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Talking with Jack Plotnick of SPACE STATION 76

by Posted in Interviews, Uncategorized Tagged , , ,

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“Never give up, never surrender,” Alan Rickman famously peeped out in Galaxy Quest. “Live long and prosper,” the wise Spock gently reinforced. “The force is with you,” Ol’ Ben loved to chime in every now and then. But it’s the iconic words of a toy, “To infinity and beyond,” that have come to describe the sci-fi space explorer mantra: that there are no limitations, no furthest reaches. But what if you were content just floating around space? Not conquering anything, not plotting any universe-saving diplomatic truces, not battling off malevolent, oddly-shaped aliens? That’s the question Jack Plotnik asks in his endlessly funny Space Station 76 and the results are blisteringly good.

 

Though always quick with a joke, Plotnik’s film works so well because it seeks to understand rather than mock its motley crew of characters. From our review,

“At the forefront of this final frontier are an unlikely cast of characters, each representative of the many uncertainties and insecurities of the era. There’s the boredom weary housewife, Misty, who spends her days slurping down Prosacs, her down-on-his-luck everyman husband, Ted, new co-pilot Jessica who is at her core representative of the shifting winds of the feminism movement, and Captain Glenn (played by Patrick Wilson with startling sensitivity), the pinnacle of Plotnik’s satirical heights.”

Jack sat down to talk about the appeal of the 70s, the indefiniteness of space, the process of writing as a team, the challenges of making a low budget sci-fi flick, and whether he could ever reasonably see Space Station 76 as a TV program.

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I think the most burning question here is where did this idea come from?

Jack Plotnik: To set a movie in the future, but imagined from the 70’s? Is that what you mean?

Yeah. The concept is wonderful but it’s so wacky. How did you cook it up?

JP: I came up with this idea. It was about eight years ago. I had wanted to write a play that would explore what it was like to grow up in the 70’s in the suburbs. I just thought it would be more interesting way to go about it, to set it in this future that we dreamed of that was never actually realized. It symbolized, for a lot of people, what it was like to grow up at that time where you thought things were going to be a certain way and they didn’t quite turn out that way. I’ve always been obsessed with this 70’s future. My family went to Disney World in the 70’s and I rode the monorail. I just thought, “We’re going to be on Moon colonies soon.” Everything was possible in the 70’s. Of course, now looking back, my parents divorced in the 80’s and I can see now the trials and tribulations they had in the suburbs. You look back and see things didn’t quite turn out the way you expected.

This film also seems like it would work really well as a series. What made you decide on the format of a feature film?

JP: Well it’s really easy to say, “Why don’t you do a series?” It’s actually really tough to get a show on the air. If you don’t have experience as a show runner, what tends to happen is you sell your ideas to somebody who has already created a TV show and then they run it. This was a very specific story that I wanted to tell, a very personal one. A lot of what was in my life as a kid was in this movie. So I wanted to tell this particular story, however, before a movie I was thinking of a show and I would love that to happen. I’ve already been thinking about what adjustments I would have to make to have this be a TV show. I love that you said that.

In the film, there’s all these kind of absurd, goofball, ridiculous concepts going on, but they frame some really potent issues. What for you was the launching pad of for going, “We’re going to make this futuristic, sci-fi, low-brow comedy, but at the same time bury these important issues within it?”

JP: That’s the type of artist I am. I love mixing genres, because I think the human condition is: life is really hard but it’s also really funny. Life can be painful and sometimes people can be mean. To me, my favorite kind of comedy comes with a pinch of sadness or devastation. Some of my favorite artists, their movies are uncomfortable comedy. They’re comic drama. I always have had an appreciation for that. In terms of the heavy messages going on, I can’t help that I want things to also be funny. There were some things I wanted to say about the pain of growing up in that time in the suburbs. At the same time, I didn’t want it to be a straight up drama, because I’m a pretty silly guy and I like to laugh. This seemed like a fun way to explore that without being too heavy.

Patrick Wilson in this film is absolutely brilliant. His character is hysterical and heartbreaking at the same time.

JP: Now that you say that, I think that’s a nice way to put the movie.

What was writing his character like, for you personally?, He’s dealing with this issue of coming out and concealing his homosexuality and it’s clearly not acceptable at the time. What kind of statement did you want to make with his character?

JP: To me, sometimes it’s just a matter of just showing, and that’s all the statement you need to make. We’re sort of examining what it was and what that would be like, for people who don’t know what that’s like to see it and have some empathy. I co-wrote this film and a lot of Glenn’s work came from one writer, Sam Pancake, and he did a beautiful job. Glenn’s more suicidal tendencies came from me. I thought that would be an interesting way to deal with the very real pain that people go through with that kind of self-hatred. So the idea is that Glenn wants to kill himself but the ship won’t let him.

That’s hysterical but it’s also so real at the same time.

