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millllenniawrites · 2 years

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Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness thoughts!!

okay so now that mom is on disney+, i am sharing my thoughts. i wrote this right after i saw the movie and it's literally just been sitting in my drafts.

obvious spoiler warning for the movie

overall, i didn't love it. i'm really disappointed and i think it could have been so so so cool and opened up so much potential for future storylines and it just..... didn't? but that doesn't mean there weren't good things about it!! anyways, here's my thoughts:

things i liked

wanda. my love. what a fantastic arc (up until the end). everyone complaining about her going evil for no reason clearly missed wandavision. she literally just wants her kids back and girl i get it. also how many times do we have to go over how the darkhold corrupts people for y'all to get it??

the first 30ish minutes. like everything up until america and stephen jump universes for the first time. it was perfect and fun and i love love loved it

the whole mirror/reflection sequence thing

the convo about spiderman without mentioning peter parker

the illuminati!!!!! so cool!!!! i love the fun casting!!!!

FUCKING CAPTAIN CARTER MY WIFE SPIT ON ME

the horror elements used when wanda is fighting the illuminati. the mouth disappearing? john krasinski getting unzipped into a bunch of rubber bands? very disturbing! very cool!

the ultron bots were neat

the costumes were beautiful

also the effects on wanda's hair

wong. literally obsessed w him. his lil whip??? we love our sorcerer supreme

they did a good job explaining the darkhold

"I love you in every universe"

stephen and wanda being contrasted without ever questioning whether or not wanda is the strongest avenger

wanda being the one to stop herself. no one else could

things i didn't like

so much of the dialogue was just........ bad? like stephen's speech to america at the end was really really not good and it should have been because those moments are so important, especially for young girls!!! like i really didn't like the script

also most of americas dialogue was bad which didn't even give her a fighting chance. like im not sure if i like her as an actor cause she just didnt have good material

also so much of americas screentime was her screaming. which like fair cause its scary shit but also maybe give her something more?

ALSO we literally got three seconds of americas moms before they got disappeared. what the actual fuck. marvel we've been over this.

tuning fork man???? what the hell????? why couldn't we get a female bucky barnes or yelena as black widow or like even loki being there randomly would have been fine. that is NOT the way to introduce a new character to the mcu

captain marvel and the scarlet witch should literally never fight. ever. i hated that. they are the two most powerful avengers

zombie stephen. what the fuck

also the cape made out of souls?????

wanda did not need to die to complete her arc. that was entirely unnecessary

also why wasn't wanda also looking for a universe where her brother is alive?? and vision???? i don't understand

why would you do a post credit scene with shang chi and wong only to not have shang chi appear anywhere??? like i kept waiting for him to show up and he just didn't

christine!!!!!! literally why does she always need to be part of stephen's arc??? we had an entire what if? episode about this. they can't be together in any universe. let it go. this is creepy borderline incel behaviour at this point. get over it stephen (though your dialogue was very romantic i will give you that)

the fucking mid credit scene. make these scenes important to the plot instead of random new character drop

so yeah overall i didn't love the movie but i think part of that is how high my expectations were. so i'm going to work really hard to not have expectations of movies i'm excited about going forward cause that really wrecked this experience. also i'm probably going to rewatch it just to see if i like it better the second time.

#dr strange #doctor strange and the multiverse of madness #doctor strange spoilers #movie review

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nightwhite13 · 3 years

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#I really don't understand how ppl can hate watch hate read or hate play anything #just finished playing a game that had a really bad prequel but I thought they fix it so I give it a try #nope big fat fucking nope #the game is so dark like bro ure not Zack Snyder that can get away making dark movie for aesthetic reason #the story is so fucking cringe good God I read a better fanfic than whatever the fuck that game has #which incel wrote that script? why the romance is like that????#God I wish I could stop my younger self to buy that shit #look I buy some stuff that I'm not proud of but holy hell I hate this game so much #wasted 13 hours!!!! I could use that to play dishonored instead!!!!#fuxk I hate it #and don't get started on the bad mechanic

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pinktwingirl · 3 years

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More on “The Worst Guy of All Time and the Girl Who Came to Kill Him”

So, for those of you who don’t know, these excerpts are from a script called “The Worst Guy of All Time and the Girl Who Came to Kill Him”, which Loki series lead writer Michael Waldron wrote and based the show off of. (Basically, Loki = Barret and Sylvie = Dixie.) A lot of people have already made jokes about how bad this script is, but I also wanted to talk about how disgustingly misogynistic it is too. Much like Sylvie, Dixie’s only personality trait is that she’s a “hot, angry fighter girl.” Like… did Waldron seriously think that was “empowering” to women? All she ends up being is a sex object for the lead anyway, because clearly, that’s all female characters are good for. Also, any time Barret says something nice about her, it’s always the same: she’s hot. That’s it. That’s literally the only reason he wants to be with her. Waldron doesn’t even TRY to make Dixie interesting or give her a personality; he just comes out and says it: her physical attractiveness is the only notable thing about her. But uhhh she fights good, so that totally makes her a feminist icon, right ladies???

