So this was a pretty darn good afternoon to evening to early morning, and I think we can all get behind midnight movies being about 54 minutes long: The odds are pretty good that the Red Line will still be going, even better that there will be buses, and then there's more plentiful taxis.
Amusingly, with the evening ending on a double dose of Gaspar Noé in Vortex and Lux Æterna, the latter at midnight, the Coolidge was playing another one of the director's films, Enter the Void, as their midnight movie. Not great coordination, guys!
"Tea Time"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Teenage Waterpolo, digital)
I love how utterly straight Tara Price plays "Tea Time" even though the temptation to be a little more arch must have been fierce. It's a wonderfully goofy set-up to start with - sweet looking little girl (Kennedy Barrie) stops being cutesy playing with her dolls when nobody's looking, taking on the personality of a mafia don and terrifying both her kid brother and her toys. It's straight-on as heck but Price nails it and gets just what she needs from Barrie.
The thing that seems bold for how no-nonsense her choices are is the way these toys are basically just people, not big fancy rubber costumes or particularly goofy makeup, and there's no winking at the audience about it. Ballerina, Bunny, and Teddy just present their terror so directly that the comedy is dark rather than meta. It's kind of absurd and horrifying. It'd be easy to underline the joke too much, but instead it just works in earnest.
"Truck Dad"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Teenage Waterpolo, digital)
A lot of these comedy shorts aren't quite so focused, instead feeling more like riffing, which is kind of where "Truck Dad" lands - filmmakers Tamir Rawlings & Bradley Wilkinson appear to have come up with the sort of line which amuses in the moment ("My Dad was a truck - he just drove away!" said in a not-so-bright-sounding drawl) and sort of tried to top each other getting to that bit while spinning a yarn they'd later animate. That's probably not how it happened, but it's the feel of it, constantly trying to top itself but kind of going off the rails.
It's pretty funny at times, but the sort of funny where I start thinking it might be funnier at four minutes than five, even though that really doesn't seem like enough time to wear out its welcome or fall apart.
"They Used to Call Me Crazy"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Teenage Waterpolo, digital)
I kind of love shorts like this, with relatively limited animation as someone tells a story, especially when you can absolutely sense that it's an old family story so folks are getting ahead of themselves and laughing as they get to the good parts. In this case, it's a funny-horrible story about kids who've got no business driving swiping unattended cars while their owners are in church and joyriding. The visuals are fine, more than good enough, but it works in large part because the joke as been perfectly refined while still feeling spontaneous.
"Bliss"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Teenage Waterpolo, digital)
I'm not sure that "Bliss" is the first time I've seen someone try to drop a human into a sock-puppet world, but it feels surprisingly fresh, like filmmaker Sarah Gold has seen a whole mess of of comedy shorts with sock puppets and twisted it from "we can do this kind of simply, and even make that the joke" and instead decided to just commit like heck to the bit - how does this all work?
It ultimately works in large part due to Jared Gilman, who plays the human teenager who doesn't realize quite how different he is before it's pointed out to him. He's delightfully guileless, playing Toby like he's a character in a classic Disney movie, handling the physical comedy of a guy who never properly learned how to use his arms like it's second nature rather than something he's just figuring out. He's earnest and appealing and is able to play the guy pretty straight while also giving him a character beyond not fitting into the world.
It eventually gets to the point where it starts sort of spoofing conspiracy thrillers, and even with the built-in absurdity of it, it's a bit less fun - the movie's been played straight enough that it's kind of got to be taken seriously even when it's exaggerating - but it's still a fun high-concept short that doesn't really come close to wearing out its welcome.
"Meat Friend"
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Teenage Waterpolo, digital)
Writer/director Izzy Lee's not exactly a close friend, but I like her and we're in enough of the same circles that it's a bit awkward to say that, yeah, we don't really have the same sense of humor at all. In this case, I suspect that we're just far enough off pop-culturally that a lot of what she's referencing in "Meat Friend" is kind of foreign to me (I've never seen an episode of Full House or the cottage industry it spawned), so it kind of feels like it's working hard to spoof something that only takes a little effort to lampoon.
I laughed a bit at times, but mostly just chalked this up as Not For Me.
