SXSW comes to a close! We’ve gathered pics from throughout the festival, including the MOST BEAUTIFUL ISLAND and LIKE ME premieres and the GEP / Dogfish Pictures / Palomo Films party.
BuzzFeed Photo Shoot
(Check out all the BuzzFeed Candid Pics here)
MOST BEAUTIFUL ISLAND
LIKE ME
PARTY!
Film synopses are often misleading. To the point that I try not to read them. But when you’re sorting through festival screenings, synopses are usually ground zero. I gave the blurb for Robert Mockler’s Like Me little more than a casual glance and wrote it off as a tween ‘social media obsessed’ drama. Then I found a different movie to see in that time slot. But serendipity is beautiful thing. That other film’s screening was completely booked up. I was stuck in line with no plan. Like Me was next up on the docket. So I bought the ticket. I took the ride. I found out that Like Me‘s synopsis was very misleading. And that’s a good thing.
That was apparent a couple of minutes into the film. Mockler opens the action at a drive thru grocery store in the middle of nowhere. It’s night. Christmas music is playing. A burly, bearded gentlemen is minding the shop when a shabby little Oldsmobile drives up. After a tense silence, a woman’s voice simply says, ‘I want some milk.’ The woman makes her way into the store. She wears a mask. She points her camera phone at the burly man like a gun. She says not a word. It almost feels like a bad joke … until it doesn’t. When that shift comes, the scene escalates in wildly unpredictable ways.
Wildly unpredictable is the only way to describe the story that follows. That heist video winds up on YouTube. It makes an overnight sensation of Kiya (Addison Timlin) the young woman that executed the ordeal. Viewer comments drive Kiya to escalate her antics in increasingly dangerous fashion. So yes, for simplicity’s sake you could say that Like Me is a drama about social media obsession. But that’s not at all what Like Me is. There’s no ‘unfriending’ high school drama. There’s no annoying little texting bubbles or Tweeting graphics. No, Mockler takes that setup and spins an arresting tale of modern isolation from it.
Much of that tale unfolds on a days-long ‘crime spree’ leading Kiya on an uncomfortable late-night diner binge, to a themed ocean-side motel, and on a doomed road trip with a complete stranger. All the while her camera is rolling (minus the one precarious/hilarious moment it isn’t). And all the while her viewers fuel the fire. But Kiya never seems to get any real pleasure out of the online attention. Every escalating adventure leaves her less engaged with the real world. As Kiya’s journey descends into a surrealist nightmare, it becomes a delicate balancing act between hyper-stylized visuals and stark, melancholic realism.
Mockler proves himself more than up to the task. The first-time feature director guides Like Me through its myriad of tonal shifts and stylistic flourishes with the grace of a seasoned filmmaker. His story is erratic and prone to flights of fancy, but the finished product is fluid and focused. And his unruly story unfolds – even in its fantastical moments – with a captivating level of naturalism. The naturalism proves a stark counterpoint to the expressionistic flourishes that Director of Photography James Siewert brings to the table. Siewert and Mockler use vibrant coloring, disorienting camerawork, expressive animation and dazzlingly simple effects to bring Kiya’s nightmare to life. But they always seem to know when to reign things in. Like Me often plays like a farce, but it never feels that way.
In fact, the film is most alive in the quiet moments in between. The moments when Giona Ostinelli’s score builds a dreamy sense of doom under the stillness. The moments when Mockler lets his camera linger on the face of Addison Timlin in all of its fragile instability. The face that effortlessly projects the innocence and menace and loneliness and dismay that form the twisted inner world of Kiya.
If you’re not familiar with Timlin, now’s the time to take notice. Zach Clark used her fragile features to striking effect in last year’s Little Sister. But nothing can prepare you for what Timlin brings to Like Me. She commands every single moment of this film. She imbues Kiya with a real-world complexity that lends the story a credibility that the narrative doesn’t quite earn. And she finds a welcome partner in the ever-adventurous Larry Fessenden, who gives the performance of his career as a paint-huffing loner named Marshall (Larry Fessenden). That’s no joke, by the way. Fessenden really is great in this film. It’s the sort of performance that makes you wish he’d stop letting people poke objects through his head … or stomach … or other body parts in movies and just be an actor.
