Events
Slamdance Film Review: After Arcadia
After Arcadia is a ’50s-science-fiction-themed short shot in black and white wherein the protagonist’s internal monologue opens with his guilt for having accidentally decimated humanity with a seemingly nuclear invention that he created. He dilapidates in the boredom of solitude in the bunkers in which the film is shot, which spurs him to create a time machine to reverse his misdeed. … read more
Slamdance Film Review: Rezeta
Rezeta (Rezeta Veliu) is an Albanian (well, Kosovoan) model looking for more opportunities and advancements in her career in México, but, more so, adventure. Once she’s there, she befriends thasher/hesher/metalhead/punker Alex (Roger Mendoza) as a bit of guide for the city she’s in, who also helps her learn español. Rezeta—very much a free spirit—engages in a couple sexual exploits, and eventually tries to drunkenly kiss Alex, much to his surprise and subsequent abashment. … read more
Sundance Film Review: Ping Pong Summer
From the goofy, ’80s-themed opening credits, this film doesn’t pretend it’s going to be anything other than what it is, and that I can respect. It’s a nod to the campy (in both the cinematic and genre definitions of the word) teen movies of the ’80s and ’90s, the underdog championship dramedies of the early aughts, with a dry, Napoleon Dynamite–styled deadpan sheen—and at times, it succeeded in coaxing a sincere smile of nostalgia or a light chuckle from a good joke, but it’s not quite enough. … read more
Sundance Film Review: War Story
I’ve seen some really beautiful, underrated films in the NEXT category at Sundance: where most of the experimental films that only the most open and artsy minded audiences gravitate towards (which means less crowded theaters!). War Story was not one of them. … read more
Sundance Film Review: Song One
Remember Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist? How about nearly anything that Michael Cera or Audrey Plaza have been in the past five years? Well, what the Hollywood indie scene is to those films, Brooklyn’s folky singer/songwriter scene is to Song One. With Oscar winner Anne Hathaway at the helm, one would expect this to be a level above those quirky indie pop romance flicks, but it doesn’t even reach there. … read more
Slamdance Film Review: Who Took Johnny?
Who Took Johnny? is a spooky time. This documentary reaches back to 1982, when Johnny Gosch, a West Des Moines, Iowa paper boy, was abducted. Noreen, his mother, has powered on with the search since then up until now. The film initially follows the inaction on part of the local law enforcement to effectively identify Johnny as a missing person (the law used to require 72 hours for the kid to be gone), and initially wrote his disappearance off as him running away until further evidence compounded this assumption. … read more
Slamdance Film Review: Little Hope Was Arson
Theo Love’s documentary, Little Hope Was Arson, finds communities in East Texas reacting to the burning of 10 churches. The film follows the logic of law enforcement and community members discovering their churches having been torched, one by one, and the trajectory of the investigation. A central figure of the documentary is Christy McAllister, who received a lead that her brother, Daniel McAllister, was a suspect. … read more
Sundance Film Review: No No: A Dockumentary
I didn’t know who Dock Ellis was until last year, when I read about him in Mike Brown’s SLUG Magazine article about athlete drug use—Ellis was famous for pitching a no-hitter for the Pittsburgh Pirates while high on acid in 1970. Ellis, along with the rest of the Pirates, broke barriers and set precedents for black American athletes and developed a reputation for the Pirates as one of the wildest teams in the major leagues. … read more
Sundance Film Review: Mitt
“If this film had come about before the election, Mitt Romney would be in the White House.” I heard this exact same quote from three different people while waiting for other films during Sundance. Let me be frank. No, he wouldn’t. As director Greg Whiteley did, in this film that follows Mitt Romney from December 2006 to the day after the 2012 presidential elections, let’s not focus on politics. … read more
Sundance Film Review: Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead
At the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, director Tommy Wirkola unleashed an over-the-top take on the horror genre with Nazi zombies attacking a group of medical students on a skiing trip in his Norwegian cult flick, “Dead Snow.” Five years later, Wirkola picks up the story at the exact moment where he left us. … read more