"Johnny the Dime"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Teenage Waterpolo, digital)
Another short that seems to spring from something that made the filmmakers crack up - in this case, David Gazzo's skeezy title character who probably has very few issues with peeping at someone else's sister but is absolutely going to make it a thing when it's his. It's the sort of character that makes for a decent skit, especially played off of a good straight man. He's mostly on his own here, though, winding himself up amid cuts to him stumbling around ineffectually trying to defend his sister's honor.
It's fine, mostly. It feels like the start of something, an initial riff on the character that could be refined and put into a situation that could do more with it.
"The Blood of the Dinosaurs"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Teenage Waterpolo, digital)
Director Joe Badon and co-writer Jason Kruppa riff on some kind of obvious targets in "The Blood of the Dinosaurs" - public access TV, patronizing kids' programming, corporate-produced propaganda, that sort of stuff - and like a lot of these shorts, it's kind of amiably homemade but not exactly making new observations or coming from surprising angles. It does have the kind of busy look and attention to which angles Badon and cinematographer Daniel Waghorne are choosing that hints at more careful construction than just "well, it's supposed to look cheap, so let's kind of half-ass it ourselves".
Which helps a fair amount when reality starts breaking down, as it will; the jump-cuts and unnerving choices feel like they're driving to something rather than random. There's just enough something-isn't-right to the rest of the movie to keep that turn into chaos feel sharp rather than unmerited or desperate to finish.
"Take Him Down"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Teenage Waterpolo, digital)
Joe Raasch built this 2-minute short in Unreal Engine and it's kind of crazy just how much animation can be done in close-to-real-time with sufficient prep these days, isn't it? And how the result kind of could be a video game or a movie.
At any rate - an amusingly goofy enough riff on that sort of sci-fi action finale.
"Shitty Shitty Bang Bang"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Teenage Waterpolo, digital)
You see where this is going pretty much right away, but the directors (Neil Cicierega plus the search-unfriendly Kevin James and Ryan Murphy) know what their one joke is and zero right in on it. The short is kind of abrasively in-your-face while going about it, maybe going a little hard on the idea that this awful situation is funnier if the folks stuck in it are exactly the folks you'd enjoy watching get screwed over. These aren't exactly guys it's fun to spend five minutes with, after all.
I do kind of dig how the visual effects are kind of basic as heck, but not exactly campily so. The whole "magical flying car that runs out of gas" deal is silly, but it's a situation that works better as "I can't believe we're in this ridiculous and inescapable situation" and not "look how dumb and unbelievable this all is". There's shades of absurdity, and this one has about the right one.
"A Puff Before Dying"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Teenage Waterpolo, digital)
Was the "educational" film meant to caution students against drug use or dangerous driving with horror-movie levels of gore something that has been seen in schools lately, or is it just a thing that's been embedded into the culture to the point where people treat it as current even though it doesn't actually show up any more? We didn't have it when I was in high school some thirty-odd years ago, but my suburban Maine town was super-white bread and might have gotten the collective vapors at that. At any rate, that's what Michael Reich & Mike Pinkney are going for with "A Puff Before Dying", except with marionettes.
And, let's be honest, puppets make everything better, especially in a situation like this where the idea is that you're looking to amplify just how absurd and over-the-top those films were (are?). It's obviously exaggerated but it mostly captures the idea that these things were made with decent intentions despite being deeply overwrought before going completely, entertainingly over the top.
"Polybius"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Teenage Waterpolo, digital)
Speaking of things I apparently completely missed despite it being something I should know about, I had no idea that "Polybius" was based on some sort of urban legend about a mysterious video game back when I would have been interested in such things. I honestly thought it was just a simple riff on the oddness of Tetris taking the world by storm amid the Cold War. But apparently there are multiple films, short and feature length, inspired by it right now.
This one's neat and taut, to the extent where I wonder what I'd think of it if it hadn't shown up in the comedy bloc. Writer/director Alex Rouleau kind of leans into how goofy combined paranoia parents of the era had about the Russians, games, and a few other things. In this setting, it plays as kind of absurd; elsewhere, I suspect it plays closer to honest pastiche. That's a neat trick.
"Toshie the Nihilist"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Teenage Waterpolo, digital)
Filmmaker Matthew Chozick is American, but he's based in Japan (he's been in a couple films directed by Eiji Uchida), and he goes for a strain of Japanese pop culture that's maybe not as well-known on this side of the Pacific as others, a sort of soft-spoken absurdity that I greatly enjoy at festivals like Fantasia and NYAFF but which doesn't seem to have quite the same reach outside the festival circuit of the manga-inspired action and over-the top horror on the one hand or the restrained art-house material on the other. I don't know how popular it actually is inside Japan, but I tend to presume "not very", just because it hasn't seemed to break through because a film's popularity can't be denied.