And Like Me is the sort of film that will make you wish more directors would take big chances. Much like his story, Mockler’s film plays like an escalating game of risk. Every twist and turn and unorthodox decision could’ve led the first-timer’s film to ruin. But he pushed limits. He took chances. He made a devastating little film that’s not like anything else you’ve seen before. It’s far from perfect. But it’s likely to be the most exciting debut you’ll see this year. Or maybe any.
Dread Central will be hosting the NYC premiere of director Hunter Adams’ supernatural shocker Dig Two Graves, and you can win a pair of tickets to the star-studded premiere and after party! This special event will take place on Friday, March 24, at 7 pm at the Cinema Village (22 East 12th Street, off University Place), where the movie will begin a week-long run. Dig Two Graves marks the latest genre production from local horrormeister Larry Fessenden (Habit, The Last Winter, Stake Land, Late Phases, I Sell the Dead, The Innkeepers, etc.)
“A stylish, haunting thriller…dark, original and chilling…Ted Levine gives one of the most memorable performances of his career.” — Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times
“An inky dose of the supernatural.” — New Orleans Film Society
“Part moody Stephen King-style thriller, part brooding family drama.” — Culture Crypt
“A haunting and darkly beautiful tale of revenge.” — Horrornews.net
Gravitas Ventures also has landed U.S. and international rights (excluding Canada) to No Way To Live, a crime thriller, with plans for a July release.
Starring Freya Tingley and Tom Williamson, the film noir follows an interracial teenage couple in the 1950’s south, during the Jim Crow laws, who rob and steal to escape their town and find themselves in a downward spiral as violence erupts and dark secrets come to light. Larry Fessenden and Timothy V. Murphy also star. No Way To Live was written and directed by David Guglielmo and Nick Chakwin, and produced through Moderncine.
Andrew van den Houten of 79th and Broadway handled the sale on behalf of the filmmakers.
When I was nineteen I spent three straight days without sleeping. I had just moved to Tokyo and couldn’t cope with the light pollution or the sounds from the trains that ran behind my flat. I would spend the nights listening to relaxing music and watch films during the day. On the third morning at around 4AM I made an instant coffee and decided to put on Enter the Void.
The first thing I heard after listening to a recording of Enya’s Paint The Sky With Stars on repeat for some three hours, and not having slept through two slow nights, was the Thomas Bangalter scored opening credits. I’d never again feel as disorientated as I was in those two and a half minutes; but watching Robert Mockler’s Like Me, I came close.
Like Me marks the first time Robert Mockler has been credited as a director and writer of a feature length film. The film, which premiered at this year’s SXSW Film Festival in Austin Texas, is eighty minutes of visual portraits pieced together by tactile transitions, lucid VFX and a millennial journey.
Addison Timlin plays Kiya, a young girl who amasses a huge social following after posting a video of herself holding up a convenience store with a replica weapon. She takes her newfound popularity on the road and begins to film her encounters with a string of unusual characters, eventually taking a paedophile, ‘Marshall’ (Larry Fessenden), hostage, to mixed reactions from the online community. An antagonistic vlogger, Burt (Ian Nelson), begins to take Kiya’s videos apart, and her journey becomes visceral as Burt begins to impact both her content and her psyche.
Kiya guides us through her journey. She tests the humanity of the characters she meets, finding that a vagabond doesn’t want much more than pancakes from a diner, or that a painter who believes there is no age of consent had lost his own daughter at a young age. Kiya studies these characters and presents them to us; but often she seems to be neither a part of the film nor the viewership. She’s more like the kid holding a magnifying glass over an anthill.
Addison Timlin is perfect as Kiya, even if the character is not a strictly formed one with laborious dialogue. She has again shown her ability to completely comprehend the characters she’s becoming. Like her performance in Little Sister, she brings a sense of palpability to the role and becomes so natural as Kiya that the film, in moments, feels kind of like an Addison Timlin vlog, like she’s simply playing herself (with exception of the scenes where she’s forcing food into Marshall’s throat and telling him, “you’re going to eat or you’re going to bleed”).
What makes Like Me so mystifying to the senses is the intense cinematography and editing. Every shot is beautiful. Every background, shadow and light setting progresses the film like a series of paintings, ushering the narrative from frame to frame as if it were an exhibition across a gallery wall. The lighting and colours filter the film in two schemes, the afternoon pink skies and radiant neon signs to moments of moonlight blue and shadow. Both ethereal and at every shot, meticulously thought out.
