Saturday Matinee: Obex

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By Zachary Lee

Source: RogerEbert.com

Projects that primarily center on characters’ isolation and the respite they experience from hiding themselves behind a screen land differently in the post-lockdown era. Director Albert Birney’s “OBEX,” though set in 1987 (denoted as such by TV adverts for “Nightmare on Elm Street”), feels seeped with such proximate anxieties. It is sympathetic to the ways we’ll migrate to digital worlds to escape the hell of embodied living, but it sweetly and gently reminds us about the beautiful inconvenience of community. Even though we can pick our flavor of digital numbing, Birney brings his DIY mentality and a host of collaborators who are in sync with his sensibilities to craft a project that shakes us out of the tempting lull and urges us to live life as an NPC. 

The first section of “Obex” focuses on the daily rhythms of its protagonist, Conor Marsh (Birney), who lives in his Maryland house with his dog, Sandy (played by Dorothy, who gives fellow horror hound Indy from “Good Boy” a run for his money). His only communication with the outside world is with his neighbor and proto-DoorDash driver, Mary (Callie Hernandez), who kindly delivers him food but is never invited into his home. We spend much of the film watching Conor and Sandy go about their lives in an unremarkable fashion; Birney plays Conor with relatable contentment. He has his dog and three TVs … what’s there not to like? 

Mileage may vary about whether or not you enjoy getting what amounts to an extended house tour, but Birney and his crew have put in the work to make Conor’s house the type of oasis that would warrant such sedentary. The production value is rendered in such hypnotic detail that I found it a joy to simply be lost in the lo-fi, analog space. It is befitting of the theme, in that Conor has created his home to be a place of such alluring safety and comfort that it becomes nauseating to consider leaving (or any form of disruption).

Pete Ohs (who most recently directed quirky nightmares of his own with last year’s “The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick” and “Erupcja”) serves as the cinematographer and co-writer, and the film thrives on his and Birney’s surreal wavelength. Even though Conor is comfortable, the film’s visual language is anything but. We often see Sandy and Conor framed from an object in Conor’s room; as we peek at their lives from the perspective of a toaster or keyboard, these grainy shots, dreamy in their ambling compositions, feel as though they’re probing for dysfunction. It feels like we’re seeing Conor’s and Sandy’s lives from the perspective of a benevolent spirit, watching and curious about how someone seemingly well-adjusted can be so lonely. It feels less like a movie we stumbled upon and shouldn’t be seeing, and more like a project that’s eerily being filmed, where we’re trying (and failing) to locate the cinematographer.

The sound design is worth saluting, as Kevin Hill, the re-recording mixer, and Matthew Giordano, the post-production sound designer, work to create a hypnotic soundscape that chillingly unites disparate elements. Josh Dibb’s score, with its spectral and techno-piercing wavelengths, is unsettling in and of itself, and it’s particularly fascinating to see them work in the context of the rest of the film’s audio. The buzzing of cicadas outside Conor’s home is a common audio fixture, but it gets remixed with the hissing of the tea kettle in Conor’s kitchen, the hum of TV static, and the downpour of a running faucet, so that these sounds become indistinguishable from one another. Try as he might, Conor’s digital life is bleeding into his physical one.

That theme comes more into the fray after the film’s inciting crisis. Conor later sees an ad for the mysterious, state-of-the-art computer game, OBEX, which allows you to scan yourself into the game, where you have to fight the demon king, Ixaroth. Conor plays the game but quickly gets bored, and later finds that Sandy has been abducted by Ixaroth. He then reenters the game to liberate Sandy from her digital captor, all the while being forced to grapple with the uncomfortable truths about his family history and how that trauma informed his tendency to self-isolate. 

The world of OBEX, while free of keyboards and printers, is just as painstakingly realized as Conor’s physical world. There, he meets Mary in real life (Hernandez, riparian in her ability to oscillate between earnest and farcical, is a delight even in her small scenes) and encounters a traveling companion with a TV for a head (Frank Mosely). There’s a humor in seeing a scruffy, ’80s equivalent of a tech bro bring his white button-up and Spirit Halloween-coded sword to battle against humanoid cicada soldiers (Ixaroth’s lackeys) and Birney mines all the earned laughs from this mash-up between high fantasy and reality. 

