Films I Watched (Documentary Included)
"Maidentrip"
starring: Laura Dekker
written and directed by: Jillian Schlesinger
When you think of a 14 year old (girl) deciding to do any sort of adventure on their own the first word that comes to mind must be- self-indulgent or even narcissism. And yes, the majority of this documentary is the footage that Laura Dekker shot herself while on her own personal sailboat, which her and her father bought and fixed for her solo adventure, but thankfully, the director decides to steer clear of the vain aspect of the documentary, and instead, it becomes more about how we should all strive to live our own lives to the fullest and doing what makes us happiest; to explore the wide open world, and to discover things that inspire us. I had a similar experience of my own when I decided to pack my car for a summer on the road, traveling over 8,000+ miles circling the country, couchsurfing, hiking, catching baseball games in every city I found myself in, and perhaps most amazingly, driving for hours at a time by myself, with nothing but my surroundings, music, and thoughts as my companion- until I stopped for the day and stayed with amazing people almost everywhere I couchsurfed. It was truly a life-altering experience and I believe everyone should do it at least once in their life.
The youthful yet wise 14 year old addresses the camera often to share her experiences on the water, including storms that brew in the middle of the night, her observations, and perhaps most intriguing- her emotions.
Laura experiences all of this on her circumnavigational journey, but she didn't exactly set out to “find herself”—or, if she was intending to find herself, she didn't realize it at the beginning. As Laura tells it, the trip started simply from an inchoate desire borne not only from boredom with life in Holland, but a love of sailing that developed in her earliest years, living on a boat with her parents in New Zealand before they moved inland. With a love of sailing came a desire to see the world, and in the early stages of her voyage, that's exactly what she does.
Like myself on my road trip, the longer Laura is out on the open water, the more she seems to cling to the solitude and the introspection that inevitably comes with being your only friend out there. And although with this trip Laura Dekker breaks a record, that is not why she set out on this adventure.
"Maidentrip" is not just the chronicle of a stunning feat, but a coming-of-age journey of self-realization, made immensely more involving by virtue of being seen through Laura's first-person perspective, experiencing personal revelations in the moment with the same emotional immediacy with which she herself makes them.
........................................................................
"An Invisible Sign"
starring: Jessica Alba, J.K. Simmons, Chris Messina, Sonia Braga, John Shea, Sophie Nyweide, Bailee Madison
written by: Pamela Falk and Michael Ellis
directed by: Marilyn Agrelo
This is quite an unbelievable story- and not just because in it Jessica Alba plays a math teacher, hell a teacher of any kind is quite an astonishing feat for her- but she does give a valiant effort and certainly doesn't go for the beautifully attractive woman like you can usually see her in the movies.
It's a story about a little girl who really admires her father, and when she goes up and he falls ill, she decides to look at life differently, through more of her father's lenses and in a numbers way.
It's an idea we can all get behind: someone we love gets ill and we bargain with God in order to allow them to become better. That's the impetus which gets An Invisible Sign off the ground and running. Mona Gray lets go of friends, exercise, movies, music, and everything she loves in order to guarantee her father will go back to being the loving, attentive man she has always known him to be. But as the years pass and her father does not recuperate, Mona starts to look to numbers, the subject she and her father adore, in order to provide answers. However numbers don't do her much good when her mother (Sonia Braga) abruptly kicks her out of the family home and says it's time for Mona to get a life. And that's where the movie spends its remaining runtime.
The message is a good one: it's not about changing who you are, but rather loving the person you are and all that you are. And the great thing about Mona Gray (Alba) is that yes, she does have a love interest, but she never changes who she is or transforms herself into the beautiful woman to keep him around, instead, he has to come to the realization that he likes her for who she is, which makes her a powerful female character and not just a pawn or the aptly named "manic pixie dream girl" we often find in films.
................................................................................
