Today on the Graveyard Shift - 10/6/19

Today on the Graveyard Shift at the Nashville Film Festival.

At 10:30am, we've got Bruno Dumont's COINCOIN AND THE EXTRAHUMANS, a sequel to the director's 2014 French TV series L'IL QUINQUIN. It's a raucous three hours with alien invasions, slipping into absurdist fascism, and all of your favorites from the first series. Showing with it is Tracy Facelli's film FAVORITES, which is a kind of effective drama. I'm big on tradition, and a new Dumont/Facelli pairing is always a wild way to start the day.

At 8:30PM, we have the encore showing of the new film DRIVEN from director Glenn Payne, starring periodic lifelong Nashvillian Richard Speight Jr.  It's got ancient evil, a decent amount of humor, demonslaying (which should come as no surprise to fans of RSJ), and the emotional stress of trying to make ends meet doing a rideshare.

It will be showing with Dieter Spears's short film THE TRAVELER, which is a ghoulish little short story with a masterful last shot. There will be folks from both films in attendance. 

Tomorrow (Monday the 7th), we're showing NINA at 4pm, ROT at 8pm, THIS IS WRESTLING: THE JOEY RYAN STORY at 830pm, and the DREAMS OF THE EXTREME shorts program at 830pm.

Tonight on the Graveyard Shift - 10/5/19

Greetings to y'all.

It's Saturday, October 5th, and we have two Graveyard features tonight, both showing at 9pm.

Roman Chimenti and Tyler Jensen's SCREAM, QUEEN! MY NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET is a big deal, telling Mark Patton's story as the first male scream queen and as a queer actor under siege in '80s Hollywood. It is an exceptional film and you need to see it. It is showing with the short film JEFF DRIVES YOU from Aidan Brezonick, which is also a film about how mass culture commodifies queer desire. The pairing is also showing Tuesday, the 8th, at 6PM.

We're also showing Maria Winther Olsen's film NINA, which is a somber and restrained work of suspense and unease that deals with a gifted artist in an isolated space having marriage troubles. And a selkie may be involved... This is classier than Graveyard usually gets, but worthy of your time. It's screening with a great, Lynchian short called BOXES, from Tony Yang. And it's showing again on Monday the 7th at 4pm.

Coming up tomorrow (Sunday) we have Bruno Dumont's COINCOIN AND THE EXTRA-HUMANS at 1030am and the encore of DRIVEN at 830pm. Please, please for the love of Gawd come and see them.

Tonight on the Graveyard Shift - 10/4/19

Tonight, Friday the 4th, we've got two different selections on deck.

At 8:30PM, we have the new film DRIVEN from director Glenn Payne, starring periodic lifelong Nashvillian Richard Speight Jr.  It's got ancient evil, a decent amount of humor, demonslaying (which should come as no surprise to fans of RSJ), and the emotional stress of trying to make ends meet doing a rideshare.

It will be showing with Dieter Spears's short film THE TRAVELER, which is a ghoulish little short story with a masterful last shot. There will be folks from both films in attendance. DRIVEN and THE TRAVELER are also both showing on Sunday the 6th at 8:30 PM.

In addition, at 9:00PM we have the FRAYED SHORTS block, which is the (slightly) more accessible shorts block on this year's Graveyard Shift. The films featured in this block are Montana Mann's ESTHER (an EC Comics Western with a delicious surprise), Mac Cushing's FULL MOON (a mystery with unspeakable comic undertones), Ryan Worsley's GOOD GIRL (absurdly cute and grotesquely violent), Katie Kapuza's HUNKS (a special kind of animation), Aidan Moretti's I SEE YOU (lovingly Lynchian both in terms of unease and absurdist humor), Dan Hass' MAGIC H8 BALL (a queer Fantasy about childhood magic colliding with adult sexuality), Alec Cohen's MOUNTAIN (a dramedy that pushes all the envelopes), Will Bakke's THE STUDY (a SciFi/Horror setup that's just irresistible), RJ Blake's TIKTOK (SciFi romantic comedy for this modern age), and Dan O'Brien's TRICK OR TREATMENT (horror icons in amazing puppet form).

There will be filmmakers in attendance. The FRAYED SHORTS block will also play at 8pm on Tuesday, October 8th.

Tickets are available here.

Coming up tomorrow, Saturday the 5th, we have two Graveyard offerings, both of which are showing at 9pm. 

