parasite, Kajillionaire disregards the idea of the glamorous con and settles fully into the concept of scam as a daily grind. And, like Koreeda and Ho, July uses this workaday world to examine family. Although July’s vision is more decidedly comedic and highly stylized, she hits the same notes.

The Dynes make their home in an abandoned office space that shares a wall with a car wash. Every day—twice on Wednesdays—pink bubbles descend that wall and it’s up to the Dynes to collect, discard, and dry, lest the foundation of the building become besot with dampness and mold. The precision clockwork (their digital watches are timed to go off) and the pink ooze become ideal identifiers of Old Dolio’s rigid yet surreal existence.

Things get unpredictable when Mom and Dad take a shine to Melanie (an effervescent Gina Rodriguez). She loves their oddball qualities and wants to join the team, but Old Dolio is immediately put off by the disruption, and more than that, by her parents’ doting affection for Melanie.

July is a sharp, witty and incisive filmmaker, but Kajillionaire benefits more from the performances than any of her other films. Wood is like an alien visiting human life, then imitating and observing it, and the performance is oddly heartbreaking.

Jenkins and Winger are reliably magnificent, and Rodriguez’s bright charm is the needed light in an otherwise gloomy tale.

The film hits July’s sweet spot: gawky introverts struggling to find, accept and maintain human connections. The humor works as well as it does because the whimsy and eccentricity in the film is grounded in compassion rather than mockery.

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Leave No Trace

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Residue

by Matt Weiner

Residue begins as a wry bayonetting of gentrification, but the film slowly unfolds—languidly, and then with a dizzying crescendo—into one of the most powerful films to come out this year.

Director Merawi Gerima’s confident debut traces summertime in a fast-changing D.C. neighborhood, where the new white arrivals don’t so much coexist with the area’s long-time black residents as much as they pursue parallel existences. For one group, the area is the latest in affordable rentals.

But for Jay (Obi Nwachukwu), Q Street is home. Or was home, before Jay moved to California. Now grown and an aspiring filmmaker, he decides to visit his parents and childhood friends to collect material and, in his words, “give a voice to the voiceless.” (Gerima himself is a D.C. native who moved to California for film school.)

Not all of Jay’s friends welcome him back with open arms though. As Jay reconnects with friends— some still in the same house, others in prison or dead—he is reminded, forcefully, that the white speculators buying up investment properties and yuppies blissfully smoking pot without fear of long prison sentences (or worse) aren’t the only ones taking advantage of Q Street.

Gerima’s critiques are unsparing, but his direction is achingly beautiful. It’s a mournful sort of beauty—Jay’s washed out recollections of summer in the District, where the sounds of children yelling, fireworks and go-go beats take on a physical texture, only drive home how rootless everything is in the present.

As Jay lapses in and out of these reveries and confronts what has replaced them, elegy turns to horror. There’s a creeping dread with every new encounter, and we’ve seen enough videos on social media this year alone to know that there can be as much danger in Jay’s exchanges with police as with a dude named Josh.

When learning of Jay’s motivations, one of his old friends simply replies, “Who’s voiceless?” Gerima lets Residue speak for itself, an essential statement not just on everything happening right now but on film and art.

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Gone Catfishin’

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Summerland

by Rachel Willis

It’s hard to sympathize with a catfish – someone who pretends to be someone else online to develop a misleading relationship.

Yet, in the film, Summerland, directed by Lankyboy (the nickname for directing duo Kurtis David Harder and Noah Kentis), we’re asked to do just that.

Bray (Chris Ball), who is pretending to be Victoria online, has made a connection with Shawn (Dylan Playfair) via a Christian dating site. Bray/Victoria has plans to meet Shawn at the music festival, Summerland.

Along for the road trip to Summerland is Oliver, Bray’s best friend, and Oliver’s girlfriend, Stacey. The problem? Bray has been using Stacey’s pictures to construct Victoria online. Once the trio gets to Summerland, will Bray be able to find Shawn before he finds Stacey?

Miraculously, as the film progresses, we do begin to sympathize with Bray. As a gay teenager, he is not accepted by his parents and struggles with his identity. He wants to meet someone, to have a relationship, and be himself. Despite the fact he has lied about his identity, he’s managed to be as open with Shawn as he has with anyone.