"Well Wishes"
starring: Shane Callahan, Cullen Moss, Don Henderson Baker, Anna Stromberg, Nick Basta, Jane McNeill, Audrey Speicher, Elizabeth Becka
written and directed by: Anderson Boyd
This was a wonderful, indie find on Netflix with a short running time and a well-crafted story/fantasy that dives into spoof and satire of our corporate culture and social conventions.
It's an indie film with heart and becomes a bit too sappy while betraying the satire and spoof it was going for in the beginning, so I felt like it lost its identity about halfway through. You can't blame the film or the filmmaker for the sincerity and good nature behind the film, but that doesn't make it a stellar film, in my opinion. Shit in life is bad sometimes, and this film tries to wrap everything up nicely by the end. Sometimes, life doesn't work that way and that's one of the reasons I am usually draw to indie films like this.
.......................................................................................
"Cronies"
starring: George Sample III, Zurich Buckner, Brian Kowalski, Landra Taylor
written and directed by: Michael Larnell
Shot in black and white, Cronies is set largely over the course of a single sweltering summer day in the life of the perhaps significantly named Louis (George Sample III)—not a saint, but trying, with his young daughter’s birthday party coming up. Along for the ride are his childhood best friend Jack (Zurich Buckner), bonded to Louis through common boyhood trauma; and his new friend Andrew (Brian Kowalski), a work buddy with cargo shorts and gelled hair. Jack leans heavily on his past with Louis, and bums cigarettes off of Andrew, as the three coast through the day, bantering, consuming substances, and striking guarded buddy-buddy poses as they move towards some kind of reckoning.
With Spike Lee as the filmmaker's teacher/mentor as well as the film's executive producer, you can see his influences throughout the film, especially as it explores the interracial friendships and hardships of the three main characters. We follow them through the course of one day together, all action leading up to one of the character's daughter's birthday party when the film promptly ends because we've seen all we need to in order to understand the friendship and their world in St. Louis. One day in the life of cronies.
The director interweaves a faux-documentary style to his film by interrogating the three characters about their histories (separately and as friends) as well as their background stories as cronies with interviews that could definitely lose or distract the viewer, but it is done in such a way that works well for this filmmaker.
Interesting facts:
Cronies was shot in September of 2013, and Larnell had basically finished the movie by the time the St. Louis metropolitan area was caught up in the protests emanating outwards from Ferguson. A post-credits dedication in Cronies remembers Mike Brown, whose death, the filmmaker says, “impacted St. Louis in a huge way.” Since Brown’s death we’ve received frequent, insistent reminders of the way in which race can bend different people’s experiences of life into violently different shapes—this is a given in Cronies. It’s no coincidence, Larnell affirms, that at Louis’s particular crossroads he’s greeted with a black friend from out of a possibly buried past, and a new white friend from work and, potentially, the future. Very few films have really addressed the subject of interracial friendship in the way that Croniesdoes. At different times in the film, both Andrew, and Jack and Louis, have to step into new environments—dice games, pool parties—hang back, figure out how to act, and wait for some kind of sign that everything’s cool, everyone’s cool. But despite its antecedents, the film feels ultimately quite hopeful—honest about the moment-to-moment tension of these interactions, but also loose, positive, and with sense of how much can be accomplished simply by hanging out in good faith.
........................................................................................
"The Girl in the Photographs"
starring: Claudia Lee, Kal Penn, Kenny Wormald, Toby Hemingway, Luke Baines, Miranda Rae Mayo, Katharine Isabelle, Mitch Pileggi, Toby Levins, Christy Carlson Romano
written by: Robert Morast and Osgood Perkins
directed by: Nick Simon
Unfortunately, this is the final film on Wes Craven's impressive and extensive resume before he recently passed away. I say unfortunately because it's nothing to shake a stick at in regards to the slasher genre it fits itself into, in a bizarre fashion. The characters are meaningless and all rather self-indulgent and at no point do we really care if any of them live or die (unless that was the point, then, job well done I suppose). We do get introduced to a potential new scream queen with the casting of Claudia Lee (whose recent stint on the CW short-lived series "Hart of Dixie" probably garnered her enough attention). Unfortunately, she's nothing new other than another attractive blonde girl who screams and is all right to look at for an hour and a half.