In many ways, “OBEX” works best when it embraces its roots as a fairy tale of sorts, even as it feels rooted in its contemporary tenderness about the human condition. This framework helps recontextualize earlier dialogue scenes in which characters can state the film’s central provocation out loud (“Someday we’ll all live in computers because life outside is too sad,” Conor says at one point), because characters in fairy tales often speak so overtly. 

To some extent, it’s impossible to fully unplug from the ways technology and virtual worlds are enmeshed with our lives. Everything from the algorithms designed to keep us hooked on certain platforms to the addictive nature of blue light makes it far easier to ignore the world around us. Pointedly, Birney never lambasts Conor or others for whom this retreat is a reflex. But his film, like all the best art, is an invocation: not merely reflecting a despondent reality and world we know, but reminding us that there’s more to life than just the screen.

Watch Obex on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/16210459

Saturday Matinee: Late Night with the Devil

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By Eddie Pasa

Source: DC Filmdon

I love horror movies. (My wife can tell you that they’re often my favorite thing to throw on when I go to sleep, often to her chagrin.) They can be fun and entertaining, and they offer you the thrill of being scared without being in danger, if that’s your thing. But it always goes the same way: You leave the theater considering the acting, the makeup effects, and how the filmmakers tried to make you jump out of your seat or make your brain go sideways. But it all wears off usually around about the time you get home, and – in my case as a reviewer – you try to hold onto the memories you want to talk about, whether positive or negative.

Not here. Hoo, boy, no. This one stays with you.

It’s been over fourteen hours since I finished watching Late Night with the Devil, and I’m still shivering at the memory of it. Not for a long time have I been completely freaked out and scared by a movie – maybe not since Fede Alvarez’s truly visceral Evil Dead remake in 2013. That was a movie that had scares, gore, and atmosphere, all set in and around a backwoods cabin – plenty of room to move about and create any kind of atmosphere you want. Alvarez did just that, using different colors, smash zooms and whip pans, and other mood-setting techniques where his limits were only his and his crew’s imaginations.

Conversely, Late Night with the Devil confines itself to a TV studio, with TV cameras and two behind-the-scenes film cameras capturing everything as it happens. There’s lighting, sure, but the usable areas are limited to the soundstage and the direct backstage area. The behind-the-scenes cameras are running black and white 35mm film, leaving the 1970s TV cameras to capture everything else in the then-limited color space. And why are we here? To watch late-night host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) attempt to stave off cancellation with a desperate broadcast stunt.

We’re propelled back to the days of gas shortages, the Nixon resignation, Jimmy Carter, and the rise of news reporting that followed the “If it bleeds, it leads” adage coined by William Randolph Hearst. Also central to writers/directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes’ found footage frightfest is the ‘70s obsession with cults and the occult, both of which play into why Delroy has chosen Halloween to tackle all of it. His guests for this night, where the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest? A self-professed psychic; a former magician, now devoted to debunking so-called paranormal activity; and finally, a parapsychologist and her young patient, the sole survivor of a demon-worshipping cult mass suicide.

The Cairnes brothers take care not to overplay anything, leaving us hanging on the possibility that maybe we’re just seeing things owing to blips on the master tape or mere suggestions of the unnatural. We see Christou (Fayssal Bazzi) work his supposedly psychic powers to middling effect with the studio audience, which casts doubt on the screaming fit he has that causes his eyes to forcibly roll upwards and beyond a physically possible position. Even more doubt is thrown our way when Carmichael (Ian Bliss) shows us how all of Christou’s act is a bunch of hooey.

But there’s no mistaking the increasing amounts of dread piling up with each commercial break, as Delroy gets more news – both about his show and the condition of one of his hastily departing guests – that makes him push the envelope further than he should. And when he brings out Dr. June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon) and cult survivor Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), the latter of whom stares intensely at the cameras instead of talking with everyone on stage normally, the Cairnes brothers masterfully build and build to a shocking climax that will horrify even the most jaded of scary movie enthusiasts.

The notion of the audience being toyed with is savored, especially where Carmichael is concerned. We almost rely on his condescending attitude to help us believe that none of this is really happening, that Delroy is doing anything and everything he can to maintain his viewership through sordid chicanery. The Cairnes brothers give us outs, but we’re unwilling to take them, having been conditioned through the media to stay tuned for bigger and better “after these words from our sponsors.” All of this is borne by the committed cast led by David Dastmalchian, who usually takes roles that skew toward the strange and unusual.

