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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Tribeca: Men in the Desert

Our Tribeca coverage is wrapping up. Here's Abstew on two new features starring Oscar Isaac and Viggo Mortensen respectively...

 

Mojave
You have to admire a film that trusts its audience enough to not spell things out for them. Writer/director William Monahan (who won an Oscar for his screenplay for The Departed) allows his film Mojave to unfold like a crazy fever dream as two opposing men in the desert (Garrett Hedlund and Oscar Isaac) wax on poetically about everything from Jesus' temptation to...god only knows what. As a drifter with a gravelly voice and tendency to call everyone brother, Isaac relishes the opportunity to play his unhinged character, making choices that are anything but safe. But Hedlund's straight man is overshadowed by Isaac's wild-eyed stalker, never making them feel evenly matched. And as the film plays out, it starts to feel like perhaps nothing has been spelled out for us because there's nothing actually happening - populated with indie movie eccentrics (Walter Goggins briefly shows up in his tightey whiteys to spout some random thoughts) and a story that can only be described as convoluted...

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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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Tribeca: "The Overnight"

Abstew continues our coverage of the just wrapped Tribeca Film Festival...

Alex (Adam Scott) and Emily (Taylor Schilling) are young parents that have recently moved from Seattle to the very different world of Los Angeles. Emily has thrown herself into her career, but Alex bemoans the fact that as an adult that spends his time at home with his young son, there's no easy way to make new friends. It's a very real question that most adults face, if you're no longer involved in institutions like school and business, where exactly do you make new friends? And while that might be the film's initial question, the resulting film has decidedly more adult intentions on its mind...

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Tribeca: "Sleeping With Other People"

Tribeca ends tonight but we'll have a few more reviews for you as the team finishes up. Here's Joe Reid...

After the phenomenal success of Bachelorette (creatively if not commercially; I'm still fuming that it never got the promotional push it deserved), I expected Leslye Headland's follow-up film to have that same dark-heart-with-teeth approach to the tried and true "can men and women be friends" comedy. Intriguingly, a few things about that statement turned out to be not the case. The humor in Sleeping with Other People is still incredibly sharp, but where Bachelorette was as hard as nails when it came to female singlehood in a wedding-drenched world, Sleeping with Other People puts its beating heart on display.

Which isn't to say Headland has gone soft. [More...]

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