The 14th Indie Memphis Film Festival gets underway tomorrow. We covered a lot of the most high-profile selections in this week’s Flyer cover story, which hit the streets today and will be online tomorrow. As always, there’s far more going on than we have room for in print, so we’re extending our coverage online with several additional preview posts over the next three days, starting with a breakdown of the festival’s competition features (one of which, the locally produced Woman’s Picture, we featured in print).
The competition films aren’t as high-profile as the out-of-competition showcase screenings, but offer the best chance to catch emerging indie filmmakers on the way up. We haven’t had a chance to screen all the competition features yet, but of the ones we have, these stand out:
Bad Fever (Saturday, 5 p.m., Studio on the Square) Hometown favorite Kentucker Audley shows off his acting chops in the second feature film by Dustin Guy Defa. Eddie (Audley) is a socially stunted would-be comedian who jockeys between driving around and tape-recording each terrible joke that comes to mind and actually sharing those jokes with an unforgiving audience at a stand-up comedy club. Irene (Eleonore Hendricks) is a warped vixen who delights in making videos of men humiliating themselves. Thus, a match made in purgatory emerges: a socially clueless loner looking for love and a manipulative sex fiend looking for a victim. The film is exceedingly and intentionally uncomfortable, but achieves a strange harmony in the intersection of these two lives. Audley has mastered his character, with an almost schizophrenic manner of speaking you won’t be able to forget. — Hannah Sayle
The Dish & the Spoon (Thursday, 6:45 p.m., Studio on the Square): This feature, directed and co-written by Allison Bagnel, who co-wrote the Vincent Gallo indie hit Buffalo 66, is something of a showcase for actress Greta Gerwig, who has lately been transitioning from the mumblecore/festival scene into the mainstream. Gerwig is a woman who reacts messily to the discovery of her husband’s infidelity. Gerwig’s character flies off the grid for a while, and picks up an effete stray (Olly Alexander) in a meet-not-so-cute. Most of the film is about the developing friendship between these two lost souls, with echoes of such previous quirky/indie odd-couple pairings as Midnight Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, and Annie Hall. Big-boned, disheveled, but still quite attractive, Gerwig is more charming, flawed-human oddball than Manic Pixie Dream Girl. — Chris Herrington