Here, Dastmalchian tones it down completely, not even venturing to make Jack Delroy the comedian he’s supposed to be. Instead, he’s the baseline for this night of terrors; while everyone around him is some sort of archetype, he’s calm, trying to stay in control of himself while others either encourage him to go further or warn him against doing so. Aside from last year’s Oppenheimer, this is the most knowingly natural I’ve ever seen him; the Cairnes brothers wisely use our expectations against us with his casting, and Dastmalchian solidly holds down his end to keep the film grounded.

Opposite him, Ingrid Torelli stands out as the frighteningly placid Lilly, who seems to have happily accepted that a demon might be residing in her body. Lilly freaks us out by just looking at the camera; she doesn’t have to say a word, leaving Torelli the room to create an ominous presence through her eyes and posture. Again, our expectations are flouted by having Lilly portrayed as this smiling teenager who seems to relish being on camera and who doesn’t mind that “Mr. Wriggles” can come and go when he wants. Torelli alternately keeps us glued to the scene and repulses us just by her mannerisms, switching deftly between her character’s intent and what’s behind her piercing, eerie visage.

I once wrote an opinion that “horror films” are different from “scary movies,” figuring that the latter was kind of everyday, Friday the 13th-type film that teens attend to have a good time and the former was where characters cannot escape horrible fates. Late Night with the Devil is a perfect combination of the two, holding enough in the scare department while watching our characters tunnel further away from the light toward their agonizing destination. Even though we wish for reason to settle the matters and that people could make the right decisions, the Cairnes brothers purposefully travel down the other path. In this film, hubris gives way to damnation, and for every second of it, we’re clinging to hope that some possible good could come of these events. Here’s the thing, though: Cameron and Colin Cairnes don’t care one solitary whit about that hope, leading us through a waking nightmare the likes of which I’ve seldom seen.

Watch Late Night with the Devil on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/15032949

Saturday Matinee: Snowy Bing Bongs Across the North Star Combat Zone

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By Nico Chapin 

Source: The Knockturnal

“Snowy Bing Bongs Across the North Star Combat Zone” is the kind of film words cannot possibly describe.

Not because it’s bad, or because there’s nothing to say, but doing so feels inadequate. It’s a film that is simultaneously overflowing with ingenuity and talent that is constantly teetering dangerously close to the maligned qualities of what we might call twee, and yet that is only half of it.

But, you should also know, none of this is a surprise. Or at least it shouldn’t be. After all, Snowy Bing Bongs was produced by duo the Daniels, whose 2016 film Swiss Army Man suffered under a similar weight. As it turns out, most people have the same reaction when faced with a film where a (possibly) deranged Paul Dano befriends the flatulent corpse of Daniel Radcliffe and proceeds to stalk Mary Elizabeth Winstead. That reaction is somewhere between visceral disgust, complete bewilderment, and utter joy, both that a film would so willingly forego what we might call “narrative coherence” and that it would so lovingly embrace the entire scope of what movies can do.

Here, directors Alex Huston Fischer and Rachel Walter, along with collaborators Cocoon Central Dance Team (Tallie Medel, Sunita Mani, and Eleanore Pienta), similarly drop the audience into a bizarre and wondrous world. Like Swiss Army Man, which opens with the Dano’s character on track to hang himself, the first scenes of Snowy Bing Bongs are marked by their sheer confidence. The three women, dressed in rugs, like some sort of Paleolithic sheep, face off against a squad of beach balls, dancing slowly. Suddenly they’re sunbathing, before farting in unison.

Fischer and Walter leap from style to style with reckless abandon, and yet the film never spirals out of control. The interludes return us to the attack of the Beach Balls and the three women’s carefully bizarre dance. In between, we see Mani attend an audition in which she spends the whole time trying to pronounce her own name. (The casting director? Keith Poulson, marking his second acting credit this summer.) Pienta is pulled into a potential romance with an old man who informs her she’s the kindest person in the world, so kind in fact that she has two hearts. Medel delivers a backstage monologue that puts anything Iñárritu did in Birdman to shame.

There’s also a stop motion sequence, a montage through an asteroid belt, and a fourth wall breaking denouement in which the lights come up and the Bing Bongs hold a Q&A with an audience, and even Spice Girls-esque dance musical performance.

