We Wish You A Merry Everything

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason on Holidays.

In the immortal words of Bela Lugosi what music the children of the night make, turning the Midnight section of the Tribeca Film Festival into my favorite playground at the fest. Happy times with horror friends! So it was with some consternation when I saw this year the fest has given us a smaller swing-set upon which to swing - there are only six films showing under the "Midnight" banner (and it's a stretchto label at least two of them as Horror).

But wait! This year's opening film of the Midnight program is Holidays, an anthology consisting of eight short films (each one about a different celebratory day of the calendar) by eight different directing and writing teams, so I suppose that doubles their numbers, in a way. We'll take what we can get.

And with Holidays what we get, as is the usual case with anthology films, is a mixed bag - some treats, some tricks, a couple of candied apples with razor wire wrapped around them, a detached finger or ten. Beginning with "Valentine's Day" (directed by the duo that brought us last year's terrific Starry Eyes) and spanning all the way to "New Year's Eve" (which was written by the Starry Eyes team as well, making them the only repeat offenders of the bunch) the film makes microcosmic the fetishization of rituals and rites so annually played out in scary storytelling; think Halloween, Friday the 13th, Silent Night Deadly Night, or Eli Roth's short film "Thanksgiving"  -- for every day a bloodbath!

Truth be told there's only one true stinker in the bunch...

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A Flag Waves In Brooklyn

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason on Contemporary Color.

I vaguely remember Color Guard being a thing we had at my high school -- I know it might shock and awe you that this particular film nerd writing at you today wasn't all that into sports back then (besides the occasional loitering around a wrestling match now and then, ahem) so I don't recall ever seeing them at work though, flinging their prop guns like ballistic missiles through the air.  They seemed like a sub-set within a sub-set, not quite band and not quite the cheer-leading squad. Something in between, but also outside of.

Contemporary Color, which documents the recent shows in Brooklyn that Talking Heads' legend David Byrne organized in an effort to toss this sport under a great big spotlight, pairing ten different teams with ten different modern musician-composers (people like St Vincent and Nico Muhly) captures that strange off-center vibe well. Quirk runs far and wide, oft gloriously so. It's just a very weird spectacle, one of a kind, and even though I'm personally allergic to jazz hands I found myself captivated anyway.

Documentarian-brothers Bill and Turner Ross usually train their eye on a small community (with films like Tchoupitoulas and Western) to suss out the over- and under-lapping strands that knot them together and hold them tight - here that sense of place is abstracted; it's about movement flowing into movement, sound into sound. Make no mistake this is first and foremost a concert film, capturing the spirit of the show, but the brothers allow plenty of backstage personality to flow in too. They give us gorgeous moments of homespun artistry (there's a shot of two young girls exhausted and giggling behind a scrim mid-performance that I adored) exploding onto a big stage. It's miraculously intimate and "Muppet Show" epic all at once.

Bonus! Several of the performers highlighted in the doc were there for the premiere screening on Thursday night to give us a performance, which I managed to capture on video! (Sidenote: I had to edit the music off of part of the performance because copyrighting was blocking it; the two male dancers are dancing to this song) Enjoy:

Tribeca: Madly

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Manuel on Madly.

Anthology films are always, by definition, a mixed bag. This omnibus collection, which features short films by Gael García Bernal, Sebastián Silva, and Natasha Khan among others, is concerned with “Love.” Each short tackles this loaded emotion in decidedly different ways, tackling impending marriages, stale relationships, burgeoning romances, and everything in between.

Mia Wasikowska, for example, in a particularly interesting segment titled “Afterbirth” focuses on the love between a recent mother and her baby. Those of us who know she’s worked with David Cronenberg and Park Chan-wook will recognize the influences that run through this eerie, off-kilter attempt at depicting the disorienting world of new motherhood. Spoiler alert, it won’t pair well with Garry Marshall’s Mothers Day. Part of the strength of the film lies in Kathryn Beck’s performance; she’s all wide-eyed and beautiful so that it’s only when Wasikowska’s camera lingers on her blank, almost indifferent expression that we begin to intuit that something’s a bit amiss.