Maria Winther Olsen's NINA (also showing at 4pm on Monday the 7th)

and

Roman Chimienti and Tyler Jensen's SCREAM, QUEEN! MY NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (also showing at 6pm on Tuesday the 8th)

Tonight on The Graveyard Shift - 10/3/19

It's opening night at the Nashville Film Festival, now celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. Tonight, at 7pm, we are ecstatic to be presenting Rob Grant's film HARPOON.

It is a vicious and hysterical film that gets at the absolute worst aspects of human behavior, and it delivers the same kind of sick joy you get from The War of The Roses, The Last of Sheila, Blood Simple, or The Champagne Club. 

HARPOON is showing with the short film TAYLOR IS MISSING, from director Mia Sorenson. It's a beautiful and brutal short about memory, trauma, and regret.

I'll be presenting the Graveyard section with trailers or more info on a daily basis, and I hope to see y'all there.

Tickets are available here.

Tomorrow, Friday the 4th of October, we've got the following on the Graveyard Shift:

DRIVEN (with special guests) at 8:30 (also shows on the 6th at 8:30PM)

The FRAYED SHORTS Program (with special guests) at 9:00PM (also shows on the 8th at 8PM)

At the movies: Show Yourself.

It’s rare to find horror films that successfully manage to crosspollinate with other genres; it happens every now and then with comedy, with classics like (Shaun of The Dead, Slither, and Evil Dead II), or with Science Fiction (the Alien series, The Stone Tape). But those combinations are blends that we as audiences recognize. So what happens when something really unexpected comes along. Think along the lines of Rahtree: Flower of the Night or Lake Mungo, where you have a horror film that has found a way to expand the reach of the genre into truly unexpected territory.

Billy Ray Brewton’s film Show Yourself is like that. It’s a ghost story, and a weirdness in the woods tale, but it’s also an immersive nostalgia piece (think The Big Chill, or Come Back To The Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean), and that’s a unique mesh of elements. It also dabbles in self-help actualization and unsublimated tension, which is quite the reach for such a modest indie. It’s basically a one-man show, as Travis (Ben Hethcoat, who works his ass off onscreen for pretty much the whole movie) returns to the forest where he and his buddies would hang out back in the day. Only now, that group of friends has fragmented, with the recent suicide of Paul (Clancy McCartney) throwing previously held certainties into entirely different frames of existence.

Travis is back in these woods to spread Paul’s ashes, and also start learning a new script. He’s got technology on his side, as well as an uproarious one scene cameo from national treasure Robert Longstreet as the cabin’s owner. But he’s also, for the most part, a decent dude working his way through some heavy shit. So when supernatural things start happening, it’s hard to have an instantaneous response. Writer/Director Brewton has us in unfamiliar territory, and that is an ever rarer wonder. We understand, instinctively, ghost stories, We get home invasions, and we understand hostage narratives. Show Yourself isn't something you've seen before; it's an experience that the viewer most process in a new way.

Le us also praise Hethcoat’s performance, because without it, the film wouldn’t work. It’s a lot of heavy lifting to do, being in almost every scene, and he finds a way to never react to any situation in exactly the way you might suspect. It’s an endearingly weird performance, and that’s just fine, because Show Yourself is an endearingly weird film. It’s rough around the edges, but it gets inside your thoughts and haunts the viewer even after it’s over. It's a film that remains vibrantly alive in the subconscious, more than a year since I first saw it. And it continues to evolve, after the second and third viewings as well.

At the movies: I Am The Doorway.

I AM THE DOORWAY

Stephen King’s short stories have always been his finest achievement- timeless and unrestrained portraits of humanity in crisis that remain as unsettling and effective forty years down the road as when they were first published. There’s a power in those works that works on a level different from his rightfully acclaimed legacy of novels and their many adaptations across countless media. But anyone with memories of the cover of the mass-market paperback of Night Shift will remember its key image- a hand, covered in bandages and eyes. I Am The Doorway, which lent the collection that striking image, was Lovecraftian SciFi of the highest order, so rich in ideas and tableaux that no one attempted to take it into the realm of the visual. But now, from the Czech Republic, a filmmaker has pulled off the cinematic equivalent of alchemy, taking that story and telling it visually without dialogue and with a subjective camera. In fifteen minutes, Director Robin Kasparik delivers artful cosmic horror, creative mise-en-scene, and the finest Stephen King adaptation in years. Be ready for a bold new voice in horror and science fiction.

At the movies: BLOODLANDS.

