On the Count of Three, the feature directorial debut of stand-up comedian Jerrod Carmichael, could count on being picked up for distribution soon after its buzzy premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. A potent drama that premiered to raves in the Dramatic Competition section and won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for its writers, Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch, On the Count of Three has been acquired by Annapurna Pictures in a hefty deal worth millions.
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Wearing bulky Kevlar vests and bulletproof helmets, a squadron of law enforcement personnel prepare to enter a residence. It’s an image that is primed to make one automatically raises one’s hackles — given the sociopolitical landscape in the past 10, 20 years, we know exactly how this scene will play out. But then you notice how young they all are. Sporting braces and adolescent acne underneath their paramilitary equipment, the mostly Mexican-American teenagers of Horizon High School are participating in simulations of high-stress policing situations as part of their school’s law enforcement club — one of the many popular law enforcement clubs in the region that puts them on a fast-track to getting a job at Border Patrol. See, Horizon High School lies about 10 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas, home to one of the country’s largest immigrant populations — and to one of the region’s largest law enforcement education programs.
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Ever since Peter Finch stormed in front of the TV studio cameras to declare that he’s mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, people — fictional or otherwise — have held a kind of twisted fascination with the parasitic relationship between broadcast television and its viewers. The ghoulish appeal of capturing the attention of an easily distracted public on a live broadcast with some shocking message has sadly permeated reality in harrowing ways. But what if said messenger never got in front of the camera?
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13 is a hard age. No longer a child, not yet an adult, and nowhere to channel that teen angst, which is even rawer for angry delinquent Sammy Ko (Miya Cech), who is struggling to overcome the grief over losing her mother. So Sammy breaks things at her school and tattoos little x’s on her thigh with a makeshift tattoo pen, until her father (Leonardo Nam) gets fed up and threatens her with military camp. If she can make it through one business class over the summer, then she doesn’t have to go.
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“Dying isn’t simple is it?”
Masao (Steve Iwamoto) is on his death bed, unwilling — or unable — to reckon with his debilitating sickness, even as his estranged children and grandchildren flit around and away from his bedside. The only presence that has stuck by his side the entire time he’s been bedbound is not a physical one: it’s the ghost of his long-dead wife, Grace (a beatific Constance Wu), who had arrived soon after the formerly robust, dynamic Masao had received his diagnosis, looming on the outskirts of his isolated house before finally being allowed entrance by her frightened husband. As Masao waits to die, his spectral wife guiding him through his final days, Christopher Makoto Yogi‘s elegiac family drama I Was A Simple Man crafts a haunting tapestry of a man’s life, interwoven with Hawaii’s own post-colonial landscape, highlighting and embracing the scars that are left behind by both.
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Together Together is a love story – kind of. This is not the typical romantic love story that Hollywood usually pumps out; it’s a story about platonic love. About finding a connection with another human being that isn’t based on seduction or romance. And that’s refreshing! More stories like this from the movies would be welcomed. Unfortunately, the film that’s built around that platonic love story is lacking, resulting in a film that’s sweet and kind but also kind of forgettable.
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It’s never been harder to be a teenager than right now, an age when all the trials and tribulations of growing up follow you no matter where you go thanks to the smart phone that everyone has in their pockets or hands at all times. It’s even worse when there’s nothing to do, which is why teen girls Autumn, Brittney, and Aaloni often find themselves passing the time and escaping parents in their small Texas town by drinking, smoking, and hanging out with older dudes and gun-toting bros. And directors Parker Hill and Isabel Bethencourt follow them every step of the way in their verité documentary Cusp. Read More »
Today, the Golden Globe nominations were announced, and the results were pretty bad! So perhaps we should try to cleanse our palates with the 2021 Sundance Film Festival awards. This year’s Sundance was virtual, and while that experience can’t hold a candle to being on the ground in Park City, the festival organizers deserver lots of credit for putting the fest together in any capacity and running it smoothly. While I found a lot of the films I saw this year to be lacking, there were still plenty of noteworthy titles. Lots of attention was paid to Coda, a film that went over big when it opened the fest. The same goes for another opening night film: Summer of Soul, a documentary from Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson.
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Jane Schoenbrun‘s intimate narrative debut We’re All Going to the World’s Fair opens with an eight minute unbroken shot that immediately pulls you in. Alone in her bedroom, a high school girl named Casey (Anna Cobb, in her film debut) records a video of herself uttering the same phrase three times, pricking her finger with a pin, smearing blood across her computer screen, and pressing play on a video which bathes her in rapidly changing colors.
That’s the price of admission to enter a massive multiplayer online role playing game called The World’s Fair, which is described as “the Internet’s scariest online horror game” and said to incite physical transformations in those who play it. The rest of the movie (which is executive produced by A Ghost Story director David Lowery) is about Casey documenting and coming to terms with those changes – many of which serve as a metaphor about what it can feel like to experience gender dysmorphia.
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Cool Posts From Around the Web:
Every now and again, some internet smart aleck will cut a trailer for a beloved comedy classic that imagines that film as a horror movie. Mrs. Doubtfire, Shrek, Ross from Friends, what have you — they all turn into the psychopathic killers given the right editing choices and a creepy enough musical score. But the most popular victim (or villain, depending on your reading) is Kevin McCallister from Home Alone, whose cartoonish antics strike fear in the hearts of people who think about their real ramifications.
Of course, the chilling psychological thriller John and the Hole is more than just a cobbled-together internet video. The feature directorial debut of Pascual Sisto, penned by Oscar-winning writer Nicolás Giacobone (Birdman), John and the Hole is a harrowing deep dive into pre-adolescent ennui, that is closer to the empty cruelty of Yorgos Lanthimos. It only maintains a surface-level similarity to the premise of Home Alone — a young boy who is left to his own devices, only here, the boy, John (a chilling Charlie Shotwell) is the one who is holding is family captive in a misguided attempt to understand his own burgeoning pubescence.
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