This whole script feels like some gross fantasy for incels. Like, “hey, Barret spent his whole life being nothing but a self-absorbed douchebag and he still got to hook up with a hot chick, so you can too, fellas!” My God, what an utter CREEP Michael Waldron is.

#loki #loki series #loki series negativity #michael waldron #anti sylki #anti loki x sylvie #antisylki #sylvie laufeydottir #tw: misogyny #tw: sexualization #tw: sexism #marvel #mcu #disney plus

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sootcharlie · 3 years

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i was thinking recently abt how wilbur soot is like an irl quirky netflix movie love interest, or like an oc id make and get very attached to, so i made a list of all the reasons wilbur soot doesnt seem like a real person but instead a guy i made up for a movie script about learning to love life or something when i was 15 and wished i had cool irl friends (disclaimer: he is very much a real person):

he sometimes just decides that some things are his things (tm), like deciding hes going to run a minecraft country, or be a drug dealer, or that hes gonna speak in a new zealand accent, or middle part his hair, or deciding his friends are his canonical family without consulting them first, or eating too many pistachios (and then smashing a hole in his window). he just decides to do something q u i r k y and sticks with it.

his sense of fashion rly does look like he was dressed to play the part of “cool indie guitar best friend“ in “netflix teen movie #1879453“. he also collects shirts with usa presidential campaigns on them, which is a hobby he shares with one of his good friends, and allegedly they go on amazon and shop for them together.

there are so many iconic screenshots of him that ppl use for redraws. like the one where he put a bottle of air freshner to his head as if it was a gun in your new boyfriend, or the shot of him fake-smoking a bent cigarette while wearing a baseball cap in one day, or that time he middle parted his hair and put on sunglasses on stream and just vibed with it. theyre like scenes from a movie that are asking to be drawn by various different artists.

i will never forget abt that one time on new years he drank a fuck ton of vodka, went skinny dipping in freezing water and allegedly sent pictures of his ass to jack manifold. what the fuck.

his history consists of running a reddit channel, as well as an arg where he pretended to be a creepy stalker editor for his favourite minecraft youtuber, dressing up as a ceiling fan for halloween, pretending to write a film to impress a girl he liked when he was 17 and cover up his bullshit story proceeding to actually write a film script, and probably more stuff im missing.

his music. besides his two serious albums, he wrote 4 and a half songs where he pretended to be an incel obsessed with an e-girl. the opening lines to the song in the first lovejoy music video, one day, is “stop! cuz whyd you have to kill my cat?“ which sounds like the opening lines to a song theyd write for this imaginary movie as a joke abt how quirky he is.

we literally dont know his birthday, he makes up a different date every time someone asks him.

some misc things hes known for are running a twitter account where he exclusively spoke in emojis, also posting weird voice recordings on that account like that time he talked about pistachios and punching a hole in his window, being suspiciously good at making up songs on the spot (ex the vape song, the discord song). he is also 6′5′‘. and he literally punched his old computers motherboard live on stream after mcc to destory it and the stream cut out right before we could actually see him punch it (sad), he named his instruments, was accused of lying about everything so much that he had to put out a statement saying that he doesnt actually lie about everything and lying about everything was a lie. speaking of lies he said hes not allowed within 15 feet of his old office for,, was it cult activity?? i honestly cant remember anymore

he with the rest of lovejoy literally just disappeared into the woods for 3 weeks

all /lh btw all of this stuff makes him very cool

#wilbur soot #mcyt #lovejoy #lvjy

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gdelgiproducer · 4 years

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Tanz vs. DOTV: Something to ponder

(Content warning: use of a common five-letter word for the female anatomy to illustrate a point)

Hi, everyone! Vulture article plugging aside, it’s been a little while since I used this platform to directly discuss the differences between Tanz der Vampire and (what I hesitate to call) its New York incarnation, Dance of the Vampires. A lot of people have already identified the key problems, me being extra loud and verbose at it, with what DOTV did on the road to Broadway that sunk its chances. But there are always new things to discover, and I thought this little illustration which occurred to me recently might add more to the overall picture.