The plot is triggered by unfortunate events that beset Colleen (Claudia Lee), a restless young woman who becomes even more restless, and ever more terrified, when somebody starts to leave grisly “presents” for her at the small-town South Dakota grocery store where she works: detailed photographs of what appear to be recent victims of savage violence. The local sheriff is slow to respond, dismissing the photos as sick-humored fakery. But when the photos go viral, they attract the serious attention of Peter Hemmings (Kal Penn), who can’t help noticing the similarity between the ghastly images and his own trademark output. So Hemmings travels to the South Dakota town which just happens to be his birthplace, with an entourage of similarly self-centered models and his harried assistant. Colleen pretends to be unimpressed by the snarky celebrity, but accepts an invitation to the secluded rental house where Hemmings and his crew plan to party hearty and shoot photos. Naturally, the aforementioned psychos crash the party and, just as naturally, they make bloody nuisances of themselves.
The performances, not to mention the writing/screenplay is just terrible and leaves so much more to be desired. This is a horror film failure.
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"James White"
starring: Christopher Abbott, Cynthia Nixon, Scott Mescudi, Ron Livingston, Makenzie Leigh, David Call, David Cale
written and directed by: Josh Mond
When a film's title is the main character's name you can rightfully assume the story will center around the character and become a close read/study of said character, in an almost at times uncomfortable way, even. And you might even expect to see the character transform and/or go through some major conflict(s) and hopefully come to some resolutions. You don't necessarily want and/or expect to see the main character's perpetual parade of antics and behaviors that lead to a path of self-destruction, but then again, sometimes in life, when you get a glimpse of someone or even experience their life with them during a specific time of their life, that's exactly what you get, and even though you want them to crawl out the other side having seen the light, sometimes shit has to get even worse before it can get better.
The two options offered to James, of mellowing into a functioning adult or continuing on as a reckless, antisocial delinquent, are echoed structurally by the film, which dramatizes this duality through a series of discordantly staged scenarios. The first occurs in the seething, violet-hued club in which the story opens, with the soundtrack toggling between the harsh Danny Brown track blasting from the over-driven sound system and the sweet sounds of Ray Charles pouring from James's earbuds. He chats up a girl at the bar, coerces her into a bathroom tryst, then impulsively bails, tumbling out the backdoor to a startling burst of morning sunlight. Jumping into a cab, he heads home, where he's confronted with an apartment packed with people sitting Shiva for his father, whose death he'll never have time to appropriately process.
With a great script and an awesome performance from Christopher Abbott (who I had seen in "Girls" prior to this), we get to see an incomplete character of a boy who should be working towards becoming a man or more specifically the man his mom wants him to be. We see two extreme aspects of James White: the sweet and the misanthropic, which allows the viewer to feel sympathetic towards him, especially as shit just seems to keep hitting the fan. Adding to James' story is his cancer-stricken mother (Nixon) whom he has cared for over the years of her illness and continues to, after his father's passing.
This maternal relationship is equally complex, with Gail both yearning for him to leave the nest and genuinely needing his assistance, further muddying the familial dynamic. Just as James makes his first entreaty toward independence, he gets more bad news regarding his mother's health. This forces him back into the dual role of child and protector, with the accompanying realization that, as an orphan, he'll end up as an independent adult whether he likes it or not.
This is a coming-of-age story about a conflicted and heavily tragic man-child with less warm feelings exchanged then perhaps James White really needs and no clear lesson ever learned by the main character.
It's an unbelievable film, especially for a first-time director/writer and these are the type of indie films I find myself drawn to. It sort of reminded me of "Good Will Hunting," in ways.
This is a definite must see, but be prepared to feel terrible.