The experimentation behind the lens continues through to the cutting room floor with disorientating and innovative shots that mess with the audience and remove any limits to the camera’s function. Shots will revolve around rooms and bury through the floor, while actors become stuck in a glitch-like trance, moving in two-second motions, back and forth on loop.
It’s these scenes that make Like Me feel like one long hallucinogenic journey. Although not directing the film, drugs play a part in Kiya’s internal narrative and are managed in a tacitly accurate sense. Ketamine is blue and calm, and doesn’t make a lot of sense, MDMA is sense-altering and intense, where mushrooms give the film its ‘baby on the ceiling’ moment, as a snake slides from Marshall’s bullet wound and into the alternate dimension that has surrounded Kiya.
At times the film does get lost in its own eccentricity, sacrificing the plot beneath the layers of art. The balance between progressing the narrative while constantly combing it to assure its uniform in style throughout, tips slightly through the second half of the film. Scenes like Kiya chasing Burt through the streets of a sunny city before inexplicably arriving at a foggy beachfront leave viewers with a decision to make about the symbolism of each moment, and what’s been done just because it looked good.
The film is still one of the most refreshing indie debuts in a long time. It is an experiment in style and as well shot as any box office film released this decade. While the plot at times fades into its own aestheticism, the acting and the unique style excel the film into rare territory for contemporary cinema.
Review Score: FOUR STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Mickey Keating’s PSYCHOPATHS will premiere at Tribeca Film Festival 2017, dates have been announced!
Over the course of one excessively blood-soaked night, multiple serial killers’ paths cross, leaving a trail of bodies and begging the question: Which psychopath will live to see morning? One of the most exciting and unclassifiable new voices in indie horror, Mickey Keating delivers his wildest ride yet with this ultra-stylish and uber-violent descent into madness.
At a packed Paramount Theater this evening, the SXSW Film Festival, now at the halfway mark, handed out their big film awards. The fest’s two big competition jury prizes went to director Ana Asensio’s “Most Beautiful Island” …
Shot in super 16mm, it tells the story of undocumented female immigrants struggling to start a life in New York. It is a feature film debut for Asensio, who also stars and wrote the screenplay. “Island” is being billed as a dramatic thriller and was produced by the New York horror master Larry Fessenden’s Glass Eye Pix.
Writer/Director Robert Mockler’s feature LIKE ME calls for a bit of a different review. After all, this film is all about a girl who buys into social media so much that she completely forgets how to connect with people. Given that this causes her to kidnap someone and go on a weird spree, I think anyone watching this would agree that a traditional review just will not do this justice.
As such, let us go a different route. First of all, do me one favor, DO NOT CLICK LIKE ON THIS REVIEW. Let’s not perpetuate this reliance on social media. I will very quickly know who actually bothered to read this just by whether or not they clicked like (ooh, social experiment!).
I know, this is weird, but it is very much in the spirit of this movie.
How, one might ask?
Well, you see, this piece is all about obsessing over social media. The thrust of our action is an artist who posts a video online and suddenly has a lot of people reacting to the footage. When someone calls her out, in a way that hits too close to home, she decides she must somehow connect with an actual person.
While this may seem like the stuff of a cerebral, introspective drama, they never quite take events in that direction. Instead, we are offered a kidnap movie where she slowly befriends the older man she has ensnared. Their time together is a highlight of this piece as their relationship is constantly switching from touching to combative. The performance given by Larry Fessenden is one of the best I have ever seen him give and fans of his should run to check this out.
Addison Timlin is no slouch herself as she perfectly embodies a young, obsessive woman who is trying to figure out her place in life. The first portion of the feature has her trying to listen more than talk, making her facial expressions our only window into her thought process. As she begins to come out of her shell more, her range reveals itself through her vulnerability and uncertainty with human connection.
All the while, she continues her artistic and online endeavors which allows for some truly stunning visuals. In all honesty, the look of this alone makes it worth a watch as there are so many amazing lighting features, camera shots, and color schemes at work that it really feels like a moving work of art in and of itself. From the crazy paintings in the room to the psychedelic drugged up sequences later in the film, this is a visual feast for the eyes that is sure to captivate.