JP: Patrick Wilson is just so not this guy. He just walked on set with this, I think, iconic character I’ve never seen him play, yet I feel like this character has always been around. I’ve never seen a character quite like this, yet you feel like, “Oh I know this guy.” I love what he did with it.

Let’s talk more about the writers, because you just mentioned that you worked with a whole team of writers. There were five of you credited with the film. What was that writing process like? Why so many writers? In the future, would you go with such a collaborative effort again, or would you rather just focus on your own project?

JP: Well I love working with other people. I’m a collaborative writer. I co-wrote and directed the off Broadway musical, Disaster, that we hope to bring to Broadway later this year. I just like to do it that way. What happened was that I came up with the idea for Space Station 76 and I just jabbered around my favorite actors at the moment – funny, funny, smart people. For three months, I would direct them and through improv they created these characters. I would record the sessions, type them out, and then I would sort of sift through it and pick the best stuff. Then I would try to give that back to the actors. So the scenes grew out of improv. Then, in order to turn it into a movie, we needed to open up the world, and I added some characters, and did some more work on it. I love writing with other people and creating as a group. At the same time, it was very important that I also look at it from the big picture and keep the focus, so it’s one work of art and not five. I do think it’s all very much one voice coming through that film.

I definitely agree with you. It actually kind of surprised me when I saw so many writers on it, because typically you would think it would be more jarring, but no not at all.

JP: I think everybody understood what I was going for and I handpicked people who are smart and funny and have the same sense of humor as I do. They nailed it and I just love those guys.

Speaking of that sense of humor, my favorite character in the film is Dr. Bot. That was such a hysterical role.

JP: He’s a very small android. He’s a robot therapist who lead characters can see, but only Misty, the frustrated housewife, tends to go to him. I’m glad you liked him.

Totally. He’s the cult character to pull from the film. With Dr. Bot, was there any kind of statement that you were trying to make about the mental health community, or is this more just playing it straight for comedy?

JP: Everything in this film is commenting on a specific time and place of what it was like in the 70’s and what people were doing, what they were up to. There’s a few things going on with Dr. Bot. One of the big things about this film is it’s really about people who can’t connect, in general how hard it is these days to connect with one another. I just find it interesting that this character who is a frustrated housewife in the unhappy marriage, the only person she connects to in the film is this tiny robot. And to really connect with him, she ends up having to turn him off. One thing I love about him is that the sound effects were done by Denny Bird at Skywalker Sound. His father did the sounds for the original Star Wars movies. Denny did an amazing job. He added so much to this film. One of the things he did is he added a wonderful sound of Dr. Bot thinking. Whenever someone said something to him, you hear this looping sound. I believe it’s the sound of an old fashioned printer from the 70’s or 80’s. It’s so fun to watch Dr. Bot think and to see how his brain works.

This being your directorial debut, at least on the big screen, can you tell me about a couple things that were surprisingly hard that caught you off guard by how difficult they were? And then other things that you thought were going to be really hard but ended up being surprisingly easy.

JP: In terms of how hard it is to make a feature, my friend Richard Day who wrote and directed Girls will be Girls that I produced and starred in, he said, “Doing this film is going to be the hardest thing you’ve ever done in your life.” And then, “You’re going to want to immediately do it again.” He said it’s going to miserable and horrible and everything is going to look like all is lost. There’s definitely those moments. Specifically, there are just so many moving pieces. I had a great team around me, amazing producers and the whole crew. Actually shooting went fairly smoothly. The hardest part, I would say, was pre-production, getting everything ready. We had to build a spaceship on a soundstage in the valley. But the actual shooting went incredibly smoothly and I think the thing that surprised me was how they come and they’re just ready to play, if you get the right actors. It was just amazing to watch them show up on set and do what they do. It was just facilitating it. Especially that little girl, the girl Kylie Rogers played, she is a genius. She was just the one-take wonder. She somehow knew what every scene was about and would really get it in never more than two takes. She astounded me. That was a real joy to discover her and we were lucky to find her.

She was lovely in the film. Obviously, you were under budgetary constraints, this being a little independent feature that you’re then doing in space, the CG is not astounding. Would you want it any other way, though? Would you rather have had big production values on the asteroids and space station, or do you feel like this was kind of perfectly suiting for what it was?

JP: Well I would have loved to have millions of dollars, yes. A film like this it’s not quite the tone people are used to. You come to a spaceship, you tend to think, “I’m either going to get a goofball comedy like Spaceballs or a space-adventure comedy like Galaxy Quest.” People don’t quite expect to see a science fiction movie about suburban life in space. Hopefully people get that. Sometimes the characters can be mean to each other. You can also laugh at it all. I personally love comedies that are uncomfortable, like the British Office. In terms of the budget, we had enough money and also the mother of invention is necessity. So it was always exciting when we didn’t actually have the millions of dollars to build what we wanted to build. It was exciting to find the other way to do it and we always were able to. I’m just proud of what my set designer pulled off and the costumes. There’s really nothing I would change. The sets are gorgeous. I’m really thrilled. I mean maybe with a little extra money we could have been 3-D.

