Tribeca: "In Fabric"

Jason Adams with another review from the Tribeca Film Festival.

There was a Twitter query going around last week asking in the wake of the new Avengers film what pop culture events we felt personally blessed to have lived through in our lives. Apparently some people feel this way about the Marvel movies, which, well, great for them. It's nice to be happy. Personally I like more lesbian sadomasochism and insect fetishism in my entertainment, so my answer to said query falls more in line with how I think we're live-time experiencing the birth of a genre genius with the writer-director Peter Strickland, who's gone three for three with Berberian Sound Studio, The Duke of Burgundy, and now In Fabric, his latest slow-motion psych-out beamed in from an alternate dimension.

In Fabric first introduces us to Sheila (a marvelously world-weary Marianne Jean-Baptiste), who swims through her bank job and a string of telephone-based blank dates with all the ease of any Strickland character, which is to say with little to no ease at all...

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Tribeca 2019: "The Place of No Words"

Here's Jason Adams reporting from Tribeca once more...

Do you remember the moment you first realized what death is? The goldfish speech from Kill Bill: Volume II comes to mind -- "A fish flapping on the carpet, and a fish not flapping on the carpet." I remember a dead squirrel in the middle of the road, personally. But I think for most of us, the lucky ones who didn't experience an early loss, it's too gradual a process to recollect. The idea of a before and an after, heck even the concept of time itself, was less defined. Of course then we get older. Now I'm watching my friends have to explain these ideas to their kids, putting walls and definitions around boundless ideas.

Mark Webber's The Place of Lost Words attempts to straddle both of those places...

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Beauty vs Beast: Napalm Mornings

Jason from MNPP here with this week's "Beauty vs Beast" -- Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now has been coming up in conversation a lot lately, and not just because my boyfriend kept accidentily getting the title of Gregg Araki's TV show Now Apocalypse backwards. The film is celebrating its 40th anniversary this Friday, and besides doing a screening and conversation about the film at the Tribeca Film Fest last week Coppola's putting out what he's calling a "Final Cut" in August, in theaters and on blu-ray. It falls somewhere between the original release and the 2001 Redux cut, apparently. But no matter the cut it's the tension between Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen) and Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando) that remains the the backbone of the film, and that's what we're investigating today...

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PREVIOUSLY Two weeks back most of us still hadn't seen Avengers Endgame, and now two billion dollars worth of us have. But all that money couldn't help Chris Pratt, who lost the contest against Thanos 70 to 30%. Suck it, Star-lord. Said Tom G:

"Just like Jennifer Lawrence ran circles around [Pratt] in Passengers, Brolin literally ran galaxies around him."

Marielle Heller at Tribeca

by Murtada Elfadl

Marielle Heller has built quite a reputation as a director based on two films; Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) and Can You Ever Forgive Me (2018). We attended a talk at the Tribeca Film Festival in which she was interviewed by the writer Jo Piazza. They talked about how she started as an actor and her transition to writing and directing. Of course she mentioned her next project, scheduled to come out later this year, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Tom Hanks plays Mr. Rogers in the film, but Heller was adamant that it’s not a biopic. She said it's a story about fathers and sons and based on journalist Tom Junod (Matthew Rhys) profile of Mr. Rogers. 

“Mr. Rogers is not the lead character. You can’t create a narrative around Mr. Rogers because he’s too good...”

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Tribeca 2019: "You Don't Nomi"

Team Experience reporting from Tribeca Film Festival which wraps up tomorrow. Here's Nathaniel R

Of all the titles that I most looked forward to at Tribeca's 2019 edition, You Don't Nomi was at the top of the list. The debut documentary from Jeffrey McHale examines the cult fandom and critical rehabilitation (of sorts) surrounding Paul Verhoeven's trash-masterpiece Showgirls (1995). And readers, I was not dissapointed so much as seething with envy while watching it...

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