Over the years, I’ve been none too subtle -- perhaps jaundiced by my own experience with the man, I’ll admit -- in pointing a finger of blame at Jim Steinman, arguing that, far from the remove at which he placed himself in retrospect, he was an engine behind many unnecessary changes which were not related to Michael Crawford’s creative control. As someone who spearheaded the closest thing to a reboot Tanz will ever have in English (which will hopefully see the light of day in the future as more than two rough demos), I spent a lot of time with 1) Michael Kunze’s original draft, dated July 1997, 2) at least four drafts of the script for DOTV, and 3) watching my team develop its own version from the original German, so I know whereof I speak.

Now, many of Jim’s fans who heard about our effort around the time it began scoffed upon hearing about it, partly because I was a purveyor of Encyclopedia Dramatica level fandom wank as a kid and they didn’t trust the source (why lie, the Internet is a semi-permanent archive of one’s faults) and partly because they didn’t see the need for a new translation when surely Jim and/or Michael Kunze had already done a faithful English draft: “Who are these assholes to interject?”

Well, there’s an easy answer to that: Kunze’s draft, like many of his English lyrics to his own work, bears no comparison to his work in German. (A first-year ESL student probably would do a better job. That sounds harsh, but ask Kunze’s fans. There are very few who will disagree.) As for Jim, it became quite clear that when he didn’t just re-use Kunze’s English version of the material and substitute a word or phrase here and there, capturing the German meaning in his... we’ll call them more loosely adapted... lyrics was not even remotely on his mind. Indeed, there were times he took something beautiful and made it downright creepy.

A handy example is “Für Sarah.” Michael Kunze wrote a straightforward innocent love song, with maybe a tiny bit of foreshadowing. The point is that Alfred’s not a romantic hero, and that’s the joke. You root for him, but you pity him. You’d think they’d honor that in an English version with better phrasing or a different way to say the same thing.

Instead, Jim Steinman, in his quest to make Alfred a romantic hero (an “impetuous young gallant,” in Giovanni’s ultimate words), shoehorned in brooding imagery that turned it into a ghastly incel anthem, and I can prove it by changing literally just one word of his lyric for the song:

Substitute “pussy” for every instance of “Sarah.” (Example: “I will slash / I will burn / There is nothing / I would not do or be / For pussy...”)

See? Altering one word is all it takes to picture a pimply neck-beard idolizing a “dream girl” that doesn’t even know both that he exists and has built a hidden shrine to her. For that matter, the whole song is turned into a litany of horrible “male power fantasy” things this guy, who is supposed to be a shrinking violet in the original version, would do for her: stealing, lying, slashing, burning... none of this is in the German at all, but leave it to Jim to introduce it!

Not to toot my own horn too loudly about something people may never see, but my team’s translation, while it may not always have said exactly the same thing as Kunze did in German, at least tried to capture the same imagery and emotion in it. More than I can say for Jim. Way more than I can say.

#tanz der vampire #tanzblr #tanz network #tanz discourse #Dance of the Vampires #Dans der Vampieren #danca dos vampiros #Taniec Wampirow #ples upírů #le bal des vampires #Vampirok Balja #bal vampirov #vampiru no dansu #vampiiride tants #Vampyyrien tanssi #Jim Steinman #Roman Polanski #Michael Kunze

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amusedmuralist · 4 years

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Genderfuck

(Rosky, 2013, 686): Radical acceptance. Why is it bad if they get queerer? There are already any number of queer children, love.

TLDR: Genderfuck is playing around with gender and gender tropes. For instance, making a cover of Future Soon Jonothan Coulton’s sexist science incel song (”turns out she’s smarter than I thought she was”) Into a painfully earnest lesbian song of longing (She knows I wrote it!/ ...Now the whole class does too/ ...she skates by/with some guy/on her arm) is interesting and examines a different set of gender tropes than singing it as a man.

Genderswap, either within universe in a Sci-fi/fantasy setting, or within a context where the character is ‘read’ differently gives an opportunity to explore those same gendered tropes. The example I’m going to use is Twilight, since the author did a genderswap of Bella and Edward herself: If the characters change minimally, but their presentation changes, there is a set of expectations around that which the audience has to re-read, and come to understand.

It’s not for everyone, and that’s fine. It’s not always well executed but neither is anything. But genderfuck, and genderswaps as a part of that, have a role too dismissed by “Always Transphobic” to my mind.

Academics like saying the fuck word. If we didn’t Lee Edelman’s No Future rant about “FUCK THE FUTURE! FUCK HOPE!” would be far less cited out of its context about despair for queer interests.

Language transgression is one of the most straightfoward games to play with language, and I promise you, having been to local comic, gaming, and discworld conventions, the best and worst parts of Conferences are the same. Look at this cool shit i found, do you want a turn? what would you make with it, I want to see!!