In a few recent reviews I have commented upon music, so I feel I must give just a moment’s notice to the score. This was an odd and engrossing soundtrack that drew me in right from the get-go. Like walking through an art museum, the score tried on many different styles to varying degrees of success. Some I am still hearing one day later, others, though, I don’t recall as clearly, but either way I respect the approach taken as doing something wholly different is in short supply these days.
Listen, this is a movie that has a little something for everyone so I recommend all to give it a view. It is beautiful and heartbreaking at the same time with equal measures given to style and character development. The performers are also at the top of their game bringing a lot of weight to this visually stunning journey of self-discovery.
Once again, I want to stress, please DO NOT CLICK LIKE. Instead see this movie and talk with someone about what it meant to you. Create a connection, get out there, be with people and experience art at the same time.
Nighty Nightmares,
The Creeping Craig
There’s a key image that unlocks the central metaphor of Most Beautiful Island: cockroaches, fallen into a tub of water, scrabbling to survive. But are they treading water, treading each other down, or creating a raft for mutual survival?
In her directorial debut, seasoned Spanish TV actress Ana Asensio heads to a grimy New York of undocumented workers and lousy cash-in-hand jobs. In the lead role of Luciana, she’s on the run from her old life, washed up in the Big Apple, and living gig to gig. There’s a measured bitterness and a self-destructive streak that seems destined to take her down risky paths.
Asensio’s opening act is one of measured subtlety. Rather than have her characters engage in long, declaratory exposition about life without documentation, she paints their stresses in smaller brushstrokes, like having them pass over a Craigslist job ad because it requires a social security number. There’s almost a dash of mid-Nineties Ken Loach, or more recent Joe Swanberg (also a fan of Super 16, on which this was shot) in the lo-fi depiction of daily grind, of owing the bodega for ice cream or taking crappy jobs to make ends meet.
But this is not Swanberg’s Chicago: this is Larry Fessenden’s New York. As one of two titles under the genre-bending auteur’s Glass Eye Pix shingle (along with Like Me) at SXSW this year, there’s more seething under the skin than dealing with ungrateful kids on a babysitting gig. Her friend/fellow migrant Olga (Natasha Romanova) tells her of a deal that sounds too good to be true: a few hours at a party, no stress with a big payday. Of course, if it sounds too good, it is too good, and there’s something more sinister at the end of the cab ride than bad DJs and watered-down martinis.
Asensio sets herself an almost impossible challenge: a slow, tense second act that is just the mounting tension of a waiting room. How can the third act possibly pay off that invested time? Well, it does. Moreover, she creates a final resolution that avoids any of the trite defaults of a thriller.
Most Beautiful Island is a character study of survival in a capitalistic, hierarchical world that is not completely bereft of humanity. Arsenio gives Luciana a true inner life, and even the antagonists make deep emotional sense. And then she puts everyone through a ringer that matches the most devious and nail-biting stories of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected, an intriguing and slow-burn reinvention of survival horror.
“An enjoyably blood-soaked thriller with unexpectedly lyrical interludes — made very much in the shadow of classic genre forebears and on what was clearly a constrained budget — this is a strikingly impressive calling-card.” —Hollywood Reporter
Disc includes the hour-long “making of” featurette entitled SWEATING BULLETS.
Stop by your favorite brick and mortar video store or order on-line today!
Starring Asa Spurlock,
Jack Fessenden, James Le Gros,
John Speredakos, Larry Fessenden,
and Kevin Corrigan
and why not pick up the STRAY BULLETS Score from iTunes as well!
The Films of Larry Fessenden: Vol 2
Wendigo & The Last Winter
The Films of Larry Fessenden: Vol 1
Habit & No Telling
The Innkeepers
Limited Edition Blu-Ray
The House Of The Devil
Collector Edition Blu-Ray
WENDIGO Figures
From Glass Eye Toyz
CRUMB CATCHER Blu-Ray
From Arrow Video
BLACKOUT BLU-RAY
From Dark Sky Selects
FOXHOLE BLU-RAY
From Vinegar Syndrome
9 Tales From Beyond The Pale
on Amazon!
THE LARRY FESSENDEN COLLECTION Blu-ray
on Amazon!
BENEATH Blu-ray & DVD
on Amazon!