Anyway - "Toshie the Nihilist" has a lot of that, from its heroine played by Rino Higa who eventually breaks out of a frustrating, minimizing life to the eccentric supporting characters to a finale that on the face of it seems utterly absurd - folks swim to Hawaii! - but doesn't hit that way. Chozick manages the sort of slow build to where that seems believable in 15 minutes, partly with storybook narration and partly with impressively well-executed escalation.
This sort of thing can feel twee and patronizing in some hands, but works out nicely here.
Watcher
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022, DCP)
I imagine director Chloe Okuno calling up the sound designer early on and saying, look, I know you've got a standard library of effects, but there's a moment or two at the finale where they really have to count. Like, these noises have to be as awesome and overwhelming as they are in real life.
That aside, an awfully well-built thriller that seems to know of what it speaks, taking great care to establish just how uncomfortable this situation is to someone like Julia, even for the men in the audience who haven't lived it, while building up the specific setting so that not many are waiting to catch up. Okuno does nice work pacing the film to stay unnerving even though there aren't many people among whom to spread suspicion in the mystery pieces. Okuno raises her game in nifty ways when she needs to create a little more tension, and "just a little better" in a few places can count for a lot.
It's nice to have Maika Monroe in just about every scene, too; she's been a rock-solid anchor for any sort of genre film ever since It Follows, and she's got a clenched, vigilant take on Julia that implies a history, and you can tell when she's genuinely loosening up and when she's putting on a show. She plays well off Madalina Anea as a neighbor, and there's a nice tension with Karl Glusman as her husband. Everyone involved knows how to play things with underlying tension even when the scene doesn't obviously call for that.
Vortex
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022, DCP)
It's hard to argue against the craft or thought process that went into making this movie, but on the other hand, Gaspar Noé's choice to extend everything just a little (or a lot) longer, to make sure that a viewer doesn't just understand that something is awful but is awful in a way that never stops, can't help but wear on an audience. It's a movie that really doesn't need tangents but has them anyway. It's well over two hours long and the intent is to exhaust the audience.
On top of that, Dario Argento and Françoise Lebrun, playing an elderly couple whose simple life is being upended by the wife's encroaching dementia and the husband's slightly less obvious diminishment, don't exactly try to ingratiate themselves; they're bourgeois and unremarkable, making this a common tragedy rather than an exceptional, operatic one. It's sedate, quality work that grounds the film despite the fact that it's as formally tricky and elaborate as any of the more flashy things Noé has done in the past.
That's in large part because the film starts and spends a great deal of time in split screen, one camera following Argento's Leo and another Lebrun's Elle, often in long oners that must have taken a great deal of coordination. The idea behind using the split screen is fascinating: This is in many ways more an overlapping experience than a shared one; for all that the popular narrative about folks who have been married any length of time is that they become a team facing difficulties together, it almost certainly can't be that way at the end, and Noé never lets the audience lose track of that.
Vortex never feels less than honest. It's just a lot.
Lvx Æterna (Lux Æterna)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 26-27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022, DCP)
I suspect that a lot of folks will get to the end of Lux Æterna and have their main reaction be "...and then what happens?", especially if they're not seeing it as a midnight screening at the end of a long day (at a festival or otherwise) and feeling a bit wobbly.
What this movie does is a lot of fun, combining stories of what making old-school Eurosleaze was like versus the chaotic, oppressive nature of a modern film set with everybody looking toward their next project or glued to their phones, not able to just entirely be in this weird fantasyland that they maybe could have been in the 1970s. It's fun, at least until it starts to seem clear Noé has no idea where to go with it. There's a sort of oddity about how the things Noé does to indicate that maybe there's something supernatural and corrupting forcing its way onto the set is also just kind of Noé's style, and you can't exactly be sure what to read into it.
It's a classic case of a movie that stops rather than one that ends, with the good bits maybe hopefully being enough to make up for how completely it's tossed aside. On the other hand, more midnight movies should be 51 minutes long! And for as meta and art-house-y as this is, it's definitely a midnight in that environment.
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