Earlier you mentioned that when you made this film, someone told you that it would be the hardest thing you’ll ever do but you would want to get right back on that horse. Have you already started thinking about a new project?

JP: Absolutely. I have several things. My immediate plan is to direct my musical, Disaster!. You can read about it at Disastermusical.com if you want to see it in New York. The plan is to direct that on Broadway in the fall. So I’ve got to do that. But then, yeah, again I love that you said Space Station as a TV series because we have already kind of been thinking about that and talking about it. And there’s a couple film scripts that I’m working with other people on.

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Out in Theaters: THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

by Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Fiennes, Brody, Dafoe, Goldblum, Murray, Law, Swinton, Ronan, Norton, Keitel, Schwartzman, Seydoux, Wilson, Balaban, Amalric, Wilkinson. Wes Anderson‘s latest may have more big names working for it than ever before but their characters are more paper thin than they’ve been, more fizzle than tonic, more Frankenstein’s creations than humans. His company of regulars – joined by a vast scattering of newbies – are relegated to playing furniure-chomping bit roles, filling the shoes of cartoonish sketches, slinking in long shadows of characters. From Willem Dafoe‘s brutish, brass-knuckled Jopling to a caked-up and aged Tilda Swinton, gone are the brooding and calculated, flawed and angsty but always relatable characters of Wes yore. In their place, a series of dusty cardboard cutouts; fun but irrevocably inhuman. Read More

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SXSW Review: HONEYMOON

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“Honeymoon”
Directed by Leigh Janiak
Starring Rose Leslie, Harry Treadaway, Ben Huber, Hanna Brown
Thriller, Horror, Sci-Fi
87 Mins
United States

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In 1954, Colliers Magazine published Jack Finney‘s sci-fi horror serial The Body Snatchers. Since then, this fire starter novella has led to a handful of direct film adaptations (the latest being Oliver Hirschbiegel‘s 2007 The Invasion starring Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman) and dozens of spinoffs (John Carpenter‘s The Thing for instance.) But even more importantly, Finney’s creation all but gave birth to a whole subsection of genre: the infamous body invasion flick. In the years since, many filmmakers have employed this humble little niche market as an elastic stage to claim veritable scares by peddling harrowing practical visual effects and unsettling character shifts (in the best of cases) or CG sight gags and the banal formula of a group’s numbers mysteriously thinning (in the worst of cases). Director and co-writer Leigh Janiak though sees the genre as a chance to explore change on a microscopic scale, to prod just how absolutely horrifying it would be to see the one you love most temporally drained from their own body. Let’s just say, it’s not nice.

With the very talented Rose Leslie (Ygritte from Game of Thrones) and Henry Callaway at her disposal, Janiak prohibits an immense talent for directing her actors into believable territory, even under such inconceivable circumstances. From the opening montage where we meet newlyweds Bea and Paul undergoing matrimonial traditions like cake fighting (even though they forewent a real cake for cinnamon buns) and recounting the events by which they met (bad Indian food, it’s always bad Indian food!) to Rose’s fleeting misguided attempts to protect her husband from her extraterrestrial transformation (“They’ll never find you down here”) and through all the bumping of uglies in between, Leslie and Callaway sell the show as genuine.

Even on the heels of the more outrageous elements, their steadfast performances point to a unshaken understanding of their character’s respective head spaces. For the genre, it’s an uncharacteristically committed pair of performances and with Janiak jamming her cameras right in the midst of their personal space, we feel like we’re right alongside them, an equal victim of some inexplicable emotional violation.  

That is really where the true horror of these kinds of body snatching stories lies. Worse yet than seeing someone shot by a laser beam or abducted by some ethereal blue beam, there’s something infinitely more jarring to standing witness to an individual’s personality being siphoned out of them. Janiak’s film engages this process in stages. After running into what seems like the only other two people living in a ten mile radius, couple Annie and Will (who Bea just so happened to share a summer love with in the way, way back of past childhood flirtations), Janiak presents a first taste of “off-ness”. Annie’s withdrawn, confuzzled and all around off. She’s stage one of a mental virus, the foreshadow of what’s to come.

Shortly after meeting them, Paul wakes in the middle of the night to find the spot in bed next to him abandoned and cold to the touch. With harebrained suspicions of infidelity, he charges from the house only to find Bea naked, disorientated and caked in mud. Upon bringing her inside, a patch of what appears to be bug bites around her crotchal region alarms him. It’s nothing to worry about, she pleads in unconvincing manner. Instead of slamming on the brakes and seeing whatever transformation to come take place overnight, Janiak picks at her plate like a sparrow to birdseed. Like a gas leak from the brainstem, Bea isn’t replaced outright so much as reborn one blink at a time, reinvented with each breathe drawn, re-imagined with every performance of normalcy.

