Film Festivals are Back - My Recent Movie Viewings

Something terrible happened! I had already finished this perfectly fine article, with pictures and all, a few weeks ago but during the final touches I accidentally and irreversibly deleted it... After a few hundred moments of looking at the white page in shock and horror I decided to give it a rest for a while. Now I think enough time has passed for me to recover sufficiently to let it go and start anew. Here goes!

So, since this past summer I have been back going regularly to movie theaters and it has turned out mostly good for me,  no infections at all, with the exception of one movie in which I thought the audience just was so annoying that I stopped watching the movie and slept. But we'll get to that later.

Before discussing all the various movies I saw, especially the ones I could view during the Fantasy Film Festival in September, I want to focus on the director duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who, incidentally, were also featured at the FFF with their newest flick, Something in the Dirt. There was even a special showing at the Berlin Planetarium of their probably most known work, The Endless, a time warp story speckled with cosmic horror and subtle humor, recurrent elements in all their work. The Endless happens to be among my personal top 5 movies of all time, so I was psyched to view it on the big screen - even though I was outright disappointed they didn't showcase it in the planetarium's dome, we only viewed it on the "normal" big screen, which was just a little off-putting but still a great experience.

The Endless revolves around two brothers who have spent their childhood and early youth in a UFO death cult called Camp Arcadia, situated in the backwoods of San Diego. When the two brothers receive a video cassette from camp members calling them home, they take stock of their lives and realize it wouldn't hurt to visit the camp for one last time, in order to justify their decision of leaving and to settle their differing recollections of what the place was like. However, the gap between the two brothers widens as Aaron wants to stay in camp, not understanding anymore why they have left in the first place, while Justin can't adjust and wants to go back to life outside. He discovers a variety of weird types of people doing weird things and lots of "off" things in and around the camp: two moons, tug of war with gods, two best friends on a detox trip in a remote cabin, a weeping widow, and and and... All these elements gather around the eerie and unsettling miasma Camp Arcadia emits and form a sort of entertainment park for a furious god/gods/higher being.

The first time I watched The Endless (I had gotten the hint from some best of list on youtube), I honestly was a little underwhelmed. The movie unfolds in a slow pace and unless you watch carefully there are tons of details very easy to miss, so I judged it boring, but it got stuck somewhere in the back of my head. Taking the opportunity to re-watch all my Blu-rays during hard lockdown, I re-discovered it and paying more attention this time it left me intrigued. I like a movie which I can watch many times over and at each watching discovering new details and that is definitely the case here. So it wasn't love at first sight, but a deeper kind of appreciation I find in The Endless. Apart from the thematic details (and having since watched the other films of the duo, I have discovered that there are many connection points that tie all of them together), I find the cinematic style which hangs somewhere between mainstream and indie pretty awesome. The hands-on directors tend to also write the screenplays, produce and play the lead roles for their movies (apart from Synchronic (2019) starring Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan) which form a highly coherent universe featuring in all their body of work and it is fascinating and recommendable for everyone who likes their movies original and substantial.

So I was thrilled to see the FFF-program and discover that Benson&Moorhead have a new movie coming up I could view during the festival - Something in the Dirt, which again is set in the Camp Arcadia universe but not in the camp itself. Here we are following neighbors Levi and John who discover that an object John wrongly identifies as an ashtray has the ability to hover under certain circumstances. So the two decide to make a documentary about this phenomenon and while filming they go through every possibility from ghosts to cults to scientific explanations. The filming process also allows the two of them to dispute about their differences in personality and views and deal with each other in partly intimate ways. The differences between them and their cluelessness in face of the happenings their minds cannot grasp, often leads to comical situations and there are so many of these funny moments that this movie can definitely be categorized as dark humor beside science fiction and light horror. I definitely can't wait for the theatrical release in Germany to re-watch and discover so many things I probably missed on my first viewing.

Some other movies I got to see during the festival and that I would certainly recommend are; Watcher (dir. Chloe Okuno); Gaesterne / Speak No Evil (dir. Christian Tafdrup) and Piggy (dir. Carlotta Pereda).

Watcher is a very subtle, a very slow story of Julia who, together with her Romanian boyfriend, relocates to Bucharest to build a new life in this place she is a stranger. She often contemplates the neighbor on the other side of the street from her window and gets more and more unnerved by his presence, noticing him while seemingly following her and follows him in return. A report with the police does nothing but aggravate the situation and the thrill and the tension between the neighbors build up to a striking climax.

I have to admit I have conflicting feelings about this one. While I very much understand and appreciate the depiction of female anxiety, I also feel like it is a very US American anxiety that is showcased here; considering the story is a USA production set in Romania, it inevitably calls to mind The Hostel (2005), which too leaves an aftertaste or feeling that Eastern Europe is a dangerous place for US-Americans to be. But maybe it's just me being over-sensitive, I don't know. In any case, despite the movie I love Romania and it will be the destination of my next vacation!

Gaesterne / Speak No Evil is a Dutch-Danish production which so goes under the skin! A Danish family of three meets a Dutch couple and their little boy during their vacation in beautiful Italy. Both families get along brilliantly, keep in touch even after the vacation and the Dutches invite the Danes to their remote house in the woods in Southern Netherlands. They grab the chance, but realize on various occassions that gradually their limits are being tested and stretched by their hosts. After a stressful night they leave the house without telling but have to go back to grab their daughter's forgotten toy, and they are busted. The Dutches force them to stay - they don't do it by physical force but with mean psychological tricks and the poor Danes just are really really polite people. As a result they get even more offensively disrespected and molested, but to what end and where will it end?

Super uncomfortable to watch, the kind of movie that will give you chest tightness.

 

My final movie Cerdita / Piggy, which is written and directed by Spanish filmmaker Carlota Pereda, deals with heavy bullying among young people and the effects it can have on a person, including her decision-making capabilities. Our main girl is Sara, who is an overweight teenager brilliantly played by Laura Galán and bravely faces humiliation and bullying from her classmates on a daily basis. During one of their worst attacks she needs to fight for her life as well as her dignity but there is a serial killer lurking in town - and he might actually be the only person on her side.

Cerdita is a really intense movie and it is really really really very much gory, if that's what you like to watch. The last fifteen minutes are full of bloodcurdling scenes finalizing this sad but gruesome story.

Piggy is actually being showcased right now in various indie cinemas in Berlin, like Moviemento or b-ware Ladenkino.

As I have mentioned before, last Monday we visited the Final Girls Berlin Film Festival Halloween Showing and Costume Contest where my favorite festival showed all the best short films of the last three years, and it was a blast! I also loved the Red Herring which deservedly won the costume contest, congratulations! It was awesome as always, maybe even more awesome than always, now I'm waiting for the main festival in February 2023!

Folks, these were the best of my movie experiences. I have also seen Smile at the Cubix at Alexanderplatz and really came to regret it because people in the audience, especially the group behind me, were super loud - they were whispering, talking, giggling, playing with their phones, and all that was super disturbing, disrupting and frustrating. I felt like it was a waste of time and money and as a result I can't review Smile because I wasn't able to understand a word.

Because it expresses my feelings so well, I will link here a rant on moviegoers by film critic Chris Stuckman, and I wish everybody would watch this video, especially before going to the movies.

So anyway, I hope the theaters stay open over the winter and I can go to many more movie showings without lockdowns and annoying audiences and discuss them here. I will also try really hard not to delete them accidentally, promise!