Newsletter: Indie Focus: Summer gets wild with Next Fest, ‘The Mind’s Eye’ and ‘Multiple Maniacs’
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen, and welcome to your weekly field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
A lot of think pieces this week are mulling over the failure of the summer movie season to deliver, based largely around the critical drubbing of “Suicide Squad.” And while that crisis may exist at the level of mega-budget would-be blockbusters, for anyone with a more rounded view of the world of cinema, this summer has been more balanced.
Such as, two of my favorite movies of the year, Ben Wheatley’s “High-Rise” and Yorgos Lanthimos’ “The Lobster,” just came out on disc and digital platforms. Each in its own way presents people fighting against the onset of a dystopian society and finding a way to hold on to some semblance of their humanity. So, as always, if the multiplex turns you off, dig a little deeper. Good movies are always out there, and frankly, they are not all that hard to find. (Honest.)
And we also have another event coming up soon with a screening of “The Intervention” followed by a Q&A with director, writer and actress Clea Duvall. Check events.latimes.com for more info.
Sundance Next Fest
In Los Angeles, it’s easy to get spoiled by how many film festivals, revival screenings and Q&A events are happening around town all year round. And as someone who travels to film festivals as well, I know how self-same-y they can become. Which is all a roundabout way of saying that the Los Angeles-based Sundance Next Fest is something special.
Next Fest, which runs Aug. 12-14, brings a small selection of films from January’s Sundance Film Festival to town for their L.A. premieres. But the program also curates musical performers to go with some of the films, such as R&B singer Shamir paired with the fluid romance of “Lovesong” or the out-there bounce of Big Freedia after the extremely outré “The Greasy Strangler.”
Moreover, the party vibe of the event turns crowds into audiences and fosters a sense of connection and community. It’s fun. In just a few short years, Next Fest event has become a real summer essential.
‘Miss Sharon Jones!’
Veteran documentarian Barbara Kopple turns her attention to soul singer Sharon Jones in her new film “Miss Sharon Jones!” The film chronicles Jones’ battle with pancreatic cancer and struggles to get back onstage.
In her review for The Times, Sheri Linden called the film “illuminating and often powerful” while adding “there’s no overarching life-story chronology; biographical details emerge in bits and pieces. The director doesn’t wring maudlin tears from her subject’s ordeal, in part because Jones never asks for pity.”
In the New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis said, “Once you’ve seen this tiny firecracker perform, shimmying and prancing in a flame-red flapper dress, you won’t soon forget her,” adding, “it’s clear she deserves that exclamation point in the title. Even if the movie around her sometimes struggles to do the same.”
‘The Mind’s Eye’
From Joe Begos, who has emerged from the festival circuit as a leading light among low-budget genre filmmakers working from a love of a certain kind of grubby, willfully disreputable storytelling, comes “The Mind’s Eye.” The story is of a telekinetic drifter who becomes caught up in the plans of a scientist whose plans are not at all for the greater good.
In his admittedly mixed review for The Times, Noel Murray compared the film to the recent Netflix hit when he said, “as with ‘Stranger Things,’ the new film ‘The Mind’s Eye’ calls back to genre favorites like ‘Scanners,’ ‘The Fury,’ ‘The Thing’ and ‘Firestarter.’ Fans of pulsing synthesizers, shadowy government facilities and exploding heads should be ecstatic.”
In his review at HitFix, Drew McWeeny added, “‘The Mind’s Eye’ is straight-up sincere, earnestly played and honestly intentioned. This is exploitation fare without any wink attached. These guys aren’t trying to elevate the genre … they just want to make a psychic wars horror film and blow up some heads.”
‘Lace Crater’
A sort-of horror film based more in creepy mood than gore or freakouts, Harrison Atkins’ “Lace Crater” follows a young woman, played by the always compelling actress Lindsay Burdge, as she either goes through some sort of breakdown or begins dating a ghost. Or maybe both.
In her review for The Times, Katie Walsh said, “‘Lace Crater’ is a thoroughly modern ghost story that creeps into camp, testing the audience as it wavers between terrifying and deadpan funny. It would spill over into silly if not for the delicate performance of Burdge, who brings a palpable fragility and anchors the film with her sensitive, intensely physical performance. She’s one of the finest actors working in the experimental New York indie scene at the moment, and this vivid yet controlled performance proves she’s ready to break out onto a bigger stage.”
At MTV, Amy Nicholson compared the film to other current low-budget horror filmmakers when she said, “This wave of young filmmakers uses horror concepts to sell indie stories, a showman’s pitch that gooses up what’s really a simple plot about a lonely girl with monstrous friends. These flicks can lean too much on mood, asking us to stare at their heroine’s face until we invent an excuse why. Still, I love seeing how much they do with so little.”
“I feel like the movie is somehow reverberative in this texture of sexual shame and mystery that reflects a changing world,” Atkins said in an article by Erik Piepenburg in the New York Times that explored how both “Lace Crater” and “It Follows” can be read as parables for anxiety over sexually transmitted diseases. “Sex is a huge part of everyone’s life, but it’s the elephant in the room. It’s a teeming terrain for horror movies because there is so much meaning in the way that people on an individual level, and culture more broadly, interface, or not, with sex. When that bubbles over, it makes for a really specific horror situation.”
‘Multiple Maniacs’
John Waters is a national treasure. If he hadn’t invented himself, we would have had to make him up ourselves. His giddy aesthete’s appreciation of junky lowbrow culture, provocateur’s awareness of ripe cultural hypocrisies and sense of just plain fun have led to an astonishing and varied career.
One of his earliest films, 1970’s “Multiple Maniacs,” is being rereleased in a new restoration. I could try to describe the story, but really who cares? It stars Waters’ muse Divine and is just a pure delight along with still being genuinely outrageous and shocking.
David Rooney at the Hollywood Reporter reviewed the new version of the film and declared, “The film stands as an anarchic slap in the face to the era’s peace-and-love credo of hippie harmony, and it demands to be approached in that irreverent spirit.”
I had the distinct pleasure to interview Waters myself a few years ago, and he said to me then, “I always joke and say I made bad taste 1% more acceptable.”
Email me your questions and feedback. Follow on Twitter: @IndieFocus.
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