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Watching Bea recite milestone events from her own life into the mirror mimics an earlier scene where she practices a speech to get out of engaging in post-marital carnal relations but in the space between, she’s become more drained – more a shell than the filling. She’s lost another chunk of “Bea.” It’s the hollow spaces between the words, the falsity of her gestures, the empty recitation of loving remarks that imbues Honeymoon with such an eerie tautness. Bea being such an unreliable character, we never know what’s coming next and right up to the very last moments, we never really get a grasp on how much “Bea” is left in Bea after all.

And though Honeymoon may take place at a cabin in the woods, the camp has been left at home. Janiak’s take is fatally humorless, devoutly sobering. Instead of harping on frights, she’s left us with a steamy atmosphere so thick you could cut it with a butter knife and serve it at as a wedding cake. Even the hollowed out bride and groom toppers wouldn’t be missing.  

As Bea and Paul’s deserted woodland homestead becomes an unwelcome chrysalis, we’re left with little more than the remains of an evaporating relationship. Like Bea’s special nightgown (though it’s more hoary than whory) that Paul finds in the woods after her disappearance, there’s chunks inexplicably missing, impossible to recover, chalked up to some pieceless puzzle. But even after everything, there’s still some inkling of connection left, some fleeting memory of what it means to care for each other.

Perhaps that’s her intent after all, to show us something beautiful only to take it away, leaving tatters and fragments of what it meant to be able to connect with someone, to tell them you love them and actually mean it. By the end, “Bea” is reduced to mumbling her twisted version of sweet nothings but I’m still not convinced that all is lost of the well-intending New York butterfly she once was. Even in her harrowing final act, there’s love or at least something masquerading as such.

B+

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Talking with Leigh Janiak of HONEYMOON

by Posted in Interviews Tagged , , , , , ,

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When you think of filmmakers from the sci-fi or horror genre, the first thing that pops into your mind most likely isn’t a young female director. Leigh Janiak though is here with Honeymoon to challenge that assumption. Crafting a modern sci-fi/horror film actually worth remembering, Janiak showcases her razor sharp ability to cull great performances while demonstating a kingpin-level status of economic filmography.

 

With only a few weeks of shooting (many of which were under threat of rain), four actors and a tent-sized crew, Janiak has wrung all the best elements of a genre film out, rinsed and refused to repeat, offering a genuinely eerie, wholly engaging body snatchers narrative. From our review of the film,

“Though Honeymoon may take place at a cabin in the woods, the camp has been left at home. Janiak’s take is fatally humorless, devoutly sobering. Instead of harping on frights, she’s left us with a steamy atmosphere so thick you could cut it with a butter knife and serve it at as a wedding cake. Even the hollowed out bride and groom toppers wouldn’t be missing.”

Debuting in the midnight section of this year’s SXSW festival, I had a chance to speak with Leigh about where Honeymoon came from, the challenges of working on a tight budget, and whether or not she believes in aliens.

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Firstly, I really enjoyed Honeymoon. What was your inspiration for writing this, I know you co-wrote it, was it mostly you that came up with the idea?

Leigh Janiak: Phil (Graziadei), my writing partner, we met when we were freshmen at NYU, a long time ago. When we come up with ideas, we don’t really keep track of whose idea it was first, our process is so intertwined. Basically what happened was, in 2009 or 2010, I saw Tanya Hardinger and Monsters within a couple months of one another. It jolted me out of a scriptwriting process, because we had been spending four or five years writing scripts, meeting people at production companies trying to break into the business that way. Seeing these movies inspired me. “With the next film we write, let’s actually make a movie.” If we don’t take things into our own hands, it’s going to be forever before we actually get hired to do a studio-level movie. You know, years and years and years. We went into writing Honeymoon with this idea that it was gonna be a contained genre movie, that we thought that we could get made. The idea itself grew out of this idea of exploring how something very familiar can become other, or monstrous. Picking this idea of a relationship and destroying it. Connecting to that, we thought about bigger budget ideas that we really loved, and the audience could understand. What we wanted to do was make this small, rounded, intimate version of that.

You work with such a small cast. There are four people credited working on it, but only two are you really dealing with for the most part. How does that effect the dynamic between yourself and the crew, and does it make it more of a collaborative effort between you guys?

LJ: Certainly. An interesting thing: Rose and Harry had met once before in London before they arrived on set. They got to set, maybe five days before production began. The three of us had about four days where we could maybe spend some time working together. I wouldn’t say it was rehearsal, it was more like talking through the characters, making sure we were all on the same page about where their head spaces were at certain points through the script, and really going through that process together which I think was invaluable. Rose approached Bea from a very outside perspective. Really analyzing who she was, how she thought Bea would react in a situation, there was a space between Rose the actress and Bea the character. Whereas Harry is very much more like method and he explored who Paul was from the inside-out. Initially that was a bit challenging, because when you only have two actors and they have such different approaches to their craft, you kind of have to negotiate that difference. But I think ultimately it ended up working really well with the dynamic of the characters because they are slowly drifting apart so to speak. It’s just such an intense environment when you have pretty much only two people the whole time. That took a lot of screen time for both of them and they really didn’t have a lot of down time. We shot six-day weeks so they didn’t have much time off, so the whole thing became very intimate. We all spent a lot of time together. I think it was very collaborative because of that and I just felt very lucky: they’re both so talented and they really elevated everything that they touched.