However, the film doesn’t let Bray off the hook entirely. We’re repeatedly reminded that he’s constructed a relationship around a lie. We must ask ourselves if some lies are forgivable when the liar struggles with what it means to be himself.

Most of the film is centered around the road trip to Summerland. Bray is anxious to get there so he can finally meet Shawn in person. Oliver wants to enjoy the journey. Stacey is rebelling against a stepdad she doesn’t like.

Lankyboy wants their movie to be quirky, but it’s a conventional road trip/relationship movie with some weird extras thrown in. Those weird moments are forced, don’t contribute much, and end up making a short movie feel intolerably long.

There are also far too many montages for such a short film.

The actors aren’t terrible in their roles. They’re not the worst trio to spend time with on a road trip movie, and the film does have one or two funny moments. But too much of the movie is focused on what it wants to be rather than effectively embracing what it is.

Unfortunately, what is ends up being is an unmemorable experience.

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Hope Floats

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Buoyancy

by Hope Madden

Hey, it’s been a pretty easy going year. Feel like a movie?

Well, first time feature filmmaker Rodd Rathjen has one for you and you’re not going to like it, but you should watch it anyway. Buoyancy shadows a 14-year-old Cambodian boy sold into slave labor on a Thai fishing trawler.

I know, but stay with me.

In his feature debut behind the camera, Rathjen wisely relies on naturalistic performances from mainly non-professional actors to recreate the circumstances rather than dramatize them.

Sarm Heng is Chakra, a put upon adolescent bristling at the limitations of his life. There’s the universal element of adolescent rebellion, here tied to far more than angst. Chakra does manual labor rather than going to school, and as kids in uniform whiz by him on bicycles, and cars on the nearby highway come and go, his stagnancy and the back breaking monotony awaiting him in adulthood press down on him.

He follows an opportunity to sneak away from home and get a ride out of the country, where he’ll make real money working in a factory. It’s OK if he doesn’t have the $500 fare to leave the country, he can work that off in his first month.

That’s not how it actually works, and we spend the rest of the film watching as Chaka’s realization comes to him in bits and pieces that he will probably never leave this rickety fishing boat.

Rathjen’s film ends with sobering facts concerning the modern slave trade in Southeast Asia, with as many as 200,000 boys and men currently missing and believed to be held in bondage on fishing boats. The filmmaker’s verité style helps us understand how this happens. There’s no boisterous villain detailing the scheme, no, “Ha! You belong to me now!” No one tells you you’re never being paid, never going home. You simply adjust to your circumstances or you die.

There’s little dialog once Chakra leaves the boys in the village behind, but Heng doesn’t need it. The evolution of this character hangs on his face. It’s a remarkable performance, especially from a kid who’s never acted before.

Heng gets an assist from two actors with some experience. An utterly heartbreaking Mony Ros is the middle aged man who falls prey to the scheme in the hopes of providing for his family. The camaraderie between these two characters is powerful, and it’s a theme Rathjen mirrors in Chakra’s relationship with the ship’s captain, played with menacing relish by Thenawut Ketsaro.

What they create together is harrowing, but it’s also a brilliant piece of filmmaking that needs to be seen.

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Speaking Softly

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Lingua Franca

by Hope Madden

Lingua franca is literally a language used between two people who don’t share a native tongue. But what goes unsaid in Lingua Franca carries far more weight than anything we’re actually told.

Writer/director/producer/star Isabel Sandoval has mastered cinematic understatement. Her approach, as filmmaker and performer, is never showy. Her third and most confident feature is a slice of life drama that meditates quietly on need, agency, love and capital in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

Olga (a perceptive Lynn Cohen) sometimes forgets where she is. She gets a little agitated and a little weary.

Olivia (Sandoval) calms her, keeps her safe, keeps her well, but has worries of her own.

Alex (Aemon Farren) just needs to catch a break, so he’s staying with his grandmother and helping out Olivia when he can. But we can’t all help each other, even when we mean to.

Sandoval’s film says so much with so few words, it’s remarkable. By way of Olga’s apartment we enter an entirely lived-in world, one that is likely to be utterly unfamiliar and yet feels as authentic as any you’ve seen. The ordinariness of extraordinary circumstances, unusual measures and extreme tensions emerges by way of Olivia’s resigned, world-wearied gaze.

