The second half of the festival arrives! Some of the glitterati bail after the weekend, they even sell a “second half” badge, and many of the movies get shown in the first and second halves.
Before the first film of the day, I quickly went to the spooky book sale or whatever they called it, focusing on Texas horror authors, where I picked up three – “The Legend of Charlie Fish” by Josh Rountree (Tachyon Publishing), a horror novel set in Galveston during the hurricane, “Whispers of the Dead Saint” by John Bathlisberger (Madness Heart Press), fiction for Mork Borg the new style RPG, and “Mother-Eating” by Jess Hagemann (Ghoulish Books), a retelling of Marie Antoinette’s reign set in Austin. And I got all three signed by the author!
I also picked up “Corpses, Fools, and Monsters” a book about transness in cinema. If you like horror and barbeque, check out Haunt Happy Books in Lockhart and if you like gaiety check out The Little Gay Shop in Austin.
For the first movie slot, I planned to see “whatever I missed out of Sirat, Luger, Vicious, and Folies Merutreries.” I saw all the other three already, which is good because Sirat was a winner.
Sirat – This film hit me like a ton of bricks. Here’s my raw notes I took as I sat outside the theater afterward still having to will myself not to cry a half hour later.
“I don’t know what I’m feeling. Loss? Grief? Existential dread? My heart feels hollow. People say it’s bleak. Is it really? Or is it just unflinching?”
I don’t really know how to explain the movie, the plot is really just a reason the characters are there – a man and his young son are living in their van driving around looking for their teenage daughter, and they go to an underground rave in the desert near Morocco to hand out flyers and look for her. The federales break that one up but they hear from some of the ravers there’s another one so they caravan across the desert with some interesting characters that definitely seem like career race-goers – sun-baked, drug-baked, tattooed, one missing an arm, another a leg, speaking a mix of Spanish, French, English, and Arabic, weird but but good-natured, in a converted bus and Mercedes 911 transport truck. Some things go wrong while driving for days and days across the desert. Maybe World War III is happening in the background, hard to tell when you’re in the middle of a Moroccan desert.
There’s a pretty sparse amount of dialogue – most of the time it’s just sensory storytelling – thumping bass, roaring engine, and the moan of dust-laden desert wind. Definitely needs to be seen on the big screen, or at least the big speakers! But what’s it about? I don’t know, man. Human connection but isolation. Hope and desperation and despair. Everyday toil and the suddenness of tragedy. All of that. In my opinion it shows how you cross the thin line to being a refugee. Sirat means “the narrow bridge from hell to paradise” so that tracks I guess.
I have to stop writing about it now because I’m getting upset again. But best of the fest by a wide margin. Won the Jury Prize at Cannes too and is getting submitted by Spain for the international Academy Award. NEON will be releasing it here in January. 5/5 stars.
I just sat outside in silence until the next showing. Here’s another review of Sirat for you. It’s best seen on the big screen, or at least the big speaker, as so much of it is the immersive sound design and cinematography. Here’s a Spotify playlist of the soundtrack if you want to desert-rave.
Penance – a movie made for $7k by a bunch of stunt people! Good action in the beginning, two brothers attack a whole warehouse+bar installation of goons because… something about their sister? Anyway, they kill infinite goons but the Bad Guy and his three sons jack them up, burning one with acid and such. Cut to three years later and they are healed up and ready for revenge, they go after it a lttle more serial-killy than you can do and stay the good guys. Lags hard in the middle but there’s a good twist at the end. The sound wasn’t finished, and the acting levels varied, but for $7k quite an achievement! 3/5 stars.
Dinner to Die For – a hot food photographer and true crime lover needs a piece de resistance for her new cookbook. She teases her pet friendzoned guy with scenarios about participating in a food related thrill kill with a curvy lesbian next door. Is she just teasing him? What will happen? A good South African thriller made mainly with three people and a cool loft. 3/5 stars.
One fine day, all the movies made during COVID will finally finish being released and we’ll get full casts again. Though maybe peak capitalism will still prevent it. Anyway, this leads us to the second Secret Screening of the fest!
Bugonia – The new Emma Stone acted, Yorgos Lanthimos directed, Ari Aster produced A-tier feature about two losers who abduct hyper-CEO Emma Stone because they think she’s an alien plotting against humanity, as proven by the stuff she and her bio-pharma-tech-whatnot company does to people and the world. Which is plausible. It was good, a fun ride! Conspiracies, capitalism, and so on. Possibly more ambitious in touching on “hot button topics” than actually delivering on solid conclusions on them. I will sum it up as “Emma puts the lotion on her skin or she gets the hose again” and “Fuuuuucking Andromedans!” 4/5 stars.
In the final slot I had a ticket to The Curse, but I have a bad attitude about all the ‘social media horror’ movies this year, I feel like they’re all just “let’s remake The Ring or whatever but instead of VHS it’s… Instagram!” That may not be fair in every case but it’s fair enough that I avoided the genre, which means after going outside to watch people take advantage of the free head-shaving after Bugonia I turned in.
Geek Related 