Their performances were undoubetly fantastic throughout the film. You haven’t yet released an official budget on this and probably can’t because it’s still in acquisition, but I think we can assume it was somewhat modest. Can you tell me some of the biggest challenges you ran into working on a tight budget?

LJ: Any time you’re making an indie movie, your biggest challenges are going to be time. Because you always want more time to shoot. We actually had a really nice schedule. We had 24 days which is a lot more than a lot of indie movies do. I felt that 24 days was quite comfortable except that we were shooting in North Carolina in the Spring, and we only had eight hours of darkness a night. Because we had so much night shooting, that became a real challenge. Instead of doing a twelve hour day, when we had our night work, we only had eight hours to shoot. That was difficult, because your schedule just shrinks a bit. The other main thing was that we had terrible rain, I mean it was horrible, it started raining maybe four or five days after we started shooting and then it didn’t stop for about two and a half weeks. The water levels rose, it flooded our docks, all of the roads to the cottage were completely muddy and my first VD was like pulling out his hair, we had no idea what we were going to do because we had some exterior scenes that we still needed to shoot. It was supposed to be a “happy, funny Honeymoon” and the rain just kept going. We got really lucky, because two days after we needed to get out of the location, the skies kind of cleared and we prescheduled this long shoot day where we started our night shooting at 6pm and shot all the way through the morning until like mid-afternoon so we could clean up our sunny outside scenes.

Seriously, you don’t usually hear about people complaining about not enough darkness. Before you mentioned that you grew up on horror movies. What were some of the movies that scared you and stuck with you?

LJ: It’s interesting, because I consider the genre that I like more than anything else to be sci-fi, more than horror. I have a lot of gaps in my knowledge of horror, generally, but it’s funny because my first horror movie I saw maybe in like 5th grade, and I was having a sleep-over party and I really wanted to have a horror movie because that’s what all my friends were doing, like people would be watching Chucky and I really wanted to compete with that, so my Mom said “I’m not showing a horror movie, you’re at our house.” It wasn’t just that we were a little young for it, but, what she did was she rented Psycho, which is like, way worse than any of those 80’s slasher movies, this is like 1988, 1989. She’d say “those are just slashing for gore! I’m gonna rent you Psycho” so that was extremely traumatic and awful. So those were the kind of horror movies that I began to appreciate, the Hitchockian or Palanskian, which I watched a lot in junior high and stuff. Those I still consider my biggest influences horror-wise, like Palanski for sure, Kubrick, even Hitchcock as well but I don’t really see that applying to my style. But I certainly do aspire to do more like Palanski and Kubrick and stuff.

You say that you’re more of a sci-fi person and even if it’s not ever explicitly stated in the movie, we’re led to believe that there are some kind of extraterrestrial creatures who are starting some inklings of an invasion or something. Did you do much research into alien life-forms, or did you talk to any people who maybe claimed that they had been abducted?

LJ: No, not really. I’d say that mostly I have a preoccupation with aliens, personally. Like I said, in really thinking about those bigger invasion movies, even things like Independence Day, it would always happen: there would be this big giant bang and suddenly all of the ships are overhead and everyone’s leaving. I love Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it’s one of my favorite alien-invasion movies because it does feel more grounded. I like the way Richard Dreyfuss’ character begins, it feels like he’s just going crazy and just with the dirt making the mountain, I love that shot so much. So, for Honeymoon it was really just trying to put myself in the position where most realistically we could capture that this began on a smaller, slower scale. In the movie, the idea is that Bea and Annie are thought to be first beginnings of this wider invasion .

The last project that you worked on was the Europa Report, even though you weren’t directing that, it also deals with life outside of what we know. Regardless of what you might refer to it as, do you believe in “aliens?”

LJ: I absolutely believe in them and in extraterrestrial life. Obviously, I don’t know what that could mean, it could mean a variety of things. Whether that’s a bacteria or arsenic-based life form, but I certainly believe that it’s naïve to not believe that there’s something else that exists.

Looking forward on your career, do you want to stick with the sci-fi genre or would you like to maybe try something new? What’s next on your plate?

LJ: We’re working on a few different ideas right and they are all sort of like walking this sci-fi, horror space. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t be interested in trying something else too, but I grew up reading sci-fi. The Wrinkle in Time books, are the first books that I really remember affecting me in a way, from then on I really became obsessed with thinking about how science can really affect narrative and open up imagination. Often in a terrible way, which I like to explore. I think that I’m going to stick with this genre, but it’s not like I have any kind of rule. If any other projects or ideas came up that I liked, I would obviously open to doing that too.