Genderfuck is a style of drag, a gender, and a genre

Fun cool thing! Gender and Genre use the same root word! That’s another score to Judith Butler’s idea of Copies without Originals, mimicking and transforming those traits that get the response you want, until it’s not a Rom Com without a Career Woman, and it’s not femininity without liquid concealer. The rules become popular, become overdone, change, and ellide each other, based on societal understandings of what’s interesting, and what’s ‘normal’.

Genderfuck is the Amazons of Wonder Woman wearing whatever is least likely to get them mistaken for a man, and therefore wearing trousers in Roman times.

Genderfuck is figuring out what gender signifiers override others in your non-binary presentation. Height, makeup, a skirt, cleavage, etc. What is the presiding signifer ‘read’ by your audience? (For me, it’s usually height, glasses, hair, ‘intelligent looking face’ makes me young man (?) up until I speak, where it becomes my voice, which recontextualises the rest of the signifiers as ‘not straight’) (Which is interesting but sometimes frustrating.)

I have a great attachment for JoCo, but his wider catalogue has soured on me of late. Jonothan Coulton, author of the Portal song and many others I fucking love to bits, has a tendency to focus on young (implied) men who long for women who will never know them because of their shyness, their nerdy interests, their reluctance to come forward and be the creepy guy, or seen as such.

I Love reading those songs through the lens of a young WLW/NBLW, coming to terms with their attraction to women, and it not seeming right to push that morass of feelings on another person probably as confounded as you are by this whole ‘puberty’ thing. Selfishly, my first such crush was named Laura so Future Soon (link embedded above) and Party in a Forest by the Wombats speak especially to that feeling. That welling anxiety and absolute teenage certainty that the one’s feelings are incorrect, ill fitting, unwelcome, speaks to that experience for me, back when I didn’t know of any actually queer musicians.

I like transforming the whole cast, rather than one individual, in longer works, because it means you don’t make it creepy, make the feelings of adolescence and monstrosity into characters who are monstrous and creepy. Sitcoms,the MCU, musical theatre, fairytales, things that rely on a few solid and gendered tropes, and then build a character up from them, that is my JAM.

What do we get if we make Terry of Brooklyn 99 an enthusiastic, loving mother, who loves yogurt and the farmers market and body building? And how does Gina come across differently as a man? Giving her absolute zinger lines to Taako Taaco is genius comedy but it also places them in a new context. Who is this character within the show?

This is a top-of-my-head example, but seeing characters understood differently despite the script not changing at all is a joy of mine whether it be an action movie given to Angelina Jolie, me singing Future Soon in the shower, or thinking about BICON Peralta as an ADHD having woman who is nonetheless celebrated and not understood by her colleagues as “annoying” outside her obnoxious behaviours.

#queer #queer resources

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son-of-alderaan · 6 years

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From one controversy to another, we move on to Star Wars — the 50 Shades to the Marquis de Sade of Mother!. The reboot orchestrated by Abrams has had its fair share of detractors, with keyboard warriors furious that the galaxy far, far away isn’t entirely run by middle-aged white men.

Is Gleeson aware of the controversy? “Look, that f******...” he begins, before calming himself a bit. “Having a problem with a female lead or a diverse cast? That doesn’t even cross my mind as being an issue, because if that’s a problem for you, then your opinion doesn’t matter to me. If you’ve paid the money, you’ve bought the right to an opinion. But, also, movies have to change.”

Has there been any attempt on the third Star Wars film to appease the issues a certain section of the fan base had? “Well, this is where my eagerness not to cause waves probably perks up, but I’ve not been aware of any corrective measures. It just feels like the third part of a trilogy.”

Domhnall Gleeson used to think he would be dead by the time he was 30, so the fact that he’s speaking to me at all is great. The actor is 35. Seriously, though, why did he think he would be done with this earth by now? “Argh, some stupid thing,” he says in a high-pitched voice. “Maybe I had a dream? But, past my 30th, I was, like, ‘What is going on?’” He pauses to take it all in. The bar. His glass of water. The soft lighting. Every moment precious. “It was odd,” he says quietly, seriously. “But it definitely gave me a weird drive to get things done.”

He must be exhausted. Just a glance at his CV reveals a restless actor in the rush of a career that’s busier and more varied than most. In the five years since his breakthrough lead in About Time, a temporarily diverting Richard Curtis romcom, Gleeson has been directed by Angelina Jolie, Alejandro Iñarritu and Darren Aronofsky, has starred in two Star Wars films and has coaxed the best performance out of Tom Cruise for more than a decade in the irrepressible American Made. He has the randomness of an actor desperate for any old part, except that these are big films and he is good in all of them. No wonder he is wired when we meet. He’s a man on 23 jobs at once, who has no idea which part he is playing next.