Kathryn Beck in Wasikowska's "Afterbirth"

Among the rest, I have to admit I wasn’t wowed by Silva’s work. I’m starting to feel I’ll just never “get” what he’s doing even as he offers the most overtly LGBT entry in the collection. As a fan of 2/3 of Nasty Baby, I somehow kept expecting the other shoe to drop in his young black gay kid in a rough neighborhood sojourn (and it does, don't you worry about that). As for Gael’s fragmented take on a couple's storied history, I found myself noting that it'd be the type of needlessly puzzling film you’d condescendingly describe as “arty." The other one worth mentioning? Sion Sono’s sex club/incestual family comedy which is definitely unlike anything you’ve seen before and perhaps even more bizarre than it sounds.

Grade: A through C (nothing is quite a disaster)

Tribeca: Of Straight Charros & Gay Uncles

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Manuel on two Latino HIV flicks.

Charro de Toluquilla

Following a straight Mexican charro (“cowboy”) who makes a living fronting a mariachi band and who’s living with HIV sounds like a pretty fascinating premise for a doc. Imagine the film you could make. It could tackle ideas of masculinity and machismo, of HIV prevention and education. It’s a film I’d love to watch. Unfortunately, El Charro de Toluquilla is, to its detriment, a portrait of a man who embodies every Mexican macho stereotype you could think of.

He’s a proud womanizer (he’s constantly on his phone texting women, even sometimes while on the phone with his girlfriend who he plans to wed, and with whom he has a kid), an irresponsible father (you cringe when you see him doing nothing as his little girl picks up his loaded gun), a raging sexist (he calls out his girlfriend for jeering at him for cheating), and a rampant homophobe (within the first five minutes of the film he admits gay men with HIV shrivel up and die because of shame). You can tell that in his head, he's just a lovable cad, but by god is he insufferable. I kept expecting the filmmakers to give me a reason for watching this narcissistic, peacocking macho guy. But this observational documentary never quite convinced me that it had anything interesting to say about el Charro, so that by the end when it indulges its subject in recreating scenes right out of a Western serial (complete with corny music cues and a white horse), all I could do was roll my eyes and pray the film would be over soon.

Grade: C

Memories of a Penitent Heart

Memories of a Penitent Heart is a family scrapbook. It was born out of Cecilia Aldarondo's attempts to learn more about her uncle Miguel who, having fled Puerto Rico to New York to pursue his acting career, became “Michael” to his close circle of gay performer friends. Seeing as he was in New York City in the late 80s you can perhaps guess why he died at a young age. Except, of course, that the mystery surrounding his death remains elusive considering Cecilia's family (in particular Miguel's mother) never addressed it. The title, as cumbersome and unwieldy as it is, gets at one crucial part of Miguel/Michael's family history: facing death and egged on by his devout mother, he presumably repented his sins (read: his homosexuality) in order to die in peace.

The initial desire to solve that mystery is just the first step into what turns out to be a much richer and complicated history that has Cecilia trying to track down Miguel's longtime lover who no one in her family has seen since the funeral all those years ago, as well as learn more about the many secrets and resentments that her family has accrued over the years. Smart, warm, and visually inventive, this doc has been growing on me since I first saw it ahead of its festival premiere (even if its final turn still strikes me as faltering, perhaps a reminder that real life often doesn’t lend itself very well to the types of narrative denouements the doc structures itself around). Here’s hoping it nabs a distributor so that more people get to see it.

Grade: B+

Women Who Kill (And The Women Who Love Them)

Team Experience is reporting from the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason on Women Who Kill.

Replace the hard gray rocks of a Provençal lake with the hard gray sidewalks of Park Slope Brooklyn and you'll find there's a lot in common between the gay men of 2013's Stranger by the Lake and the gay women of Women Who Kill, Ingrid Jungermann's droll black comedy screening today at Tribeca. Sure the lesbians are wearing a lot more clothes, but nature is nature, and who hasn't found themselves fetishizing sexy danger for the right mysterious someone? We want what we want, sanity be damned. (It doesn't hurt when maybe-crazy comes in the form of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night's sultry-eyed Sheila Vand either.)

Women Who Kill vibes on humor over heavy petting though, and the laughs are steady and smart and nigh on rollicking at times in Jungermann's script, and beneath her sharp straightforward direction - I probably recognized even more of myself in the foibles of these Brooklyn ladies, with their terror of swans and urine-stained grass, than I did their gender-flipped French counterparts. I'm just one serial-killer podcast and an urban rooftop garden away from a perfect storm of commiseration. Who isn't?

Grade: B+