#them ending both campaign 1 and 2 with ‘what a great/nice story’ and travis saying ‘let’s do it again!’

[shorthaltsjester]

watching the sdcc panel and i am just very :) about how sweet their answers to “what are some of the micro moments from the game that have stuck with you the most over the years?” are. taliesin saying what the fuck is up with that which was the first like The Party Gets To Know Each Other moments of c3. travis saying asking his wife if he could kiss her in campaign. marisha going way back to the cannonball competition in campaign one. ashley choosing the beauyasha date but also just the silly goat noise matt made. liam adding onto that to compliment matt roleplaying grass so well and then saying his favourite moment was writing a story for laura and reading it to her as caleb for jester. and then matt saying that was his answer, and that his favourite moments of the game are when they find ways to give gifts to each other whether tangible or not. and sam saying his favourite moments have less to do with the story and is more so when he can just. see his friends across the table from him. when marisha perches and when laura and ashley are (badly) drawing dicks and liam saying he loves when sam sneezes and ashley tells him to stop it and just. yeah. they Are an extremely popular online powerhouse, but i’m so happy that they’re also friends building a world together out of gifts to and love for one another.

like i Am so enamoured with the characters and the world of exandria but the moments when you can feel the love that those people have for each other reach out from behind the stained glass of their performances (to steal a metaphor from brennan lee mulligan) are so extremely special and i am endlessly grateful that they decided to share their silly little home game with the world.

[weekendwarriorblog]

The Weekend Warrior Home Edition May 1, 2020 – THE WRETCHED, VANILLA, DEERSKIN, BULL

Just think...  this weekend would have been the start of the summer box office with Marvel’s Black Widow before COVID came along. Now, we’re waiting for anywhere from two to three months or longer for the next big studio release in movie theaters with so many other “big” movies already being dumped to digital.

This is yet another week with no movies in theaters unless you’re in driving distance to a drive-in (i.e. you have a car), but at least we have some great stuff to watch at home, including a few virtual film festivals and virtual cinemas.

The first major disaster brought on by the advent of COVID-19 was the cancellation of the annual SXSW Festival in Austin. The movie that was supposed to open the fest, Judd Apatow’s The King of Staten Island, starring Pete Davidson, was supposed to open SXSW in March and then play Tribeca earlier this month, but Universal reported earlier this week that it was going to release it via digital download on June 12, the same day it was going to get a theatrical release.

Amazon has teamed with SXSW to screen 39 projects, including seven features, that will screen free of charge on Amazon from April 27 through May 6. The four narrative features available are the British-Bulgarian dramedy Cat in the Wall from Mina Mileva and Vesela Kazakova, which is being compared to Ken Loch’s I, Daniel Blake. There’s also the Guatemalan romance Gunpowder Heart, the French period film Le Choc du Futur and the French sci-fi anthology, Selfie.  The docs being offered are Karen Bernstein’s I’m Gonna Make You Love Me is described as “Fellini meets Motown” about one man’s search for self-acceptance, while Matt Riddlehoover’s My Darling Vivian about Johnny Cash’s first wife, Vivian Liberto, who gave the country singer four daughters. Last up is Alex Lee Moyer’s TFW no GW, a doc about the state of isolation, rejection and alienation that we all seemed to be feeling these days. There will also be a ton of shorts available that you can learn more about at The Hollywood Reporter.

The second weekend of the Virtual Oxford Film Festival will launch a few more feature premieres, as well as a virtual panel and the Fest Forward collection of experimental films. First up, on Friday, May 1 is a panel called “Creating Black Stories in Mississippi” at noon central time, and if you’re interested in that, you may want to check out the Mississippi Shorts, Getting to the Root and 70 Years of Blackness, which will now run through May 8, giving you more time to see them. Friday will also see the premieres of Daniel Lafrentz’s crime-drama The Long Shadow, preceded by Will Goss’ short, Sweet Steel. (Hey! I know Will Goss!) There will be a Zoom Q&A for the two movies on Wednesday, May 6, at 6pm Central. Also available Friday is Travis Beard’s doc, Rockabul, which is about the Afghan band District Unknown who fought against the USA’s counter-culture campaign by challenging freedom of expression and youth identify in Kabul with a QnA on May 8 at 8pm central. The Fest Forward Collection includes 8 international animated films from places like Estonia and Egypt, and those will have a virtual QnA on Saturday, May 2, at 1pm Central. (All of these Oxford QnAs and panels are recorded and available to watch for as long as the films are available to watch.)  You can get tickets for all these movies and events on Eventive.

