Author: Josh

Festivals Reviews

SXSW 2022: Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBets

by Josh

My most striking reaction while watching the crisply-packaged incredible true story of that time when an army of Reddit-affiliated retail traders rallied to cause seemingly worthless GameStop stock price to rocket to the moon was that all of this happened just a little over a year ago. I suppose that time flows differently in a pandemic. The burst of trading pitting little internet “apes” against over-leveraged hedge funds captivated the media somewhere between the insurrection on the Capitol and the rollout of the first vaccines, before hot vax summer and the revenge of the omicron. So, something like a million years ago, yet a remarkably quick turnaround to get some of the key players on film and telling their stories of how amateur stock trading during a shutdown transformed their lives.

Reviews

X marks the spot for classy adult horror

by Josh

and in extremely capable hands. The camera surveys the scene with deliberation: first the silent sirens of police cars, gradually bringing us closer, with each movement exposing another level of gore and revealing the scale of the unspecified terror. First a blood-soaked corpse covered in a sheet, a spattered wall, more bodies slumped against the wall, the sheriff and his deputies making their way into the house, descending into an ominous basement, and witnessing a horrifying scene that we’ll have to wait about a hundred more minutes to see for ourselves.

Festivals Reviews

SXSW 2022: Under the Influence

by Josh

A great way to feel ancient is to watch a very thorough documentary about someone who is incredibly famous whose existence you were nevertheless unaware. In this case, it was Casey Neistat’s account of the the rise and fall and rise of an incredibly popular YouTube personality called David Dobrik. Having himself achieved a high degree of notoriety through his own marathon presence on the social networking service, Neistat’s familiarity with the platform, fame, and Dobrik himself ideally positioned Neistat to get an insider’s view of a young star’s stratospheric ascent. When he began filming interviews with him in 2018, neither had any idea what was yet to come.

Festivals Reviews

SXSW 2022: I Love My Dad

by Josh

“The following actually happened. My dad asked me to tell you it didn’t.” These are the first words that we see as James Morosini opens his autobiographical film. It’s one that he writes, directs, and has cast himself in the lead role, and as the story unfurls in ever-excruciating waves of cringe-inducing parental behavior, audiences will likely cling to this disclaimer in escalating disbelief about the veracity of these claims. As I squirmed through the hour and a half, I frequently found myself wondering about the therapeutic value of a thirty-year-old portraying himself at age seventeen to relive a terrible chapter in his own life. For his sake, I also hoped that the opening lines were themselves untrue.

Festivals Reviews

Sundance 2022: Awards Weekend

by Josh

The Sundance Film Festival announced all of its awards on Friday afternoon, with audience awards going to Navalny, Cha Cha Real Smooth, Girl Picture, The Territory, and Framing Agnes. Grand jury prizes were awarded to Nanny, The Exiles, Utama, and All That Breathes. I had missed a bunch of these during the premiere and second-screening windows; so I was grateful that the festival dedicated its final weekend to third showings of all of them so that I could catch up with a few more before packing up my virtual snow boots until next year.

Festivals Reviews

Sundance 2022: Living

by Josh

question for another day, but if you’re going to make one — as Oliver Hermanus did — there’s perhaps no one quite like Kazuo Ishiguro to craft a symphonic tribute to the deep wells of emotion lurking within the stoic reserved protocols of a formal bureaucracy.

Festivals Reviews

Sundance 2022: Sharp Stick

by Josh

Conceived and filmed during the pandemic, Lena Dunham’s return to feature filmmaking is the most mind-boggling misfire that I’ve seen at the festival so far.

Festivals Reviews

Sundance 2022: Docs Roundup

by Josh

Sundance has gained a reputation as a launching pad for documentary films that are bound to catch popular attention. Brief reviews of some of the festival’s highlights, including stories about Boeing, Kanye West, and Lucy and Desi.

Festivals Reviews

Sundance 2022: Meet Me in the Bathroom

by Josh

most certainly dive headlong into Sundance’s ample genre programming for legitimate horror movies, but I can’t think of any or them more terrifying to the ego than sitting down for a music documentary about a bunch of “era-defining” bands as a way of being forced to confront the fact that the soundtrack from your early twenties has now aged into fodder for the archival treatment. Working from groundwork laid by Lizzy Goodman’s book of the same title, directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace have assembled a clear-eyed collage of the “rebirth of rock” that exploded from New York City in the early 2000s.

Festivals Reviews

Sundance 2022: After Yang

by Josh

After Columbus, about two people quietly getting to know each other on an impromptu architectural tour of a small town, became a surprise critical darling, many were curious about where Kogonada would go next. The answer: to the future with Colin Farrell. Seeing his new film, After Yang, during its stateside premiere at Sundance this weekend also answered the question of whether there would be any truly great movies shown at this festival and/or released in 2022.