There is a cultural currency to the story, one in which Olivia’s position as a transgender woman of color is actually less dangerous than her situation as an illegal immigrant in the age of ICE. That anxiety plays as a backdrop to a desperate romance between Olga’s two needy houseguests.

As Olivia’s sketchy love interest, Farren offers a nuanced and authentic turn. Alex is a man of squandered potential, dim prospects, and a fleeting if recurring notion that he can be something of value.

There’s a lonesome transience to the story, a feeling of impermanence that’s frightening, sad and just slightly freeing. Lingua Franca tells a lovely, sad story that’s very much worth hearing.

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The Boy With the Thorn in His Side

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Benjamin

by Seth Troyer

Benjamin is one of the most uniquely brilliant indie films I’ve come across in some time. It’s a film that could have easily been yet another Woody Allen clone, yet another romp where a director shares his thoughts on love, nervous breakdowns, and how cool and complex he is just before the film cuts to credits. Benjamin is something much more.

While the core of the film seems born from director Simon Amstell’s autobiography, what really makes it stand out is the duet Amstell has with his star. Colin Morgan’s lightning fast delivery and realistic portrayal of Benjamin, a young gay man who endlessly gets in his own way, makes the film more than just a mouth piece for a director, but a unique character study.

Benjamin is a filmmaker who recently failed to live up to the promise of his debut movie. In the aftermath, he falls in love with a beautiful French musician named Noah, but their relationship is constantly threatened by Benjamin’s increasingly erratic mental state.

In less capable hands such a plot would make for a rather unoriginal film, but here, the events that unfold feel realistically random and unpredictable. Plot points begin, end abruptly, and then pick back up all over again in surprising ways that create a true to life experience. Even the minor characters are fleshed out yet mysterious, creating unique human beings rather than lazy stereotypes.

The film’s fast paced, dark humor is never contrived or pretentious. Amstell’s incredible ear for dialogue coupled with Morgan’s gift for delivery feels like a comedic team at the top of its game.

Though far more lovable, Morgan’s portrayal of an erratic, untrustworthy protagonist calls to mind David Thewlis’s darkly genius incarnation of Johnny in Mike Leigh’s Naked. Indeed, Benjamin seems to have much in common with Leigh’s everyday dramas in the attempt to flesh out believable characters rather than convey easy moral judgements.

It is an aching portrayal of a person who seems either on the brink of transformation or immolation. Benjamin is a cry for the mind to just shut up for once, and let the heart take the wheel for a change.

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Angel of Death

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DieRy

by Darren Tilby

As far as psychological thrillers go, this is a peculiar one. An odd concoction of glaringly obvious plot twists and contrived diegesis; of excellent performances but inconsistent characters; of an implied take on influencer culture leading, bizarrely, into The Manchurian Candidate territory, Diery can be best described as—a bit of a mess.

Marie (Claudia Maree Mailer), a popular Instagram model with over one million followers. She is well on her way to getting her masters degree in comparative religion, leaving an abusive relationship and moving on from childhood trauma that saw her hospitalized. She seems to have a perfect life. As, indeed, everyone keeps telling her. However, Marie is haunted still by the events of her past, and when her cherished diary goes missing and letters, seemingly from an obsessed fan, begin turning up at her apartment, things take an extraordinary and deadly turn.

My chief complaint here is John Buffalo Mailer’s writing: there’s a lot of ideas floating around, too many in fact, and nothing comes of any of them. Is this a cautionary tale about the dangers of sharing our lives on social media? Is it a tension-filled spy thriller? There’s even a suggestion of witchcraft at one point. The answer is that it’s all of those things and none of them. To be honest, I’m not overly convinced filmmaker Jennifer Geifer herself knows.

This feels like a committee has put it together, several different concepts mashed together to form some semblance of a complete narrative. It fails. And it’s a real shame, too. Performances are pretty good across the board, even if the characters are a little generic – with standout displays from Claudia Mailer, Ciaran Byrne and Philip Alexander. But very little here occurs naturally. Almost everything feels manufactured, except, maybe, for the chemistry between the central cast, which is wholly organic.

Diery certainly isn’t without its charms: the characters are likable, the performances are solid, and Julia Swain’s cinematography exudes atmosphere. But it’s let down, badly, by several plot contrivances and its inability to stay on the rails for more than 20 minutes.

And when it ended with an enormous Sleepy Hollow-like exposition dump, I was done.   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P1JRs9b6Pw