What is next, though, is The Little Stranger, Lenny Abrahamson’s classy take on Sarah Waters’s gothic novel. The book is about Dr Faraday (Gleeson), born into a low class, but obsessed with a nearby manor house and the woman who runs it, Caroline (Ruth Wilson). The rich family are selling land to build council houses; miseries are many and awkwardness is rife. Gleeson and Wilson are both terrific in largely tacit roles. And, though the film is being sold as a ghost story, it really isn’t one. Rather, it is about society and need, and how you die in the class you were born in.

Gleeson — whose first name is pronounced “Doe-nal” and who is the son of the excellent character actor Brendan, not to forget a welfare-officer mother, Mary — is erratic company. He’s friendly and funny, telling me how he spends his days (watching George Harrison documentaries) while laughing so loudly and squeakily, it sounds like a cave of bats being gassed. But there is also, always, a barrier. This is in part because he has the hair and make-up of the villainous General Hux in Star Wars, which he had been filming earlier that day. It makes him look like an oppressive sheet. But mostly the wall is there because he hates talking about his life or opinions and just seems unflaggingly professional. Exactly the sort of actor directors adore.

“He’s an utter joy to work with,” gushed JJ Abrams, who directed Gleeson’s first Star Wars, The Force Awakens, and is back for the third in the trilogy. “I love him,” said Jolie, who cast him for the Second World War survivalist epic Unbroken.

I tell him the clippings just portray him as someone who is nice. He smiles, of course. “Having an edge is not something I aspire to,” he says, unflustered. “But I’ve done roles that definitely explored parts of myself that are more than just being a nice fella. I’d rather do it that way, via work, than go out and slate people.”

So he doesn’t want to be contentious? “I would care if I hurt someone,” he says. “And I’m aware my opinions change. I don’t see the point. I’ve plenty of negativity in my life. Plenty of negative emotions. But I’d rather just go there in my work.”

I mention that I emailed Waters before meeting him to ask what she thought about his casting as Faraday, given that neither his CV nor his interviews are exactly littered with hints that he could play a frigid weirdo like the doctor she wrote.

“When I heard Domhnall had been cast as Dr Faraday, I thought, ‘OK, that’s interesting,’” Waters wrote. “In the films I’d seen him in, he plays youthful, endearing characters, and the Dr Faraday of the novel is a bit older and not madly likeable.” Gleeson nods as he hears this. At first, he had been sent the script for a different character. “I understood I wasn’t the obvious choice, because I wasn’t the obvious choice to Lenny.”

Once you have seen the film, it’s hard to think who else could have done it as well as he does — and his casting is testament to the fact that directors are finding it increasingly hard to imagine a role Gleeson can’t play. (He’d make a great Neil Kinnock.) In American Made, he is cocky and outrageous. In The Little Stranger, he is terrified and quiet. And, yes, it’s acting. Chameleon talent is the entire point. Gleeson is just better at it than most.

Faraday’s a mess, isn’t he? “He’s not well, you know?” Gleeson says with some sympathy. “He suffers from an emptiness that can never be filled, because it’s a desire to be something he cannot be, which is of a different class. There’s just so much bitterness, and lust and anger against women. All those things add up to a man unable to connect. Lenny said, ‘If you carry something explosive, you walk carefully.’ And I think Faraday has this. Part of him understands that he has this facility for violence, maybe.”

He is, I offer, a bit “incel”. Gleeson looks blank, so I fill him in. It stands for “involuntary celibate” and is the creation of a group that came to light in April in Toronto, when a man drove his car into women because he believed they owed him sex. “That’s interesting,” Gleeson says carefully. “It’s what a lot of film noir is about, wondering where a man’s place is. With Faraday, it’s more complicated, and the power thing is different, as Caroline is a woman, but she’s from a class he aspires to. I think he’s lonely. I loved him. I connected to him while we were doing it.”

Gleeson was born in 1983 and started acting in his late teens. He still lives in Dublin, like his family. His dad’s mainstream fame came late, so it wasn’t an acting family as such. He is hardly Scott Eastwood to Clint, so he had to earn his success. He was helped by the playwright Martin McDonagh, who cast him in The Lieutenant of Inishmore on Broadway at 23: a role that gave the actor a Tony nomination. Yet despite all this, Gleeson remains very, well, normal. His conversation, for instance, is about living in a messy flat, or Deliveroo, or his grandparents’ Catholicism and his fears about his lack of faith. “I don’t believe in anything afterwards,” he says. “Wish I did.”

In the absence of the comfort of religion, Gleeson listens to advice from his grandmother. “She used to say, ‘If you’re going to make some-thing, make something beautiful.’ If you try to put some good out in the world through your actions, that’s how you live on.”

Why then, I wonder, did he make Mother!, the Darren Aronofsky film that includes a dismembered baby? Gleeson played a man who fights his own brother. Did he read the whole script? “I did.” Even the baby bit? “It will be excessive and offensive to some people, but, for me, it’s not,” he says. “I thought it was an angry film about something that deserved to be angry about.” He has seen the film twice.