One of the things that you do really well in the film, both from a writing and directorial standpoint, is that you don’t really set out to scare us, so much as just create this really moody, really eerie atmosphere that’s anchored by these really well-written, fleshed out characters. That’s a really nice surprise in a horror or sci-fi movie because at this point we’re so used to shallowly-written characters and a jump-scare every fifteen minutes or so. With Honeymoon do you see this well written character drama as the response to this slew of horror characters that are so often under-written and under-developed? Is this your “solution”?

LJ: Definitely. For me, you can watch people get splattered across screen, starting from minute two to the end, and that’s entertainment, and it’s great and it does a very specific thing, but for me when I am just aiming for more is that creeping awfulness. I really just wanted to make as much as possible, the audience feel uncomfortable and bad, just that sense of incredible eeriness as you described it. To me, that’s achieved most easily if you can bring your characters in close. Let your characters interact with the audience and understand who they are, so it will mean more when they’re falling apart.

Are you actively working on a next project right now? Do you just have a lot of balls in the air?

LJ: My writing partner and I have two ideas that we’re really working on right now, and those are in the early stages. We’re not almost done with the script or anything like that, but definitely I’m hoping that one of those will become my next film. But hopefully sci-fi will open up a lot of opportunities since we’re also playing at Tribeca. We’re also exploring other projects as well.

Can you tell us anything about those two project ideas?

LJ: Not right now. I hate talking about things until I’m 100% confident in the iteration that it’s going to live in!

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SXSW Review: KUMIKO THE TREASURE HUNTER

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“Kumiko the Treasure Hunter”
Directed by David Zellner
Starring Rinko Kikuchi, Nobuyuki Katsube, David Zellner, Nathan Zellner, Shirley Venard
Drama
America

“Based on a true story” the title card blares, half-legible in crusty, bite-sized pixelations of a magnified television screen. One chunky word at a time, each letter pronounced, amplified, stuffed in our faces. Pulled straight from Fargo‘s opening sequence (the lauded Coen Bros film goes on to become a key character in the film) and scattered by tightrope zooms, this intriguing unveiling of Kumiko the Treasure Hunter immediately begs question about the veracity of what we’re going to witness. Read More

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Talking With the Zellner Bros of ‘KUMIKO THE TREASURE HUNTER’

by Posted in Interviews Tagged , , , 1 Comment

This may not be the Zellner Brother‘s first rodeo but it’s likely to be the one to put them on the map. In addition to acting in small supporting roles across a sprawl of independent features, David and Nathan Zellner have stirred up a tight knit circle of fandom with their earlier works Goliath and Kid Thing that have gone on to tilt their filmography in new and interesting circles. But neither of those features quite inspired the near unanimous support that Kumiko the Treasure Hunter has and here to tell us about the process of turning an urban legend into a stunning feature film are the sibling twosome themselves. Read More

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Probably In Theaters, Vol. 2

by Posted in Movie Posters Tagged , ,

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When Hollywood stops being so goddamn lazy with its movie concepts, I’ll do the same and actually Google the movie listings. Until then, here are the movies that are Probably In Theaters:

ACTION: Approaching the Bench

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Approaching the Bench: “A disillusioned judge decides to take the law into his own hands and begins hitting the gym.”

SCI-FI: Down to Earth

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Down To Earth: “An abandoned Alien teenager tries to live a normal life in a small town in southern california. His feelings for the local cheerleading captain are complicated when puberty hits and his alien genitalia come in.”

COMEDY: All Greek to Me

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All Greek To Me: “A hearty teenage girl goes to Greece for the summer to stay with her distant relatives when her parents get a divorce. She learns about life, love, kebabs, and that differences are only skin-deep.”

HORROR: You Are What You Eat

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You Are What You Eat: “When disobedient schoolchildren go missing, the trail leads to the cafeteria.”

ROMANCE: Legalese

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Legalese: “Two uptight and perpetually single lawyers find each other: on opposing sides of a career-making case.”

THRILLER: Cover Girl

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Cover Girl: “A beautiful secret agent masquerades as a jetsetting model in the world’s most fashionable—and dangerous—cities.”

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SXSW Review: AMONG THE LIVING

by Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged , , , , , , ,

“Among the Living”
Directed by Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury
Starring Beatrice Dalle, Anne Marivin, Nicolas Giraud, Francis, Renaud, Xacharie Chasseriaud, Damien Ferdel
Horror, Thriller
France

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Pitched as a crossroads between Stand By Me and Friday the 13th, Among the Living builds a beautifully unsettling landscape only to take a sledge hammer to it in its run-of-the-mill, slasher-standard third act. It’s a roller coaster of quality, ticking upwards in fitful bumps, building mood and anxiety in the gorgeously photographed, kaleidoscopic backwoods of rural France. Strapped in and nervous, we’re primed for the fall, ready to rocket around unexpected twists and turns, thrown for 360s, tossed into loops and amped to arrive at the end wide-eyed and breathless. When we do reach the precipice and look unto the other side though, the sinking feeling in our stomach is one born of disappointment, not terror. Instead of a winding track, heinous turns and caveats into foggy caves, it’s a one-track rail cruising straight to the end. On this straight and narrow pathway, there’s nothing new, little remarkable and hardly anything exceedingly effective. And while the build up may be right on the money, the climax feels more like a bag of change.