Yet even if this rapid description of the films plot doesn’t make narrative or logical sense, they make an aesthetic, emotional sense onscreen. Each of the women’s vignettes feels ripped from a real experience. Like Swiss Army Man, which used its over the top style to dig into the complex emotional realities of how we deal with our inner selves and with the rest of the world, here we have a constellation of stories all of which expose Medel, Mani, and Pienta (literally and figuratively) to the audience, three actresses and improv vets whose experiences are given voice in the most absurd way possible. Snowy Bing Bongs says it’s ok to fart, and to stage interpretive dance battles against beach balls. But it also touches on the embarrassment of messing up your own name, or having a weird interaction with a neighbor, or struggling to understand why you want to be an actor. It takes the smallest moments in day to day life and blows them up into immersive tableaus, warts and all. 

So yes, Snowy Bing Bongs is “weird,” or “immature,” in quotation marks, like stumbling on a stranger’s sketchbook brought to life. Yes, many people will probably not like it, and its cuteness and kitchen sink style make easy targets for criticism. And yet.

Snowy Bing Bongs is also upsettingly funny and weirdly stirring. At the very least, it’s a bravado experiment in how two directors, with total control over tone, can set genres against each other and revel in the inevitable sparks. The result is the rare film with an unabashedly, uncynical wonder for the possibilities of cinema, something that needs to be seen to be believed.

Watch Snowy Bing Bongs Across the North Star Combat Zone on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/16712261

Saturday Matinee: Sherlock Jr.

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By André Crous

Source: Cinemuse Film Society

Sherlock Jr. is a film that uses every trick in the book to produce electrifying moments of comedy that can still thrill audiences today. It is also a shrewd representation of the place of film in our lives.

The poster shows Buster Keaton as a detective and as a beloved (projectionist). The credits merely list him in his parenthetical capacity, and in fact this occupation embraces the central part of the film, which takes the audience on a journey full of twists and turns that is very clearly related to the first part of the story.

Keaton, the man with the expressionless face who manages to find himself in extraordinary situations, stars as a guy who wants to be a detective as much as he wants to marry the Girl, but when he is framed by another suitor in the matter of a lost pocket watch, and his detective skills fail him, he dreams up a scenario in which he is the ultimate sleuth. This part of the film is presented in a way that excites by means of its presentation and its content.

This medium-length film is interesting on many levels, and while the action transcends mere slapstick (it is not repetitive and does not have any condescension for the film’s characters), Keaton’s conception of the film’s biggest stunts makes for remarkable commentary on the perspective of the viewer. Consider the following movements:

1) During a film screening in a big theatre, with a large audience watching, Keaton approaches the big screen and walks into the film. He subsequently appears in different scenes as the film cuts from one location to the next, and Keaton has to keep up with objects that appear out of nowhere.

2) In this film-within-a-film, Keaton follows some undesirables to their hide-out. He puts a rounded suitcase with a costume inside on the outside of the window, and when he escapes from the house by jumping through the window, he is instantly covered by this costume, and the criminals don’t recognise him. This particular scene is further enhanced by a cut-away image (produced by means of a kind of double exposure, a gimmick Keaton also uses to great effect in his 1928 film, The Cameraman) when the inside of the house can be seen “through the walls”. Technically, it must have been quite a job, but the final effect is breathtaking.

There are many other instances of such trickery, and in spite of (occasionally) less than perfect editing to disguise the manner in which they were done, the products are unexpected and work very well. Two other moments specifically target the perspective of the viewer:

1) When Keaton has already “entered” the screen, the camera dollies closer and closer, until the screen fills the frame, so that any subsequent scenes or cuts would appear like any other film and we forget that we are watching a film that is also being watched by the film’s audience. In this way, the second-level film becomes just as real or just as fake as the first-level film.

2) When Keaton wakes up from his dream and looks through the window of his projectionist’s booth towards the screen, his face is framed by a very clear border, similar to the image he himself is looking at: the framed image of the film in the theatre.

While Keaton doesn’t approach his subject with the same complexity as Woody Allen in The Purple Rose of Cairo, it remains a very entertaining film that touches on some important aspects of film reception. Unlike Chaplin, Keaton does not behave at all like a child, but rather like a very lucky average Joe, and since his technical skills enable a very entertaining telling of his story, he is by far the more serious director. In Sherlock Jr. he manages to craft a film that, while clearly not meant to be a feature-length idea, has enormous potential to entertain.

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Country USA

Released 1924

Director(s) Buster Keaton

Screenwriter(s) Jean Havez, Joseph A. Mitchell

Directors of Photography Clyde Bruckman, Elgin Lessley, Byron Houck

Running Time 44 minutes