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"Deathgasm"
starring: Milo Cawthorne, James Blake, Kimberley Crossman, Sam Berkley, Daniel Cresswell, Delaney Tabron, Stephen Ure
written and directed by: James Lei Howden
Full disclosure: I love these type of ridiculously cheesy/campy films. I mean, with a title like "Deathgasm" and the heavy metal/goth metal, face-painting influence, you have to know you're in for a good time. There certainly won't be any kind of epiphany happening by the film's end.
If you see only one movie this year that climaxes with demon-possessed evangelical Christians being beaten into submission by metalheads wielding double-headed black dildos and flailing anal beads, well, obviously, Deathgasm should be it. First-time director and avowed metal maniac Jason Lei Howden sprays his splatstick influences (Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste, Sam Raimi’s first two Evil Dead films, Shaun of the Dead) all over the place, but still manages to leave his own hyperactive signature on the genre.
Plot, as if you need to know anything:
Brodie is the new heavy metal misfit in a small New Zealand town. Sent to live with his white-bread relations following a family fracas, Brodie’s a beat-down magnet, with his chief nemesis being his own cousin. While digging through the metal section at the local record store – Deathgasm has a very Eighties vibe to it – he makes friends with elder metal statesman Zakk (Blake), recruits two school chums (Berkley and Cresswell, both goofily wonderful in their roles), and together they form the titular band. Through a gnarly but compacted bit of business involving a satanic hymnal and a reclusive metal legend, they end up invoking a hellacious demon that threatens not only the world but tests their friendships and loyalties as well. Chaos, you know, reigns.
It's a good, New Zealand-funded film. Enjoy.
starring: Laura Dekker
written and directed by: Jillian Schlesinger
When you think of a 14 year old (girl) deciding to do any sort of adventure on their own the first word that comes to mind must be- self-indulgent or even narcissism. And yes, the majority of this documentary is the footage that Laura Dekker shot herself while on her own personal sailboat, which her and her father bought and fixed for her solo adventure, but thankfully, the director decides to steer clear of the vain aspect of the documentary, and instead, it becomes more about how we should all strive to live our own lives to the fullest and doing what makes us happiest; to explore the wide open world, and to discover things that inspire us. I had a similar experience of my own when I decided to pack my car for a summer on the road, traveling over 8,000+ miles circling the country, couchsurfing, hiking, catching baseball games in every city I found myself in, and perhaps most amazingly, driving for hours at a time by myself, with nothing but my surroundings, music, and thoughts as my companion- until I stopped for the day and stayed with amazing people almost everywhere I couchsurfed. It was truly a life-altering experience and I believe everyone should do it at least once in their life.
The youthful yet wise 14 year old addresses the camera often to share her experiences on the water, including storms that brew in the middle of the night, her observations, and perhaps most intriguing- her emotions.
Laura experiences all of this on her circumnavigational journey, but she didn't exactly set out to “find herself”—or, if she was intending to find herself, she didn't realize it at the beginning. As Laura tells it, the trip started simply from an inchoate desire borne not only from boredom with life in Holland, but a love of sailing that developed in her earliest years, living on a boat with her parents in New Zealand before they moved inland. With a love of sailing came a desire to see the world, and in the early stages of her voyage, that's exactly what she does.
Like myself on my road trip, the longer Laura is out on the open water, the more she seems to cling to the solitude and the introspection that inevitably comes with being your only friend out there. And although with this trip Laura Dekker breaks a record, that is not why she set out on this adventure.
"Maidentrip" is not just the chronicle of a stunning feat, but a coming-of-age journey of self-realization, made immensely more involving by virtue of being seen through Laura's first-person perspective, experiencing personal revelations in the moment with the same emotional immediacy with which she herself makes them.
........................................................................
"An Invisible Sign"
starring: Jessica Alba, J.K. Simmons, Chris Messina, Sonia Braga, John Shea, Sophie Nyweide, Bailee Madison
written by: Pamela Falk and Michael Ellis
directed by: Marilyn Agrelo
This is quite an unbelievable story- and not just because in it Jessica Alba plays a math teacher, hell a teacher of any kind is quite an astonishing feat for her- but she does give a valiant effort and certainly doesn't go for the beautifully attractive woman like you can usually see her in the movies.