This kids-vs-killer horror works best when serving salty scoops of anticipation – when it’s table setting – and the first scene is absolutely dreadful proof of that fact. Planted mise-en-scène, we start the show scrambling to catch up with the chaos unfolding around us, trying to figure out why knifes are brandished and guns popping off. A man defends his child against his own wife and we know not why or what he did to deserve such a reaction but it prods both our panic center and curiosity hub. It’s the ideal cold open that leaves us questioning how the pieces will fit together.

At first glance, there’s no denying the scene is perfectly set for an unsettling and mentally distressing horror feature to unfold, one that would live up to the mantle of European filmmaking duo Julian Maury and Alexndre Bustillo. Bustillo and Maury have etched out a name as a sort of Crimson Underground of French new wave horror. Their cult favorites, Inside and Livid, too indie to nab a US release, their work is so off the beaten path that you’d be hard pressed to find them on DVD, save ever in an actual theater. So to say their handiwork is a rarity is an understatement, which made my initial anticipation for their latest film that much more.  

Even while I was at the screening, a stranger turned to me and outright asked, “So why are you here?” Like the other uninitiated, I was here on a hunch, attracted by the synopsis and one intriguing promo picture that I’d seen. The stranger gleefully informed me that I was in for a treat. Unlike the kind of “treat” I was expecting, Amongst the Living was more like a can of gummy worms that’d been dropped in the sand. Once the gambit is up, it’s not worth chewing your way through the remains.

Famous for their excessive gore and deadly somber tone, Maury and Bustillo earn an outpouring of deference from their fans but I have to wonder after a showing like this, how many will truly be satisfied. Seeing the thing transform from a genuine creeper into your humdrum slasher is like witnessing a mall parking lot flasher expose himself to you. The sad truth of the matter is in both cases, there’s often not a lot to show.

C-

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SXSW Review: STARRY EYES

by Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged , , , , , , 3 Comments

“Starry Eyes”
Directed by Kevin Kolsch, Dennis Widmyer
Starring Alex Essoe, Amanda Fuller, Noah Segan, Fabianne Therese, Shane Coffey, Natalie Castillo, Pat Healy, Nick Simmons, Maria Olsen, Louis Dezseran
Horror
United States

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At the risk of emasculating myself, I’ll admit that Starry Eyes was so scary that it made me cry. Not ooey, gooey gobs of terror tears so much as the lone, solitary drop leaking down my face as my jaw was busy sagging half-way to the floor. Still, a tear’s a tear and a tear did floweth. So if this film doesn’t at least creep you out, check your pulse because you’re probably not human or may have already sold your soul to the devil. It’s more likely though that you’ll be sitting in a pile of your own yuck after the screening, tired, sweaty, fearful and all the more afraid of the dark.

Like last year’s very frightening The Conjuring, few to no jump scares are employed as this isn’t the brand of chilling that seeks to sporadically startle you and lap up easy frights. No, director duo Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer‘s plans are far more sinister. They would rather crawl deep inside you, settling in the nook of your cerebral panic center, and plant a seed of horror that’ll grow throughout the movie until explodes into a full blown anxiety attack. And just when everything seems like it possibly couldn’t get any worse, you turn a corner into a whole new realm of terror. A maze of shudders, a labyrinth of gore, Starry Eyes triggers your instinctual fight or flight mode and dares you to stick it out.

Wringing all the best elements of a dark character study with the deeply unsettling nature of the body horror genre, Starry Eyes soars on the wings of star Alex Essoe. As Sarah, Essoe embodies the 20something wanna-be starlet who will go to any lengths in order to achieve her dreams of fame and fortune. Her bedroom walls plastered with the icons of 1940s celebrity, she wants the world, and she wants it now. When a role comes along that would be the perfect launching pad to become the next “it” girl, she goes to anything lengths necessary to land the role, even if that means losing herself.

Essoe’s performance is the bombastic center piece of the film – the gory bride on a red velvet wedding cake, the bouquet of rotting roses on some unmarked grave. Her positively brilliant turn as Sarah reminds us of Natalie Portman‘s Oscar-earning performance in Black Swan and Shelly Duvall‘s massively underrated embodiment of horror in The Shining. She’s at once totally in control and veering from the tracks of sanity. As she makes more and more conceits of character and body, Essoe’s arc becomes unforgettable, an indelible bookmark of Starry Eye’s staying power. Without Essoe’s incredible and unflinching performance, this would be a whole new beast entirely.

There’s one point where we feel like all of the build-up may be for naught, that this would tilt into a cautionary tale that peters rather than commits to its zany over-the-topisms but that’s not the case. Once the third act rounds the corner, it’s an unrelenting marathon of what we – and Sarah – can and will endure. It’s chilling, the stuff of nightmares, but it hurts so good.