This week’s Featured Film is the Pierce Brothers’ (Brett and Drew Pierce) horror flick, THE WRETCHED (IFC Midnight), which was a nice surprise since I’m not as easy a lay when it comes to horror flicks as other “horror fan” movie writers. The film involves a somewhat quizzical premise that isn’t too apparent as it begins, as we’re not exactly sure what is going on as it begins. It stars John Paul Howard as Ben, a young man living with his father (Jamison Jones), who has separated from Ben’s mother, as the two of them work at the nearby marina over the summer. Ben is immediately picked on and bullied by the locals, but he’s more distracted by the odd behavior of the woman next door (played by Madelyn Stunenkel). I’m not going to go too far into spoiler territory but the premise does involve witchcraft and an ancient evil that’s cropped up in the small town and is causing the disappearance of many small children… maybe… most of their parents seem to forget they have kids as they follow under the spell of the evil Ben’s discovered.

This is just a fantastic little scarer that at times reminded me of the original Fright Night, and I was really impressed with what the Pierce Brothers, first of all by working with a cast of great lesser-known actors, but the visual FX are fantastic and every aspect of the film’s mood and tone is just about perfect. I guess I’ve seen so much low budget horror that doesn’t really match the standards or production values of even some of the smaller-budget Blumhouse movies.

While you may not be near any of the scattered drive-in across the country that will probably be playing the movie, I definitely recommend downloading and/or renting it if you’re a fan of quality horror. The Pierces are extremely talented filmmakers who I’m sure will be doing better things down the road. For me, this is right up there with The Invisible Man, as far as this year’s stronger horror films.

Out now on VOD and Digital is Will Dennis’ quirky road comedy VANILLA (Gravitas Ventures) about a comedian (Kelsea Bauman) who goes on a three-day road trip from New York to New Orleans with an ice cream entrepreneur (Dennis), to sell his van with a questionable past to his ex-girlfriend. Both of them see the trip as a date, of sorts, but they set up a number of rules and boundaries to make the trip work.  It’s a pretty simple premise that’s made more fun by the unique elements Dennis introduces. Vanilla is a sweet, cute romantic movie with two actors appearing in their first movie that reminds me a little of the early work of the Duplass Brothers or Joe Swanberg where there’s a simplicity to the storytelling, but it’s really driven by the wonderful chemistry between the two leads.  It’s kind of amazing how enjoyable this movie is considering the inexperience of both actors, and I hope this gets seen by more people.  This is a wonderful discovery film that I was told played at the Lighthouse International Film Festival in Jersey and the Phoenix Film Festival, just a reminder why film festivals are so important!

Also on VOD and Digital this Friday is Annie Silverstein’s BULL (Samuel Goldwyn), starring Rob Morgan from Mudbound, Just Mercy and Netflix’s Daredevil. Amber Havard plays 14-year-old Kristal, a young troubled girl who is on her way to ending up in jail like her mother. After an incident where Kristal is in danger of going to juvie, she’s given a choice instead to help her next door neighbor, Morgan’s bull rider Abe Turner, with errands around his home. Kris soon discovers her own love for bull riding, as this unlikely relationship grows. I’m a big fan of Rob Morgan as an actor, because his work is highly-underrated, and I do have to say that Bull is a great vehicle for Morgan to have more of a leading role than he normally gets. He shines in that capacity, and Havard does a decent job in their scenes together, even though it’s a far lower key role. Then again, I thought this was a moderately decent indie that covered topics very similar to other movies, including Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s The Mustang last year and Chloé Zhao’s The Rider a year earlier.  Unfortunately, the material and especially Silverstein’s writing isn’t up to par with those movies, and it took me a little longer to get into this vs. those other films. Oddly, this will probably be seen by more people due to its VOD release, and that’s fine since I’d love movies like this to find more of an audience even with its pacing issues.

Back in the VOD/digital world, we have a handful of new releases including Quentin (Rubber) Dupieux’s DEERSKIN (“Le Daim”) (Greenwich), which I got a chance to see at Rendezvous with French Cinema back in February before the world came to a screeching halt, and that series ended up also being sidelined. The movie stars Oscar winner Jean Dujardin from The Artist whose obsession with a designer deerskin jacket leads him into a life of crime as he tries to complete his all-deerskin wardrobe. I generally like Dupieux’s weird sense of humor, and though this is less of a genre film than Rubber, it’s an entertaining film as we watch Dujardin’s character get further and further into trouble as he becomes obsessed with making a movie… as well as abolishing the world of all other jackets besides his own. If that sounds weird like a strange premise, then you clearly don’t know Dupieux’s work, and maybe it’s not for you. Deerskin is a movie I fully appreciated, because it was so weird and you never know where it was going, even going into the realm of American Psycho as it went along. Dujardin’s expressive performance was quite fun to watch, plus it it also co-stars Adèle Haenel from Portrait of a Lady on Fire, for those who loved that movie. Again, not for everyone, but if you enjoy Dupieux’s strange filmmaking ethos then Deerskin is another highly original offering.

