This sublime documentary couldn’t have a better theme song than the resounding “You’re Dead,” by Norma Tanega, which points out with preciseness the main qualities of its protagonists. With quite a steady hand, given the circumstances, Waikiki and Clement (who were also accomplices in Eagle vs. Shark and the series Flight of...
Functions:
The quest for success in Hollywood. The dream of becoming an actress. Novella McClure is in her early thirties and has several problems. 1) She didn’t become a star. 2) Not only that, but she also didn’t get any parts in the last three years. 3) Her name sounds like a porn star from the past century. 4) There are younger actresses willi...
Functions:
The San Fernando Valley, in Southern California, where, according to the song, it never rains. Stories converge and there’s a split screen. The main storyline involves two actors and two actresses in the adult film industry, whom we see showering, shaving (body and face), travelling to the set, performing, and returning. Also, there’s a...
Functions:
Faraday, the main character, has a new opportunity to start believing again in his passion: telepathy, the paranormal –the sub-normal? He and his girlfriend, who sells cupcakes and uploads videos to her blog aiming to be a star on the Internet, move to a new apartment that features ghostly presences. Faraday, the film, believes in comedy, in...
Functions:
Natalia is in a long-distance relationship. Natalia is Spanish, and travels to Mexico to reunite with her boyfriend. Since the very busy stud is always away, she decides to join three young girls for a night out. From then on, all hell breaks loose, a nightmare triggered by a highly lewd moment in the back seat of a car. Despite the Mexican film pr...
Functions:
Suffering from agoraphobia, Montse lives confined in an apartment she shares with her younger sister, whom she’s been taking care off since both of them were little. Deep down, Montse is fine with this situation, because it allows her to avoid dealing with many things, including the hostile and oppressive Franquist Spain she lives in. Everyth...
Functions:
Not-that-young film buff, stop drooling over action figures from your favorite VHS tapes and listen to the greatest fan-fiction story ever told (and filmed): in 1981, Chris Strompolos and Eric Zala, in Mississippi and at 11, saw Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Rosetta Stone of Indy adventure cinema. Right there, with a comic book and pirated copy of t...
Functions:
Sister film to The Future (Bafici ‘14), both share crew (the director of one produces the other, and vice versa) and, most importantly, the same aching for the present of a whole country and its inhabitants thrown down the drain. Unamuno’s “Spain hurts me” as reinterpreted in a post-modernistic key. If The Future resorted to...
Functions:
In the first scene of Summer of Blood, Eric Sparrow rejects the engagement ring offered to him by his girlfriend, but not without humiliating her a bit first. Eric is a man in his forties who lives as if he were in his twenties, has a questionable sense of humor and definitely doesn’t know how to treat women. But, as neurosis and tartan skirt...
Functions:
Following his outstanding debut –the must-see The Myth of the American Sleepover– Mitchell’s It Follows proves he’s one of the few current filmmakers who really understands what scaring people is about. Like a coming-of-age tale that transforms into a they’re-coming-to-get-you story, his second film is a horror flick t...
Functions:
#WalrusYes or #WalrusNo: that was the challenge Kevin Smith, the founding father of the smarty-pants (though honest in its show-offy meticulousness that started with his 1994 film Clerks) geek talk, gave to the legion of followers of his professional reinsertion, his podcast radio. It was June 2013, and Scott Mosier and him, who was semi-retired as...
Functions:
