Tag: Molly Shannon

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Outflix Celebrates A Wild Weekend Of Queer Cinema

CREDIT: Alanna Stewart

This weekend the queers were out in full force for the first days of the 21st Annual Outflix Film Festival, the local LGBTQ film fest organized by OUT Memphis. As a gigging queer myself, I sadly wasn’t able to attend the whole festival, but I managed to swing by Ridgeway Cinema for a few hours of queer cinematic experience.
Alanna Stewart

Malco Ridgeway Cinema Grill lit up with the LBGTQ rainbow for the Outflix Film Festival.

Opening weekend at Outflix included outsider narratives, including stories about artists, performers, and yes, filmmakers. Many of the films explored the intersection of art and sexuality, where either the queer person or the artist finds themselves set adrift from mainstream society and struggles to make a place for themselves. In the two biopics I saw this weekend, Wild Nights with Emily, directed by Madeleine Olnek, and Mapplethorpe, directed by Ondi Timoner, the narratives center around an eccentric queer artist (poet Emily Dickinson and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, respectively) who, finding themselves ostracized by their communities, devote their lives entirely to their craft and into living as authentically as they can in a world stacked against them, even though doing that means sometimes having to hide their true identities.

Molly Shannon (left) as Emily Dickinson in Wild Nights With Emily

In these films, some well-meaning little voice always chimes in, “You’re ahead of your time. Nothing like this has ever been done before. The world isn’t ready for your work. You’ll be loved when you’re dead.” But Dickinson (Molly Shannon) and Mapplethorpe (Matt Smith) didn’t have time to listen to that obnoxious little voice, and pressed on with their work. They couldn’t wait for the world to change; rather they took a role in changing it.

Matt Smith in Mapplethorpe

Like these two artists, many queer filmmakers today are making movies specifically because they haven’t seen their stories told before. Director Laura Madalinski spoke at a Q & A after Saturday’s screening of her first feature film, Two In The Bush, saying that she made a romantic comedy about queer polyamory and sex work largely because there had never been one before. Madalinski and her partner/co-writer Kelly Haas wanted a movie that they could see themselves reflected in. Madalinski remembers deciding, “We’re gonna make it ourselves! And we did!”

The film, shot in 10 days with a budget of $45k, follows in the tradition of DIY queer filmmaking, in which the process itself is centered around community and mutual support. Folks help each other out because they are passionate about their stories, and because they recognize that the project is not simply a movie, but a contribution to the greater cause of queer liberation.

In the documentary Dykes, Camera, Action! pioneering lesbian filmmakers cite their activism as the source of their artistic endeavors. They realized that in order to change the world, they had to create a new one, and film was their tool. If their voices didn’t exist in media, mainstream cis-heteronormative culture could continue to pretend that they didn’t exist. Making films explicitly about their queer identities and bodies meant that they refused to be erased; they insisted on not only being seen, but being reckoned with.

These early lesbian films broke away from traditional narrative structure because, as Su Friedrich points out, queer lives do not follow the same trajectory as heterosexual lives, and conventional formats would not do justice to their stories. Queer filmmakers experimented with new techniques as they pursued ways to share their perspective with wider audiences. That idea affected my experience of watching Wild Nights With Emily, in which queer director Madeleine Olnek repositions Emily Dickinson in a queer context, compared to Mapplethorpe, with a well-known gay artist as its subject, but a formulaic biopic structure that feels distanced and stale. Despite its subject matter being over 100 years old, Wild Nights feels incredibly personal, emotional, and surprisingly modern. The film moves non-linearly, with flashbacks and flash-forwards, lyrical vignettes of Dickinson’s poetry, and moments in which Dickinson (Molly Shannon) breaks the fourth wall by addressing the audience, letting us know that the film is aware of its function.

Whether or not the straight normie world recognizes it, queer folks have always been here. We’re everywhere. And this week we’re at Outflix.

Outflix runs through Thursday, September 13. For a full schedule and more information, visit their website.

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Film Features Film/TV

2018 Outflix Film Festival

Outflix is more than a film festival: It is a celebration of community, says festival co-director Matt Barrett. “Here’s what it’s all about: Whoever you are, we want you to be able to see yourself onscreen. That’s my life. That’s me. I can relate to that.”

Barrett and co-director Kat King took over running the festival from Will Batts, the longtime director who moved to Houston last year. Under Batts’ leadership, the festival, which began as a fund-raiser for OUT Memphis (formerly known as the Memphis Gay and Lesbian Community Center), grew in prestige and size. Now, it is OUT Memphis’ primary outreach event. “When I came here, I was looking for community,” says King. “I found the center. I’d always been a big movie buff, and Outflix was the first program I found. That was my introduction to Will … Then, after a year of watching films, rating films, and helping put this whole thing together, Will looked at Matt and me and said, ‘Hey, do you want to run it next year?'”

Wild Nights With Emily, starring Molly Shannon (left) and Amy Seimetz, plays opening night at Outflix.

Of course, running a film festival that receives more than 350 entries a year is not as easy as it sounds. “To narrow it down to a week’s worth of films is nearly impossible. There are a ton of great films we didn’t use, just based on time and space available,” says Barrett.

King and Barrett found that it took the two of them, along with help from Out Memphis’ Director of Development Stephanie Reyes, to replace the work Batts was doing every year. “It is a part time job that we don’t get paid for,” says Barrett.

To give the festival a fresh start, King and Barrett said they put everything on the table. The restarted Outflix’s dormant Summer Series, showing LBGTQ films that were hits at past festivals, such as the groundbreaking comedy from the dawn of the digital era, Sordid Lives. “Especially for a gay Southern person, you look at this movie and say, ‘This is my life!'” says Barrett.

On August 21st, the traditional preview party was spiced up with Outflix’s first local shorts competition, which was won by writer Skyy Blair’s comedic directorial debut “Motions.”

On Friday, September 7th, the main festival will open as it traditionally does with a documentary and narrative feature. The 34th, directed by Linda Cullen and Vanessa Gildea, is a documentary 12 years in the making. It tells the story of Marriage Equality in Ireland, a group that fought to extend civil marriage rights to LBGTQ people, beginning in 2005 when plaintiffs Katherine Zappone and Ann Louise Gilligan sued to get their Canadian union recognized in the Emerald Isle.

The opening night narrative is Wild Nights With Emily, a historical dramedy in which director Madeleine Olnek tells the secret history of poet Emily Dickinson (Molly Shannon). Though people like Mabel Todd (Amy Seimetz), her sister-in-law who published her poems posthumously, called Dickinson a prudish spinster, Olnek reframes her heroine as a closeted lesbian doing her best to live a fulfilling life in stifling Victorian society. Shannon’s performance as the would-be libertine poet forced to wear a mask of chastity drew raves upon the film’s premiere at this year’s South By Southwest film festival.

The festival runs through the weekend and into the next week with 13 narrative features, five feature documentaries, and 32 shorts. King says its an exciting time for LBGTQ film. “People are starting to tell different stories in the community. There will always be space for a coming-out story or the teen story. But this year there are more unique storylines, and some that kept that thread, but told it differently.”

One such film is Saturday afternoon’s offering, Freelancers Anonymous, a comedy about balancing work and personal lives. “It’s a super cute movie about a lesbian couple who are taking the next steps in their life,” says King. “They’re planning for a wedding. At the same time, one of them quits their job and starts a freelancer’s group with a ragtag group of people who are all out of a job.”

On Tuesday, September 11th, Outflix will have its first all-Spanish-language Latinx night, beginning with a block of short films from as far away as Brazil and Costa Rica, and then Columbian director Ruth Caudeli’s Eve & Candela. “We’re trying to engage different parts of our community, especially since we just started a Latinx group at the center,” says Reyes.

King says it’s OUT Memphis’ goal to expand their community to all underrepresented LBGTQ groups, and the festival’s films reflect that push toward ever increasing diversity. “We’re showing a lot of diverse transgender movies and shorts. Moreso this year, I think we tried to connect the programming at Outflix with the programs at the center.”

Outflix 2018 runs from Friday, September 7th to Thursday, September 13th at the Malco Ridgeway Cinema Grille. For a full schedule, tickets, and passes, visit outflixfestival.org.

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Film Features Film/TV

Me And Earl And The Dying Girl

I have to admit I’m conflicted about Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.

On the one hand, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s debut as a feature director is genuinely fun. The film, which was based on a young adult novel by Jesse Andrews, who also wrote the film’s script, pulled off a rare feat earlier this year when it won both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival.

The “Me” in the title is Greg (Thomas Mann), a film-obsessed teenager. High school is hell, of course, and by his senior year, he’s got his survival strategy well-figured out. He’s mapped out, in detail, all of the cliques and social groups, and has painstakingly maintained identities in all of them. He’s like high school Sweden: He has no enemies, but the cost of neutrality is a lack of friends. He won’t even admit that his actual best friend Earl (RJ Cyler) is his friend at all: He calls him a “co-worker”, because the hobby through which they have bonded is creating homemade parodies of classic movies. Their movies, which sport titles such as The Seven Seals, A Sockwork Orange, and Death In Tennis, bring to mind the “sweded” films of Michel Gondry’s 2008 Be Kind Rewind. The occasional glimpse of Greg and Earl’s work is just one of the fun formal tricks Gomez-Rejon plays.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Greg’s pretty content to drift through a life avoiding hassles; after all, who needs friends when you’ve got a killer Werner Herzog impression? But his ironic detachment hits an iceberg when his mother (Connie Britton) forces him out of his room to spend time with Rachel (Olivia Cooke), a girl in his senior class who has just been diagnosed with leukemia. Cheering up a dying girl is dangerously close to actual friendship, so Greg is reluctant, but Mom insists, and so he’s soon navigating past Rachel’s white wine-swilling mother Denise (Molly Shannon) to hang out with Rachel in her attic room.

This is only Gomez-Rejon’s second feature, after last year’s remake of The Town That Dreaded Sundown, but he’s hardly a greenhorn. He’s a veteran of TV’s American Horror Story and Glee who has worked as a second unit director for movies such as Argo. He guides Mann through a fantastic lead performance. The supporting cast is full of great turns, such as Nick Offerman as Greg’s Dad and Jon Bernthal as the tattooed history teacher Mr. McCarthy. Gomez-Rejon and Andrews adapt the novel’s first person perspective into a voice-over narration. Little stop-motion animation bits give insight into Greg’s state of mind as he and Earl set out to make a movie for Rachel, the filmmaking duo’s sole fan.

But about three-quarters of the way through the movie, I had one of those moments when you realize that, even though Ferris Bueller is a funny guy you’re supposed to root for, he’s also kind of a sociopath. For most of its running time, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is one of those movies where all of the other characters only exist to teach the protagonist a lesson. Earl is basically a Magical Negro character in the Bagger Vance mode. Rachel is only defined by her advancing illness. Viewing everyone around you only as a prop in your story is not only a bad way to go through life, but also bad writing.

Ultimately, I think the movie redeems itself. Its first-person perspective is in the first word of the title: “Me,” and the “Me” in this case is a clueless 17-year-old boy. In the voice-over, Greg outs himself as an unreliable narrator, and little details throughout the movie show that the people around him know that he’s being a jerk, even when he can’t see it himself. Rachel is ultimately revealed to be a much deeper person than Greg could see, and it’s Earl who finally delivers a much-needed gut punch to his friend. Gomez-Rejon and Andrews walk a thin line between deploying and subverting tired tropes, but their message is ultimately one of empathy, which makes Me and Earl and the Dying Girl worthwhile.

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Life After Beth

When reliable performers show up in a film that is neither good nor bad, they appear frozen, bored, cut off. In films like these, placeholding paycheck performances don’t sting much, but the latest versions of the old familiar tricks feel like mirages, too.

Such actorly lifelessness eventually conquers the cast of Jeff Baena’s Life After Beth, which isn’t a high-concept horror-romance as much as it is an impressive collection of talent sitting around while some decent ideas about love, humanity, and violence recede into the suburban background.

Baena’s film initially follows brooding young stormcloud Zach (Dane DeHaan) as he tries to recover from the sudden death of his girlfriend Beth (Aubrey Plaza). Zach grieves by spending lots of time with Beth’s shell-shocked parents played by Molly Shannon and John C. Reilly.

Dane DeHaan and Aubrey Plaza star in Life After Beth

One day, Zach stops by Beth’s parents’ house, but they won’t let him in. Later that evening Zach returns. He sneaks around to the back, peers through a window, and, to his surprise, glimpses Beth walking down a hallway. For some reason, she’s come back, and although she is a bit foggy, she seems fine. So Zach and Beth try to rekindle their relationship. What could go wrong?

Life After Beth is kind of about grief and kind of about teenage romance, but it’s mostly about interesting-looking faces. Reilly’s comic-menacing mug is dominated by a strong, tiered brow that buries his eyes so deeply in his head he suggests an overgrown troll who views the world through a speakeasy door slot. DeHaan’s weary, wrinkled newborn’s eyes and motionless shingle of hair offset his quivering childlike mouth; Plaza’s huge, deadish eyes and bulbous head suggest a predatory hipster insect that’s sucked too much blood.

Life After Beath is seldom raw or intense and never truly funny. It is kinky, though. A scene of joyful, broad-daylight necrophilia in the sands of a public park playground contrasts a romantic evening at the beach that explodes into a Kiss Me Deadly holocaust.

A likely future cult classic, this tantalizing, gender-flipped variation of Warm Bodies checks at least one item off its list — there are fewer people standing around doing nothing at the end than there were at the beginning.

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Film Features Film/TV

Twisting the Formula

CREDIT: Suzanne Tenner

You know how the formula goes: Single, aging woman experiences some kind of traumatic event, and, through her coping with it, she begins meeting men and dating. The first couple of guys are decent enough but have some kind of deal-breaker characteristic that makes them unsuitable for her. However, she eventually connects with the right guy (double points if he was there for her all along), and they end up happily ever after. Cut, print, that’s a wrap.

Year of the Dog, the directorial debut of screenwriter Mike White (Chuck & Buck, The School of Rock), follows this formula for about half the movie. Peggy (Molly Shannon) is the ostensible old maid, but she finds great contentment and love in her best friend, her adorable beagle Pencil. That is, until Pencil dies of a mysterious poisoning. Peggy grieves, but her pet’s death puts her in contact with two potential suitors: her next-door neighbor Al (John C. Reilly) and Newt (Peter Sarsgaard), a pet-adoption-services manager.

Just when Year of the Dog should be introducing Peggy’s soul mate, however, the film undergoes a tonal shift. Instead of finding healing in her fellow man, Peggy realizes she had it right to begin with: Humans only disappoint. Animals never let you down. In a way, Year of the Dog does fit the stereotypical plot trajectory. Just replace the third-act love interest with animal-rights activism.

The biggest surprise in the film is Saturday Night Live alum Shannon. Best known for outrageous sketch-comedy characters (sniffing her armpit-scented fingers as Mary Katherine Gallagher or playing mommy to the canine Mr. Rocky Balboa on the skit “Dog Show”), in Year of the Dog, Shannon is not only given a role of unprecedented breadth to work with but convinces with her subtlety that this is the kind of work she needs to continue to do. She brings a real sweetness and warmth to the part, and, after Pencil dies, Shannon carefully traces Peggy’s path from innocent sadness toward a darker destination. It’s a bit of a courageous role because Peggy is not always sympathetic and because, intended or not, Shannon looks every bit her age: Cinematographer Tim Orr finds every one of her wrinkles.

White’s direction is able, as understated as his story if a little shaky in doses. Year of the Dog feels like a distant cousin of Napoleon Dynamite (White co-wrote last year’s Nacho Libre with Dynamite filmmakers Jared and Jerusha Hess). At final tally, the closest Year of the Dog comes to a curse word is “darn” and “crap” (“bitch” is used once, but in the dog sense); until Dog, Dynamite was probably the last movie to bother with having characters expressing frustration with empty expletives.

Dog is nowhere near as funny as Dynamite, mostly because it’s nowhere near as bizarre. But it is as observant, and some of Dog‘s supporting characters, particularly those supplied by Sarsgaard, Reilly, and Laura Dern, wouldn’t be out of place in Dynamite‘s world. (Right down to the costuming: Sarsgaard wears a T-shirt as incidentally funny in its guilelessness as anything Napoleon wears.)

Year of the Dog is a movie of great and admirable conviction. If it’s not the most ambitious movie in scope or message — proselytizing about animal rights does not seem to be on the agenda — it is laudable for perfectly filling out the little niche it sets aside for itself. The film proves its humanity by treating Pencil’s death as seriously as Peggy does.

Year of the Dog

Opening Friday, April 27th

Studio on the Square