The Inefficient Filmmakers Guide to Making a Movie in Six Years

One of "Animal"'s incredibly evocative posters.

"Or, How to Have the Most Fun While Having a Nervous Breakdown"
-by David Dastmalchian 

[ICYMI -the rising actor David Dastmalchian is guest blogging today! -ed.]

I have said this in jest many times – and will probably continue to joke about it again and again – but the truth of the matter is that I came dangerously close to having a severe nervous breakdown in the weeks that led up to the filming of Animals.  For the uninitiated, Animals is a feature film that I wrote, acted in and produced.  My close friend and Midwest compatriot, Collin Schiffli, directed the film about a homeless couple who struggle between the reality of their addiction to heroin (and one another) and the fantasy life that they imagine for themselves.  

Although it’s not a “biopic” by any means, the film was definitely influenced by my own personal battles with the same demons as my characters. More...

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Tribeca: Suffer the Little Children

Here's Jason with a real pair of downers to conclude our Tribeca Coverage. Thanks for reading along. Next up in the festival game: Cannes...

Bridgend -- I'm a little perplexed about Bridgend winning half of the awards at the fest; besides a few arresting visuals I found the film moribund on arrival. The film fictionalizes the true-life story of a town in Wales where a mysterious rash of suicides has plagued the hills. Lead actress Hannah Murray (best known in the US as Gilly on A Game of Thrones, although I didn't recognize her once while watching the movie and I'm a big Thrones fan) gives us a vivid enough slide into Crucible light hysteria but I never really bought what the movie was selling - it skims over too many unreasonable plot holes in deference to its stifling mood, and at times is downright silly with trying too hard. A literally shitty sex-romp on a dirty mattress in the woods is somehow played straight, even as visions of Divine in Female Trouble flood our minds.

Meadlowlands -- Also suffering from all outward signs of Film Festival Depression, where people suffer beautifully, so beautifully, Meadlowlands does have a few nice performances even as it wrings every manipulative drop out of Dead Kid Grief it can. Olivia Wilde and Luke Wilson play parents whose cookie-munching moppet gets snatched at the start of the first reel; the kid's never more than a plot device through which we can watch them suffer, and suffer they do, beautifully. Wilson gets the less overbearing arc to play which is good since he's an actor I appreciate for his low-key style; Wilde smartly under-plays her over-drawn hand (cutting and autistic kids, oh my) but man alive by the time the elephant shows up all I could think of was "Don't think about elephants."

OUR COMPLETE TRIBECA 2015 COVERAGE
18 reviews. A round of applause for Joe, Jason, and Abstew

• Adderal Diaries with Amber Heard & James Franco - Joe Reid
• Anesthesia starring Glenn Close & Kristen Stewart - Abstew
• Applesauce starring Onur Turkel - Jason
• Backtrack starring Adrien Brody - Jason
• Far From Men starring Viggo Mortensen - Abstew
• Good Kill starring Ethan Hawke - Jason
• Grandma, the new Lily Tomlin - Joe Reid
• Hungry Hearts with Adam Driver & Alba Rohrwacher - Joe Reid
• King Jack starring Charlie Plummer - Jason
• Mojave starring Oscar Isaac & Garret Hedlund - Abstew
• The Overnight starring Adam Scott & Taylor Schlling - Abstew
• Sleeping with Other People from Leslye Headland - Joe Reid
• Slow West a Michael Fassbender western - Jason
• Stung a midnight movie - Jason
• When I Live My Life Over Again starring Amber Heard - Abstew 
• The Wolfpack, a buzzy documentary - Joe Reid

Tribeca: Tastes Like Applesauce

With another dispatch from the Tribeca Film Festival here's Jason on a new lo-fi comedy.

I can remember it taking me halfway through writer-director Onur Tukel's previous outing, the hipster-vampire sex-comedy Summer of Blood (which showed at last year's festival; he's becoming a annual TFF figure), to find myself slipping over from a sort of sneering distaste for him as an on-screen presence - ahh yes, he plays his own main characters too! - to actually vibing on what he was doing: thankfully he does seem to get that he's the most annoying man in the room at any given time. 

With his new movie Applesauce (and I'll be damned if I know why it's called Applesauce, even after actively spending some time trying to suss out the title) it was like starting over from Square One again - am I gonna find my way to the joke again?... 

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Hot Docs "Best of Enemies"

Amir continues his coverage of Toronto's Hot Docs festival. Will he spot any future Oscar nominees?

It is hard to imagine today that there was once an America where political debates in the media were sensational, not just sensationalized. Harder yet is to envision a time when conservative political commentators weren’t complete buffoons, but rather eloquent, smart thinkers. That is exactly the time that Best of Enemies transports us to, Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s film about the televised debates leading up to the 1968 Republican and Democratic national conventions. ABC, then trailing as America’s third network and in search of a ratings boost, decided to pit two of the country’s most famous commentators against one another: the liberal Gore Vidal and the conservative William F. Buckley Jr. The two were known to dislike each other and their pairing on live TV was sure to cause a stir.

Their prediction proved to be correct when on the 8th night of a series of incendiary discussions, Buckley reacted to Vidal’s name-calling and being labeled a “crypto-Nazi” with a momentary burst of anger...

Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the face and you’ll stay plastered.”

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Tribeca: King Jack

Tribeca might be over but the Team has still got a few reviews for you. Here's Jason on one of the Audience Award winners.

What happens when you see too much of a person you know in a movie? I don't mean literally. Sadly I am not acquaintances on a first-name-basis or even a-polite-nod-in-the-hallway with Chris Evans, so when I finally see the new Avengers movie I'm not gonna be all, "God I just can't buy him as Captain America. That's Lil' Chrissy up there!" No what I mean by "seeing too much of a person you know in a movie" is when a character reminds you so much of a person from your life that it ultimately becomes distracting. You find yourself paying more attention to the ways that character interacts with their real-world counterpart, your friend or mother or whatever, than ever getting lost in the movie itself. As an outside example, Sandra Bullock was just straight-up playing my boyfriend's sister in The Blind Side - it was like at least three or four steps beyond uncanniness. It was impossible to take any of that movie seriously after that.

I had a bit of that going on with King Jack... 

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