Film at Lincoln Center’s Virtual Cinema will also be playing Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra’s new film Liberté (Cinema Guild), following it being a selection at the 57th New York Film Festival last year. This one takes place in the 18th century where a group of “bewigged libertines” engage in “pansexual games of pain, torture, humiliation and other dissolute, Sadean pleasure.” Sounds like something that would never play in Middle America if not for being available across the country thanks to this Virtual Cinema. I can’t remember if I saw Serra’s other film, The Death of Louis XIV, but this doesn’t sound like something I would watch unless I had free time at a festival, and clearly, I didn’t have time for this one at least year’s NYFF.

Another foreign film to look out for via virtual cinema is César Diaz’s Belgian-Guatemalan film, Our Mothers (Nuestras Madres) (Outside Pictures), which will be available via Virtual Cinema Friday. Besides being the Belgian entry for the 92nd Academy Awards, it also won the Caméra d’Or at last year’s Cannes, where it premiered during Cannes International Critics Week. It stars Armando Espitia as young anthropologist Ernesto who works for the Forensic Foundation in Guatemala as the country is in the middle of trying the soldiers who began the country’s civil war. Ernesto’s job is to identify the bodies of the missing, including possibly his father whose went missing during the war. The project began as a documentary and then became a narrative film.

Semi-related to the above, Cinema Tropical will be releasing three new genre-breaking films from a new generation of Brazilian directors, the “Cinema Tropical Collection” also done in conjunction with Lincoln Center, beginning with Gabriel Martins and Maurílio’s In the Heart of the World on Thursday, April 30.

Another movie getting a “Virtual Cinema” release (i.e. VOD/Digital) is Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra’s “docu-thriller” THE INFILTRATORS (Oscilloscope), which tells the true story of two immigrants who are thrown into a detention center. Marco and Viri are members of the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, a group of young DREAMers who want to put a stop to unjust deportations by being put in detention themselves, a plan that doesn’t go the way they planned. The film cuts between documentary footage of the real “infiltrators” with reenactments of the events inside the detention story, so it’s part documentary and part drama.

Also, Kino Lorber will be releasing Beanpole director Kantemir Balagov’s 2017 debut film, Tesnota (Closeness), virtually on Friday to help assist New York arthouse, Anthology Film Archives. This one is set in 1998 Nalchik in the North Caucasus of Russia and focuses on 24-year-old Jewish girl Ilana who works in her father’s garage, and while celebrating her young brother David’s engagement, he and his fiancée are kidnapped, but the Jewish community won’t go to the police to pay the ransom, so Ilana and her parents have to figure out a way to save them on their own.

STREAMING AND CABLE

Lots of stuff on Netflix this week, including THE HALF OF IT, the new film from Alice Wu, her first movie as as director since her terrific 2004 debut, Saving Face! This one stars Leah Lewis as Ellie Chu, a cash-strapped teen who writes a love to the school’s jock but ends up becoming friends with him and falling for the girl he has a crush on. I haven’t watched it yet to review, but I’m looking forward to it being a nice twist on Netflix’s other teen-oriented romance films.

Ryan Murphy’s second series for Netflix, Hollywood, will debut its first season on Friday, this one co-created with Ian Brennan (Glee, Scream Queens). It takes place in a post-WWII Hollywood and tells the story of a group of actors and filmmakers trying to make it. The cast includes Darren Criss, Patti Lupone, Mira Sorvino, Rob Reiner, Samara Weaving AND Michelle Krusiec, who starred in Alice Wu’s Saving Face! (See how it’s all connecting together?)

Chris Bolan’s documentary A Secret Love, which premieres on Netflix Wednesday, about two women, Pat Henschel and pro baseball player Terry Donahue, who fell in love in 1947 but had to keep that love a secret for 65 years due to the prejudice against lesbians they would have had to face.

Starting on Amazon this Friday is Upload, the new series from Greg Daniels (The Office, Parks and Recreation), with the first season being made up of ten episodes.  It stars Robbie Amell, who I got to interview last year for a small indie sci-fi film called Code 8. This is another dealing with life, death and the afterlife which seems to be a running theme through many series in recent years (such as Miracle Workers and The Good Place). In this one, Amell plays Nathan, a spoiled rich guy who ends up at Upload after a horrifying accident that takes his place, while Andy Allo plays the Upload “angel” assigned to Nathan who has to get him acclimated to his new afterlife. I’ve only watched the first episode of this so far, and it’s okay. I’m curious to see where it goes since it’s not a straight comedy perse like some of Daniels’ other work, and a lot is put on Amell’s shoulders to be funny, and Daniels is working with a lot of lesser-known actors for this one.

On Sunday, Showtime will launch the season debuts of Billions (Season 5) and the first season of Penny Dreadful: City of Angels.

Also, Lionsgate’s free movie offering this Friday is Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, my #1 movie of that year… thanks for nothing, #Schmoonlight!

Next week, more movies and shows not in theaters!

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!