The whole selling your soul to the devil thing has been done before and probably in more subtle ways but subtlety is not Kolsch and Widmyer’s game. Rather Starry Eyes is such a horrifying victory for them because of how far they’re willing to take us. This deep down the rabbit hole, everything is so pitch black that we can’t see even the faintest flicker of light and they, in this realm of deprivation, they mine the scares perfectly. It’s unrelenting darkness opens the flood gates, letting the horror flows from what’s onscreen and those other thoughts that exist in our imagination alone. It’s the perfect synthesize of shock, disgust and angst that’ll have audiences turning in their seats and watched through the crooks of hands shielding their faces.

Starry Eyes conjures up quick similarities to Black Swan and Rosemary’s Baby but finds a perfect footing between the two so any similarities feel incidental rather than essential. It may wheel in the same thematic ballpark but, if you can believe it, makes both of those features look like a walk in the park. Both Swan and Baby may leave you unsettled but Starry Eyes will leave you shaken. At any rate, it’s unique and visionary take will all but guarantee a long shelf life among horror buffs and is sure to earn a deserved overnight cult following.

A

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SXSW Review: PING PONG SUMMER

by Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged , , , , , , ,

“Ping Pong Summer”
Directed by Michael Tully 
Starring Marcello Conte, Myles Massey, Emmi Shockley, Lea Thompson, Susan Sarandon, Amy Sedaris, John Hannah, Robert Longstreet
Comedy
United States

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The opening scene to Ping Pong Summer sees Rad – our very uncool, ironically named protagonist – trying to make a hardboiled egg. After getting a pot of water boiling, he eyes the microwave, opting for the easier route, hoping to satisfy his need for eggy goodness as quickly as possible. As that white egg spins in the hollows of a 1980s microwave, you could hear the audience groan with unease. “Is it gonna explode?” you could almost hear them fret. When Rad pops the now piping hot egg out thirty seconds later, peels it and chomps down, the yolk – now essentially a yellow sun of melty goo – explodes onto his face like yolked magma. Half of the hapless audience explodes with laughter. After digesting the contents of the remainder of this helplessly uncool flick though, one ought to see this dismal cold open as the perfect analogy for the film at large – an easy route to the finish line that just ends up exploding in its own face.

The most insurmountable problem of Ping Pong Summer is that it thinks it’s ironic but never does anything to convince us that they even know what the word means. Imitation is not art nor is it satire. Simply recreating the oddness of an epoch without actually trying to make some statement about it just goes to show the work of someone who doesn’t quite understand what irony means. A film about the 80s isn’t ironic because it’s about the 80s, there needs to be something more, something deeper. As it is here, you could measure the depth with a few clicks of pencil lead.

The characters are hammy archetypes, the plot essentially a familiar riff on the underdog sports flick – a tacky take on Rocky; the Out Cold of ping pong – and the acting is bottom shelf. If there’s one thing I learned at SXSW, it’s don’t drink too much of the cheap stuff. It may be tempting but you’ll end up paying for it later. It’s too bad that Ping Pong Summer didn’t learn that lesson as well.

Myles Massey as Rad’s snarky sidekick is the picture of everything Ping Pong gets wrong. As an actor, he’s an absolute nightmare. Every last phrase Massey cloyingly utters feels like it was read from the crook of his underarm. It’s recited like bad Shakespeare, spewed like a word burp, overblown and ham-fisted. I get it, he’s a kid but he’s exactly the reason why children actors get such a bad rap. This kid is bad. Not Michael Jackson bad, not “so bad he’s good” bad, just plain old, tried-and-true bad.

Heading up the show, Marcello Conte as Rad is surprisingly enough the best part of the film and is the only one who feels like a living breathing person. It seems like he was the solitary kid in this overblown production that actually took a few acting classes beforehand. Good on him. Even veteran Susan Saradon phones it in from a million miles away. Her halfhearted take on a Mrs. Miyazaki is downright dreadful, an abject failure from beginning to end. From the place-holder writing of her character to her tepid arc that fails to work on even the shallowest level, she is another symptom of director Michael Tully‘s essential misunderstanding of how to treat character. In one fell swoop, he’s proven he has no handle on how to direct his actors, even those that’ve been at the game for decades.

With the sporadic fits of laughter that Ping Pong pulled from the audience, I often wondered if I was just not in on the joke, if my lack of being a preteen in the mid-80s was what created the emotional distance I felt from everything going on onscreen. Upon further reflection though, whether that’s the case or not, it’s no excuse. Film is supposed to be transportative. A film about the 80s is supposed to make the audience feel a time and a place – to appreciate, or at least, understand it. To rely on nostalgia alone is never enough and results in something as uneven and pale as this. In the future, Tully ought use nostalgia as a tool, not a crutch.  Here though, he’s nostalgia crutching so hard that it’s no wonder the film can hardly stand on its own two feet.

D

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