It's a story about a little girl who really admires her father, and when she goes up and he falls ill, she decides to look at life differently, through more of her father's lenses and in a numbers way.
It's an idea we can all get behind: someone we love gets ill and we bargain with God in order to allow them to become better. That's the impetus which gets An Invisible Sign off the ground and running. Mona Gray lets go of friends, exercise, movies, music, and everything she loves in order to guarantee her father will go back to being the loving, attentive man she has always known him to be. But as the years pass and her father does not recuperate, Mona starts to look to numbers, the subject she and her father adore, in order to provide answers. However numbers don't do her much good when her mother (Sonia Braga) abruptly kicks her out of the family home and says it's time for Mona to get a life. And that's where the movie spends its remaining runtime.
The message is a good one: it's not about changing who you are, but rather loving the person you are and all that you are. And the great thing about Mona Gray (Alba) is that yes, she does have a love interest, but she never changes who she is or transforms herself into the beautiful woman to keep him around, instead, he has to come to the realization that he likes her for who she is, which makes her a powerful female character and not just a pawn or the aptly named "manic pixie dream girl" we often find in films.
................................................................................
"Well Wishes"
starring: Shane Callahan, Cullen Moss, Don Henderson Baker, Anna Stromberg, Nick Basta, Jane McNeill, Audrey Speicher, Elizabeth Becka
written and directed by: Anderson Boyd
This was a wonderful, indie find on Netflix with a short running time and a well-crafted story/fantasy that dives into spoof and satire of our corporate culture and social conventions.
Shane Callahan plays Miles, the likable everyman at the story’s center. The action kicks off when, in one fell swoop, his moronic boss (Nick Basta) fires him — on the basis of a coin toss — and his hideously controlling girlfriend (Audrey Speicher) leaves him. These are events that tend to go hand-in-hand in romantic comedies, and always signal a much-needed clean break. Though Miles is reduced to living in a house emptied of furniture and working as a Lady Liberty mascot for a mall retailer, it’s clear that better things lie ahead.
Inspiration strikes when he notices a Kennedy half-dollar in the mall fountain that serves as a modern-day wishing well. Miles’ first foray into renegade fountain "maintenance" nets an impressive haul. Best friend Jack (Cullen Moss) quits the job he hates to partner with him.
Accompanied by a zippy score that suits his ’57 Chevy station wagon (although Boyd, like many indie directors, fills his soundtrack with too many songs), Miles visits industrial parks, municipal buildings, shopping centers and stately gardens. In one picturesque site he encounters the down-to-earth but mildly mysterious Penelope (Anna Stromberg). She becomes his second hire, their romance unfolding as she very gradually divulges her reasons for being on the road. It's an indie film with heart and becomes a bit too sappy while betraying the satire and spoof it was going for in the beginning, so I felt like it lost its identity about halfway through. You can't blame the film or the filmmaker for the sincerity and good nature behind the film, but that doesn't make it a stellar film, in my opinion. Shit in life is bad sometimes, and this film tries to wrap everything up nicely by the end. Sometimes, life doesn't work that way and that's one of the reasons I am usually draw to indie films like this.
.......................................................................................
"Cronies"
starring: George Sample III, Zurich Buckner, Brian Kowalski, Landra Taylor
written and directed by: Michael Larnell
Shot in black and white, Cronies is set largely over the course of a single sweltering summer day in the life of the perhaps significantly named Louis (George Sample III)—not a saint, but trying, with his young daughter’s birthday party coming up. Along for the ride are his childhood best friend Jack (Zurich Buckner), bonded to Louis through common boyhood trauma; and his new friend Andrew (Brian Kowalski), a work buddy with cargo shorts and gelled hair. Jack leans heavily on his past with Louis, and bums cigarettes off of Andrew, as the three coast through the day, bantering, consuming substances, and striking guarded buddy-buddy poses as they move towards some kind of reckoning.
