Grace Van Patten – Memphis Flyer

Mayday

On day 4 of Sundance, patterns are beginning to emerge. It’s probably perilous to declare any kind of new trend from a limited sample of moves. Maybe it’s just the films I decided to watch, which are similar. But nevertheless, there are common elements visible on the drive-in and virtual screens.

Take Karen Cinorre’s Mayday. Ana (Grace Van Patten) is a cater waiter working a wedding with her musician boyfriend. When the venue’s electrical systems start shorting out, she is sent downstairs to trip the circuit breaker. Her boss follows her, and assaults her in the freezer next to the ice sculpture. In a dissociative state, she goes to the industrial kitchen and feels called by the oven. She turns on the gas and sticks her head inside, but instead of dying, she falls into an alternate reality. She wakes up on an unfamiliar beach where she meets Marsha (the excellent Mia Goth) and a male pilot who has also washed up lost. Marsha rescues Ana, and as they’re driving away on her motorcycle, the pilot is killed by an unseen sniper.

Ana is adopted by Marsha’s group of women guerrillas, based in a mini submarine, who are embroiled in a vaguely defined war pitting women in against men. The guerrillas are like sirens from Greek myth, attracting men to their deaths on the rocks by sending out fake distress calls. At first, Ana is okay with the new arrangement, and discovers her own excellent eyesight makes her a deadly sniper. But eventually, she starts to question this weird limbo existence and plots ways to return to the real world with the help of a friendly female mechanic (Juliette Lewis).

Carlson Young in The Blazing World

A character escaping their trauma by going into a fantasy world, and who must then decide whether or not it’s worth it to return to the real world, is also the basic plot of writer/director/actor Carlson Young’s The Blazing World. In this case, the situation is more prosaic: Margaret (played by Young) has to return to her parent’s ostentatious mansion to help them move out. She is haunted by the memory of seeing her sister drown in the pool when they were kids, an event which was both caused by and exacerbated her parents’ toxic relationship. Margaret’s inner struggle manifests as increasingly florid, candy-color hallucinations.

Are we seeing the work of a generation of young filmmakers raised on Harry Potter-damaged YA fantasy who discovered David Lynch in film school? When I write that, it kind of sounds derogatory. But the influence of Lynch’s psychotropic epic Twin Peaks: The Return is everywhere at Sundance this year, and I for one am here for it. Indie social realism is all fine and good. The cheap price point of such productions means that we will never have a shortage of that aesthetic. But in the world of 2021, the desktop computer-based digital video technology that has enabled the digital indie revolution since the turn of the century has advanced considerably. Where it used to take up all the available computing power to just render the video and edit shots together, now apps such as Adobe After Effects are available in any homemade editing suite. Now we’re seeing an explosion of visual creativity as a result.

The problem with both Mayday and The Blazing World is in the writing. Both choose style over substance in a way that cannot be excused merely by the film’s budget limitations. But hey, if we’re going to continue to watch movies about the problems of privileged white people (some things never change in the film world), at least it looks cool.

In the Earth

The outlier among my day 4 Sundance viewing was In the Earth. English filmmaker Ben Wheatley is one of millions of people who spent the pandemic year of 2020 working on a new art project. The difference with Wheatley is that he managed to make an entire feature film and get it in Sundance. Wheatley, who previously directed both the chilly J.G. Ballard adaptation High-Rise and the gonzo gun-fu thriller Free Fire, seems liberated by both the speed with which he worked and the total lack of regard for creating marketable material that comes when you’re staring disaster in the face and thinking, “What have I even been doing with my life?”

There’s a world-destroying pandemic on, and two scientists (Joel Fry and Ellora Torchia) are summoned to a rural retreat to pursue their projects, which might save humanity. Instead, they find themselves the subjects of a pair of researchers (Hayley Squires and Reece Shearsmith) who have gone full Captain Kurtz in the woods. They think they have identified an alien intelligence here on Earth which is behind the pagan legends of demons who live in the English countryside, and they are using magic mushrooms, flashing lights, and sounds to try to communicate with it.

In the Earth combines folk horror elements with real-life anxiety, seasoned with a strong dash of John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness. The climax is the kind of intricate, psychedelic trip that can only come from being cooped up by yourself for months with only your editing bay to keep you company. I personally loved this minor miracle of a movie, but my recommendation comes with one big caveat. There’s a strobe light warning at the beginning of the film, and I said to my sensitive wife “Hey, how much can there be? A shot or two?” Well, there’s a lot more than a shot or two. If you’re epileptic, or just have a problem with strobe light effects and quick edits, you should sit this one out. Otherwise, when this one surfaces — as I’m sure it will — horror fans will be treated to one of the most innovative films of the past decade.

Ailey

Monday night at the Malco Summer Drive-In, two films not about the problems of rich White people. The first is Ailey, a documentary by Jamila Wignot about the life of modern dance pioneer Alvin Ailey, which just sold to a distributor hours ahead of its premiere.

Then at 9 p.m., Judas and Black Messiah, director Shaka King’s biopic of Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Chicago Black Panther Party who was hounded, and perhaps ultimately killed, by the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation. The cast is stacked with first-rate talent, led by Black Panther’s Daniel Kaluuya and Sorry to Bother You’s Lakeith Stanfield.

Sundance in Memphis: The Potter-Lynch Generation

Tickets to Sundance films at the drive-in are available at the Indie Memphis website.

Sly Stone performs at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival in Summer of Soul.

For me, day 3 of Sundance was a more indoor affair.

The drive-in is great, except in the wind and rain. So when the weather decided not to cooperate, my wife and I decided to stick to streaming. It turned into a pretty epic binge day that resembled the analog festival experience’s rush from screening to screening.
We started off with the film that was, for many, the most anticipated of the festival. Summer of Soul (… or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), which opened the live-premiere streaming offerings on Thursday, is a music documentary directed by Amir “Questlove” Thompson, better known as the drummer for The Roots and bandleader on

The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

Questlove and his producers found out 12 years ago about a forgotten stash of footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. In the months before Woodstock, the free music festival ran for several weekends in a New York park, attracting some of the greatest Black musicians of the time, including Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, The Fifth Dimension, and Gladys Knight and The Pips. The Memphis area was very well represented, with B.B. King, Mississippi’s Chambers Brothers, and The Staple Singers. Hundreds of thousands of people attended the concert series and the show was professionally recorded and taped by a four-camera crew with the intent to make a television special out of it. But the TV show never materialized, and the 45 hours of footage sat in a producer’s basement for 50 years. Thompson and his team transferred and restored the tapes, and secured interviews with many of the surviving musicians and audience members, for whom the forgotten show seemed like a distant dream.

Thompson was introduced by festival director Tabitha Jackson as a first time filmmaker, which is true enough. Breaking new talent is what the film festival is all about. But Thompson had an advantage over the normal first time director, in that he is a relentlessly omnivorous music scholar and author, which gave him the intellectual discipline to do the research and make Summer of Soul more than just a concert film. But most importantly, Questlove is a DJ who grew up obsessively making mix tapes. Those are the skills which served him best in the editing room, as he chose the best musical moments from the concert series and put them the right order.

The performances captured on the moldering tapes are spectacular. The film opens with Stevie Wonder abandoning his keyboards and taking to the drums. Did you know Stevie was a kickass drummer? Neither did I. B.B. King is captured at the top of his game. The Chambers Brothers reveal a deep, jammy groove beyond their hit “Time Has Come Today.” Thompson puts each performance in context, such as when Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis, Jr. tell the story of how they came to record “Aquarius/Let The Sun Shine In” from Hair, as their younger selves sing and dance up a storm onscreen.

The highlight of a film full of highlights is an emotional, impromptu duet between Mavis Staples and her idol Mahalia Jackson of “Take My Hand Precious Lord.” Jesse Jackson introduces the song, telling the story of how he was on the balcony at the Lorraine Motel when Martin Luther King, Jr. asked bandleader Ben Branch to play the song for him moments before the civil rights leader was assassinated. As the band swells, an emotional Mahalia Jackson pulled Mavis Staples from her seat and put the microphone in her hand. Stunned at the anointment by the gospel legend, Staples takes center stage and lifts off in what she called the most memorable performance of her life. Then, Jackson takes the second verse and turns it into a wail of mourning and declaration of Black power.

Summer of Soul is an instant classic that delivers both goosebump-filled musical moments and a clear and well-organized history of a pivotal cultural moment that was almost lost to time.

‘LATA’

Short film programs are always my favorite part of any festival experience, and the 50 or so shorts strung across seven programs feature some real gems, proving that the pandemic couldn’t hold back the creativity. Andrew Norman Wilson’s “In The Air Tonight” uses altered stock footage and killer sound design to retell the urban legend behind Phil Collins’ 1980 hit song. He put it together in his apartment during quarantine. Alisha Tejpal’s excellent and moving “LATA” is a naturalistic examination of the life of a domestic worker in India that bears the meditative stamp of Chantal Akerman’s Hotel Monterey. Joe Campa’s animated short “Ghost Dogs,” in which the new family pet can see the apparitions of all the dogs who have lived in the house, veers between funny and unexpectedly poignant.

Looking for love in ‘Searchers’

The second feature documentary of the day was Pacha Velez’s Searchers, an intimate and often hilarious look at dating online. Velez films dozens of different people as they swipe through their choices on dating apps, and interviews them about their experiences. In a couple of cases, his subjects turn the tables on their interviewer, and Velez reveals his motivations stem from his own experiences as a single guy who just turned 40. Shades of Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March appear as Velez takes his own dating app test with his mother at his side. The innovative and insightful documentary starts off unassuming, then subtly worms its way into your brain. With subjects ranging from ages 19 to 88, Searchers reveals dating apps as the great equalizer of our age.

All Light, Everywhere

Tonight, the weather outlook at the Malco Summer Drive-In is much improved. The first show is Theo Anthony’s All Light, Everywhere. Using quantum theory’s spooky observer effect as its jumping off point, this essay film travels the blurred line between what we call “objective reality” and the often flawed assumptions that undergird our understanding of it.
The second show is the sci-fi feature Mayday by Karen Cinorre. Grace Van Patten stars as Ana, a woman from our reality who is transported into another dimension where a group of women soldiers are fighting an endless war whose origins they barely understand. The fascinating-looking Mayday is billed as the first feminist war film.

Sundance in Memphis: A Soul Explosion and All Light, Everywhere

You can buy tickets for the Malco Summer Drive-in screenings of Sundance films at the Indie Memphis website.