The first time Gleeson felt that he belonged as an actor was during his time on Anna Karenina, Joe Wright’s 2012 theatrical film version of the Tolstoy novel. Before that, during auditions or on film sets, he had felt out of place, but Wright wanted his cast to get to know each other, so planned umpteen rehearsals and bonding sessions. “Tom Stoppard was doing yoga with us. It was mad.”

Surely, though, thanks to Star Wars and working with Cruise, he is up there now? He pauses. “There is still something to be got over, and it’s less to do with the fact they’re stars. The power differential is not based on position in the industry, but hours of me watching them, as opposed to them possibly not having seen me in anything.”

That awe happened when he met Leonardo DiCaprio on The Revenant. Surely it’s happened to others meeting him, too? “A couple of people,” he says. What did they say? “They said very nice things.”

#domhnall gleeson #general hux #episode ix #the little stranger

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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New Horror and Sci-Fi Movies Break Out at Fantasia Fest

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The Fantasia International Film Festival has been serving up fresh and often visionary new voices in sci-fi, horror and other genres for nearly a quarter of a century, and this year’s 24th edition was no different — except, of course, it was all different.

Fantasia, which under normal circumstances physically takes place in Montreal in mid-summer, went online in 2020 for an all-digital edition that kicked off on August 20 and concluded on September 2. The event was a mix of films that were either available on demand at any time throughout the fest (up until a maximum ticket capacity was reached) or were designated to stream “live,” as it were, on one or two certain dates at specific times (also with a maximum ticket capacity).

Although press from around the world was invited to cover the festival, the entire program was geoblocked to Canadian ticket buyers only — which means that as a fan you would have to live in Canada to watch the festival offerings online (this was due to exhibition and distribution restrictions for other parts of the world). In addition, a handful of films — including The Descent director Neil Marshall’s new one, The Reckoning — were available only to a limited list of select guests.

Whether these kinds of restrictions helped or hindered the festival’s transition to an online format remains to be seen. On the other hand, our experience watching films was flawless, with no buffering or other technical problems during a single screening. That aspect of holding a digital festival was handled perfectly.

Less perfect, to be frank, was our personal experience. Being at a film festival or any large event or conference is like being in a bubble where all you do is focus on what you’re there to do; trying to do the same on your couch or at your kitchen table, with all the distractions of home, family, work and other elements of everyday life was way more challenging.

We didn’t watch as many films as we wanted to, but the highlights only proved that Fantasia’s longstanding reputation as a breeding ground for provocative, groundbreaking new talent will stay intact for this year and beyond.

HBO Max

Class Action Park (USA)

Our favorite film of the fest — which you can see right now if you’re lucky enough to have HBO Max — is this wild look back at a New Jersey water/amusement park where there were no rules, anything could happen and the lunatics (i.e. severely underqualified teenagers) were literally running the asylum. It was all fun and games… until it wasn’t, as the injuries, lawsuits and tragic deaths began to pile up.

The documentary delves into the history of the park, which was hatched by the insane/genial Eugene Mulvihill, the unsafe rides that he developed, the crazy atmosphere of the place and the tragedies that brought it down. But like all great docs, Class Action Park is also about an era — a snapshot of a time (the late ‘80s and early ‘90s) when kids were allowed way more freedom than they are now, with results that one could view as both good and bad. It’s a sobering, thoughtful and, yes, hilarious film. (****½)

The Department of Special Projects

Fried Barry (South Africa)

Think of this as the hard-R version of E.T. A heroin addict named Barry (stuntman Gary Green in an astonishing first-time performance) is airlifted from a Cape Town street into an alien spacecraft, painfully probed and dropped back down — only his body is inhabited by an extra-terrestrial explorer. The next few days are a wild, often gruesome yet oddly poignant journey in which the alien/Barry trips on drugs, dances the night away at a club, is brutally tortured, has sex with multiple women, becomes an instant father, rescues children from a predator and even reconciles with Barry’s own family.

Writer/director Ryan Kruger adapted this from his own short film and, as with several other movies we saw, occasionally has trouble stretching it to feature length. But what could have been a nihilistic mess becomes something alternately funny, shocking and moving, in a story about loss, addiction and love anchored by Green’s fearless performance and Kruger’s gorgeous, stylized direction. (****)

Magnolia

12 Hour Shift (USA)

12 Hour Shift was like a refreshing cool drink after watching some of the darker entries at Fantasia. We haven’t seen Angela Bettis (May) in a few years so she is a welcome and sensational presence as a night nurse in a Texas hospital running a side business in organ harvesting with her supervisor. Chloe Farnworth is equally great as her beyond-dumb cousin who delivers the organs to the gangsters running the black market, while David Arquette shows up as a dim bulb cop-killer who’s stuck in the ER.

