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Film Festivals
SXSW Review: Manson Family Vacation
- Details
- Parent Category: Film Festivals
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 17 March 2015 23:25
- Written by Matt Oakes
From Lina Phillips' ticks - his quick-burst nervous laughter after nearly everything he mutters, the awkward, uncomfortable way he holds himself, his unsettling obsession with Charles Manson - we know something's off. The journey is uncovering what and the platform is J. Davis' Manson Family Vacation - a dark family drama that knots itself up in misunderstandings and a trembling desire to be accepted. It's eerily funny, smartly performed and more twisty than you would expect for an independent film.
SXSW Review: Trainwreck
- Details
- Parent Category: Film Festivals
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 16 March 2015 23:35
- Written by Matt Oakes
Take it from the effervescently crass mouth of Amy Schumer, "The title was always Trainwreck. Trainwreck or Cum Dumpster." Oh Amy, you are such just so...you. From talk radio appearances to gross-out Twitter posts, the Schum has crafted her image on being unapologetically, oh-so-adorably crude and in the context of Trainwreck, it's miraculous to take in. At last night's premiere, when an audience member inundated her with compliments, she barked, "Stop trying to fuck me." She has swiftly become the epitome of 21st century feminism-as-middle finger; the crème de la crème of vagina jokes and reverse slut shaming that will melt the lipstick off housewives and zap the calories off your finger sandwiches with her gloriously nasty one-liners and hysterically sexual non-sequiturs.
SXSW Review: Furious 7
- Details
- Parent Category: Film Festivals
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 16 March 2015 23:30
- Written by Matt Oakes
At the bedside of crisped brother Owen Shaw (Luke Evans), older, meaner Deckard (Jason Statham) vows revenge on the crew that turned his sibling into a pin cushion. The camera pulls back to reveal a high security hospital-turned-war zone and Statham slowly saunters past gunned-down guards, ravaged rooms and fizzling tech. The world pisses itself in the presence of Deckard - your appropriately chewy badass action movie baddie at the center of the latest Fast film. It's a rightfully outrageous moment that aptly sums up Furious 7 in its complete and stupid glory; it's so dumb, it's so good.
SXSW Review: Sweaty Betty
- Details
- Parent Category: Film Festivals
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Sunday, 15 March 2015 23:31
- Written by Matt Oakes
Idiosyncratic Sweaty Betty is a documentary-cum-nonfiction of odd variety. Consisting of six scenes and six cuts and using a cast composed entirely of non-actors, it represents a new-age, inner city twist on the undiluted realism of Richard Linklater or Curtis Snow's disconcertingly realistic Snow on Tha Bluff. Tactically less intellectual than Linklater and yet more restrained and tender than Snow, Sweaty Betty shows the 21st century promise of plopping a camera in a foreign landscape to eye-opening effect, even if said landscape is on American soil.