BLOODLANDS

The idea has been with us since humanity first forged the bonds of society, that we must use the threat of further violence to ward off the initial descent into violence, reaching its apotheosis with the Mutually Assured Destruction detente of the Cold War. Albania’s history of blood feuds may reach the same, final result as the MAD doctrine, but its canvas is wider, and of a much more deliberate and patient pace. Rather than a fell swoop, the blood feud is a grind that stretches across generations, plucking individuals one at a time, back and forth until The Why becomes a mystery, a tale told and retold, shifting across decades. The fickle and impetuous hearts of man are dangerous enough on their own. So when the shtriga (a witch birthed from the anger of a wronged mother) becomes involved, that spark of violence becomes an inferno.

BLOODLANDS is a tale of two families; one, a foursome of meat merchants, the other a ragtag group of mountain survivalists orbiting the shtriga. The father Skender is driven by pride and doubt, a patriarch all too aware that his tiny empire is crumbling from within. His pride is both the instigating event for a great reckoning and its explosive fruition, helped along by what could be the ancient magic of the witch of the mountains or might just as easily be a patient hand working on a canvas spanning a century. Multihyphenate Steven Kastrissios has crafted a visceral and rapturously beautiful film, a story that has a grand, mythic resonance that could have inspired Shakespearean drama just as easily as it could be a modern tale of horror and strife. The standout performance is Suela Bako as Skender’s wife Shprisa, a pragmatic woman capable of balancing a brusque, sometimes loutish husband alongside the ancient secrets of rites that have been hidden from the prying eyes of the modern.

Violent (including some upsetting but not gratuitous footage from an abbatoir), visionary, visually distinctive, and suffused with a sense of history moving inexorably through our modern sense of stability and civilization, BLOODLANDS is a remarkable film that should delight genre fans and arthouse patrons equally. It haunts the viewer long after it ends. Its reach is beyond the now, and it is patient.

At the movies: A Closer Walk With Thee.

A CLOSER WALK WITH THEE'

Four kids, more than teens but flailing toward adulthood with uncertain grasp, have set up a small evangelical outreach congregation in a sketchy neighborhood where they’re in over their heads. Tensions are high, and it feels like nobody’s working toward the same set of specific objectives. Fortunately, for a little while, the general purpose of outreach is keeping things afloat. Until desire begins to rear both of its heads, and that ramshackle balance is shattered by the collision of fear, lust, rage, doubt, pagan gang activity, and Christian rock.

This film shocked me. And I don't shock easily. As a cautionary tale for evangelicals and gay boys, as an origin story, as an unconventional possession narrative, as the next BDSM scene you're going to try out when no one is looking, and as a horror film where horror means something different to each of the characters, A CLOSER WALK WITH THEE is a special film, as well as a queer film, a lacerating character study, and above all a sensitive, resonant, and viscerally shocking arrival on the genre film scene. I hope you enjoy it. And if you can't enjoy it, I hope it upsets you. And if it can't upset you, then I hope it makes you have Mulholland Drive-style weird dreams where you have to come to terms with the absolute moral truth of yourself.

At the movies: Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke.

I was out of town when this piece ran, but I'm glad that it did and I hope it made a difference. This was the best short I saw at this year's Nashville Film Festival, and I watched it every time it screened during that event. It is my sincerest hope that this film could help those who need it- so many people are out of work, but it's staggering to me how much of the world is out of twerk. This film can definitely fix that.

Famous People Talked to Me: Roxanne Benjamin.

In honor of V/H/S making its Nashville premiere at this year's Nashville Film Festival, I got to talk with producing phenom/former co-worker/Renaissance woman Roxanne Benjamin. Have a look, won't you?

At the movies: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

So, I was pretty bowled over by finding my review of Uncle Boonmee... in The Tennessean today (I also heard from some folks about it, which was kind of nice). As is their prerogative, they made some editing choices, which is fine, because I knew my pure uncut dope review would run at No Concessions, my webspace on the Metromix page. You can check them both out, if you'd like, though I prefer the Metromix version myself.

So you're going to the 2010 Nashville Film Festival...

Well, it’s that time of the year again. The Nashville Film Festival is looming around the corner, and I’ve had a few folks say “Hey, what should I try and check out?” So, here we go.


Section I: Stuff I have seen and proclaim to be awesome.

BLUEBEARD. Fri. 16 @ 515pm, Sat. 17 @730pm
One of my favorites from the 2009 New York Film Festival. One of Breillat’s best (though it does contain a graphic depiction of medieval cooking).

“The Inner Workings of Outer Space” screening in TENNESSEE FILM NIGHT I. Th, 15@7, Sun. 18 @830pm
One of the best Watkins student films I’ve ever seen.

DOGTOOTH. Wed. 21 @530pm, Thur. 22 @1215pm
Disturbing and provocative Greek psychodrama.

“Love Child” screening in GROW UP ALREADY. Sat. 17 @1145am, Tue. 20 @945pm
One of the best shorts of the year. I saw it at the NYFF, and it made local cineaste and philanthropist Scott Manzler laugh harder than I’ve ever seen anything make Scott Manzler laugh.

HOOP DREAMS. Mon. 19 @3pm
Granted, I haven’t seen it since 1994, but as I recall, it was pretty amazing. I’ve had people that I trust who say that it doesn’t hold up, but I’m angling to give it a re-viewing.

FILM WITHOUT BORDERS. Mon. 19 @7pm, Wed. 21 @5pm
As last year, I programmed the experimental film section, and I think it’s a spectacular array of films. I stand by all of them.



Section II: Stuff I haven’t seen, but people whom I trust have and proclaimed it worthwhile.

NOWHERE BOY. Thur. 15 @8pm, Fri. 16 @1pm
Sam Taylor-Wood made last year’s exceptional short Love You More, three amazing dance records with the Pet Shop Boys, and a series of artworks that continue to captivate me. I’ve heard great things about this, her feature debut.

APPLAUSE. Fri. 16 @315pm, Sun. 18 @915pm
Danish actress Paprika Steen (My 1998 Best Actress choice for The Celebration) goes full-on Opening Night.

HIPSTERS. Sat. 17 @715pm, Tue. 20@noon
I have a complicated series of feelings regarding Jonathan Rosenbaum, but in his most recent column in Cinema Scope magazine, he recommends the film highly enough to advise his readers to snag an unsubtitled Russian disc of the film from Amazon. That in and of itself makes me superintrigued.

FOR ONCE IN MY LIFE. Fri. 16 @730pm, Sat. 17 @215pm
This film melts even the coldest of hearts, apparently.

THE COMPLETE JAMIE TRAVIS. Sat. 17 @5pm, Sun. 18 @245
Intriguing fantasiae that have been wowing the world for some time.

LOURDES. Sun. 18 @3pm, Tue. 20 @1230pm
The magnificent Sylvie Testud (Murderous Maids) in a serious story about faith and what it means to be divinely healed. I’m supremely stoked for this.

CYRUS. Thur. 22 @7pm
John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill, and the Duplass Brothers. Sold.



Section III: Stuff I haven’t seen, but that has some kind of hook that resonates.

I AM LOVE. Wed. 21 @740pm, Thur. 22 @1245pm
You had me at Tilda Swinton.

THE GOOD HEART. Wed. 21 @noon, Thur. 22 @530pm
I trust Brian Cox as an actor completely.

“Horndog” screening in SENSATIONAL ANIMATION. Sat. 17 @715pm, Mon. 19 @445pm
Bill Plympton is always worth a look, especially his ongoing Dog series.

SOUTHERN BELLE. Sat. 17 @445pm, Sun. 18 @2pm
Any time a documentary deals with southern issues of any sort, you can expect some fireworks. There’s a quote from the inimitable Flannery O’Connor which I can never exactly remember, but which goes something like “those not from the south would view certain things as grotesque, while those from the South would view them as realistic.” Anyway, apologies to the great FO’C, but you get my drift…

CROPSEY. Fri. 16 @715pm, Wed. 21@1pm
Tonally, this seems intriguing. I’ve heard it described as both terrifying and socially irresponsible, so there you go. I’ll be there.

SOUND OF INSECTS. Sun. 18 @345pm, Wed. 21 @245pm
This sounds completely devastating. I’m so there.

ARTHOUSE. Fri. 16 @930pm, Sat. 17 @10am
Greta Gerwig in a comedy about art school. Sold.

THE COLONEL’S BRIDE. Mon. 19 @ 9pm, Wed. 21 @510pm
Local talent and I’ve heard some good things about it.


Section IV: Stuff I haven’t seen but that has an intriguing synopsis and that I feel worthy of taking a chance on.

THE CONCERT
CITY OF BORDERS
SYMBOL
CLEANFLIX
DO IT AGAIN
MEN BEHAVING BADLY shorts block
OMG WTF shorts block (though that’s a terrible name)
8: THE MORMON PROPOSITION
UNDERTOW
LUNOPOLIS



So there you have it. Feel free to say hey if you're attending this year's Nashville Film Festival, and always remember, it's okay to have a genuine experience even if you were initially trying to have an ironic one.