Grisly mayhem and gooey twists ensue, and while it’s nothing you haven’t seen before, Bettis’ implacable calm keeps it all grounded and grimly hilarious. Writer/director Brea Grant allows herself a few self-indulgent moments, but overall this is a lot of fun. A faux-bombastic score heightens the humor. Watch for this on October 2 from Magnolia Pictures. (****)

Ben Hozie

PVT CHAT (USA)

From writer/director Ben Hozie (frontman of the band Bodega), this is a smart, erotic psychodrama about who we think people are and who they really are, against the backdrop of live sex chats and relationships via screen (the latter all too relevant in these shelter-in-place times). Peter Vack is great as Jack, who gambles online by day and spends his winnings at night on those aforementioned chats. His object of desire is cam girl Scarlet (Julia Fox, alluring in what was technically her first role before Uncut Gems), who seems to enjoy her work while tentatively exploring a deeper connection with Jack.

Hozie captures a pre-pandemic lower Manhattan vividly, and while the movie evokes an undercurrent of dread it never resorts to the predictable idea of making Jack a straight-up incel. The plot’s turns are clever and true to the characters, who gradually reveal their vulnerabilities and yearnings. It’s a small film, but it says a lot about love, loneliness and sex in the age of virtual life. (****)

Unstable Ground

Clapboard Jungle: Surviving the Independent Film Business (Canada)

Justin McConnell is a Canadian filmmaker who has directed two low-budget features but finds it as hard as ever to get a single one of his next potential projects (his “slate,” as he hopefully calls it) financed and produced. This documentary, which McConnell assembled over five years, charts the ups and downs of his quest while offering insight from dozens of artists — including Guillermo Del Toro, the late George A. Romero, Mick Garris (director, 1994’s The Stand), Larry Fessenden (director, Wendigo), John McNaughton (director, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer) and others — about the difficulties of independent filmmaking.

McConnell’s saga is a fascinating one and his resiliency in the face of defeat after defeat is at times inspiring. Some of the film plays like a checklist as he tackles various aspects of the business (to his credit, he even offers a clearly late-breaking section on the even more challenging environment facing women and filmmakers of color), but it’s still a worthy guide for anyone who dares to travel this path. (***½)

RLJE Films/Shudder

The Dark and the Wicked (USA)

Writer/director Bryan Bertino scared the living hell out of audiences back in 2008 with The Strangers, and while his pictures since then are few and far between and somewhat hard to see, his latest will benefit from a release through Shudder later this year.

In the meantime, we can tell you that Bertino has not lost a step when it comes to crafting utterly skin-freezing imagery and sequences. Siblings Louise (Marin Ireland) and Michael (Michael Abbot Jr.) return to their family’s rural farmhouse to help their mother as their comatose father enters his last days, despite their mother’s entreaties to stay away. Brother and sister learn all too soon that something has come for their family and will not stop.

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Bertino works economically with both his direction and script, sketching in just enough about this family to create the necessary empathy and aided greatly by sterling work from Ireland and Abbot. The atmosphere is thick with dread from start to finish, and the images shocking and nightmarish. If The Dark and the Wicked leaves you with a few more questions than you’d like, that’s okay…this is still a genuinely unsettling watch. (***½)

Film Movement

Lapsis (USA)

Filmmaker Noah Hutton — who wrote, directed, edited and composed the score — sets his full-length feature debut in a sort of alternate universe that’s very similar to ours but sitting perhaps a few more minutes in the future. The excellent Dean Imperial (who has a James Gandolfini vibe about him) stars as delivery man Ray Tincelli, whose ailing brother’s mystery ailment forces Ray to join the gig economy. He becomes a “cabler,” one of a growing legion of freelancers who are literally laying cable across miles of rugged terrain for a quantum computing network that will revolutionize the financial markets.

Everything about the company and tech is enigmatic, as are many of the people that Ray meets along the way, and he discovers that the cabling “medallion” or permit he’s purchased may have previously belonged to an unsavory figure. Lapsis uses its subtle sci-fi trappings to tell a tale about real life, with workers fighting for whatever scraps they can get and wealthy oligarchs literally stringing them along. Lapsis is a slow burn, with a final scene that’s a bit of a head-scratcher, but Hutton has crafted a very distinct, pertinent vision. (***½)

Epic Pictures/Shudder

Lucky (USA)

Brea Grant also wrote and stars in Lucky, an allegory about a self-help author named May who is stalked — every night — by a masked killer who she keeps mortally injuring yet who keeps reappearing. Reality itself begins to fracture around her as she confronts events from her past and begins to realize what is happening to her and the other women in her life.

Lucky stretches a bit too much to sustain itself effectively over its relatively brief 80 minutes, but this is still a movie with vision and guts from director Natasha Kermani. Its central metaphor for the unending assaults faced by women every day is an unquestionably powerful one, driven home by an extended third act sequence in a parking garage that’s hard to shake. Shudder will stream it at a date TBA. (***)

Relic Pictures

Minor Premise (USA)

This intimate sci-fi thriller is steeped in neurophilosophy — and be warned, there’s a lot to keep up with here. Sathya Sridharan stars as Ethan, a brilliant young scientist who’s obsessed with living up to his father’s legacy while forging his own path. He creates a device that maps out memories and emotions in the brain, but his attempt to try it on himself shatters his psyche into 10 different emotional states, each surfacing for six minutes per hour.

Ethan and his ex-girlfriend (Paton Ashbrook), an ambitious researcher herself, try to piece his mind back together while avoiding the states of rage and psychosis that emerge once every cycle. The repetitive nature of the film and some stylistic choices by director and co-writer Eric Schultz drag its pacing down, but the two main performances are strong and the concept is fascinating and at times frightening. Minor Premise is ambitious and cerebral, if a little too dense, and still an intriguing trip. (***)

Global Screen

Sleep (Germany)

A woman (Sandra Huller) plagued with mysterious nightmares begins to piece together the visions she’s having, a puzzle that leads her to a secluded hotel in a small, desolate town in the German countryside. Once there, she has a nervous breakdown, landing her in the hospital and leaving her daughter (Gro Swantje Kohlhof) to discover the dark secrets hidden in the hotel and the town.

A feature debut from director Michael Venus, Sleep is assured in its vision and imagery even if it’s derivative of David Lynch and other practitioners of the macabre. The movie moves at a leisurely pace and Venus transitions seamlessly from reality to dream, but there is a sense of ambiguity at the end that leaves one both unsettled and vaguely unsatisfied. (***)

Hood River Entertainment

The Block Island Sound (USA)

The Block Island Sound, the new film from Kevin and Matthew McManus (Cobra Kai), would actually make a good pairing with The Dark and the Wicked in that they are both about families besieged by forces beyond their understanding. In this case, the Lynch family, who live on Block Island off the coast of Rhode Island, seem to be the target of an assault from above — an attack that is also doing macabre things to the local wildlife.

As with Bryan Bertino’s film, the family patriarch is the first to succumb, while his marine biologist daughter (Michaela McManus) and troubled son (Chris Sheffield) must contend with the fallout. The Block Island Sound has great cinematography, sound design and music, but is hampered by uneven acting and a somewhat undercooked script that shows its cards early and doesn’t really go anywhere from there. (**½)

Rivertop

Monster Seafood Wars (Japan)

A light, trifling satire of kaiju flicks, Monster Seafood Wars plays off the idea that the Japanese people are accustomed to having their cities leveled by giant monsters on a regular basis. Thus the latest siege by a giant octopus, squid and crab is business as usual, with restaurants even obtaining chunks of “monster meat” and serving it up in gourmet dishes as the latest culinary craze.

The film also pokes fun at youth culture, with the film’s three main scientists not just somewhere in their early 20s but sharing a romantic conflict as well. The movie’s kaiju costumes and green screen effects are deliberately cheesy and you’re meant to relax and have fun, but the movie labors hard to be truly funny and not just an oddity. (**½)

Trapdoor Pictures

The Mortuary Collection (USA)

“The world is not made of atoms, it is made of stories.” Too bad the stories in this anthology film don’t live up to those opening lines. Writer/director Ryan Spindell clearly loves the old Amicus portmanteau films, Creepshow, Tales from the Crypt and others, but his beautifully shot and handsomely designed tribute rarely comes off as more than a surface homage.

The framing device stars Clancy Brown (The Flash) in heavy prosthetics as a mortician who welcomes a cynical young woman (Caitlin Custer) into his funeral parlor and shares stories about some recent clients. There is some attempt at atmospherics and lots of gore, but the scares are non-existent and the stories just sort of sputter out without the punchy endings often associated with this subgenre. (**½)

Copperheart Entertainment

Come True (USA)

For Come True, writer/director/editor/cinematographer Anthony Scott Burns has come up with some truly eerie dream imagery, but the story he built around it is tedious and incoherent. Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone) desperately craves sleep and participates in a dream study that unleashes…what?

The movie never really fleshes out what is happening, while both its script and characters remain maddeningly vague. Throw in a sketchy love story between the very young Sarah and the lead scientist and it gets even creepier in the wrong ways. A misfire all around that sent us quickly into dreamland. (**)

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