With Spike Lee as the filmmaker's teacher/mentor as well as the film's executive producer, you can see his influences throughout the film, especially as it explores the interracial friendships and hardships of the three main characters. We follow them through the course of one day together, all action leading up to one of the character's daughter's birthday party when the film promptly ends because we've seen all we need to in order to understand the friendship and their world in St. Louis. One day in the life of cronies.
The director interweaves a faux-documentary style to his film by interrogating the three characters about their histories (separately and as friends) as well as their background stories as cronies with interviews that could definitely lose or distract the viewer, but it is done in such a way that works well for this filmmaker.
Interesting facts:
Cronies was shot in September of 2013, and Larnell had basically finished the movie by the time the St. Louis metropolitan area was caught up in the protests emanating outwards from Ferguson. A post-credits dedication in Cronies remembers Mike Brown, whose death, the filmmaker says, “impacted St. Louis in a huge way.” Since Brown’s death we’ve received frequent, insistent reminders of the way in which race can bend different people’s experiences of life into violently different shapes—this is a given in Cronies. It’s no coincidence, Larnell affirms, that at Louis’s particular crossroads he’s greeted with a black friend from out of a possibly buried past, and a new white friend from work and, potentially, the future. Very few films have really addressed the subject of interracial friendship in the way that Croniesdoes. At different times in the film, both Andrew, and Jack and Louis, have to step into new environments—dice games, pool parties—hang back, figure out how to act, and wait for some kind of sign that everything’s cool, everyone’s cool. But despite its antecedents, the film feels ultimately quite hopeful—honest about the moment-to-moment tension of these interactions, but also loose, positive, and with sense of how much can be accomplished simply by hanging out in good faith.
........................................................................................
"The Girl in the Photographs"
starring: Claudia Lee, Kal Penn, Kenny Wormald, Toby Hemingway, Luke Baines, Miranda Rae Mayo, Katharine Isabelle, Mitch Pileggi, Toby Levins, Christy Carlson Romano
written by: Robert Morast and Osgood Perkins
directed by: Nick Simon
Unfortunately, this is the final film on Wes Craven's impressive and extensive resume before he recently passed away. I say unfortunately because it's nothing to shake a stick at in regards to the slasher genre it fits itself into, in a bizarre fashion. The characters are meaningless and all rather self-indulgent and at no point do we really care if any of them live or die (unless that was the point, then, job well done I suppose). We do get introduced to a potential new scream queen with the casting of Claudia Lee (whose recent stint on the CW short-lived series "Hart of Dixie" probably garnered her enough attention). Unfortunately, she's nothing new other than another attractive blonde girl who screams and is all right to look at for an hour and a half.
The plot is triggered by unfortunate events that beset Colleen (Claudia Lee), a restless young woman who becomes even more restless, and ever more terrified, when somebody starts to leave grisly “presents” for her at the small-town South Dakota grocery store where she works: detailed photographs of what appear to be recent victims of savage violence. The local sheriff is slow to respond, dismissing the photos as sick-humored fakery. But when the photos go viral, they attract the serious attention of Peter Hemmings (Kal Penn), who can’t help noticing the similarity between the ghastly images and his own trademark output. So Hemmings travels to the South Dakota town which just happens to be his birthplace, with an entourage of similarly self-centered models and his harried assistant. Colleen pretends to be unimpressed by the snarky celebrity, but accepts an invitation to the secluded rental house where Hemmings and his crew plan to party hearty and shoot photos. Naturally, the aforementioned psychos crash the party and, just as naturally, they make bloody nuisances of themselves.
The performances, not to mention the writing/screenplay is just terrible and leaves so much more to be desired. This is a horror film failure.
........................................................................................
"James White"
starring: Christopher Abbott, Cynthia Nixon, Scott Mescudi, Ron Livingston, Makenzie Leigh, David Call, David Cale
written and directed by: Josh Mond
When a film's title is the main character's name you can rightfully assume the story will center around the character and become a close read/study of said character, in an almost at times uncomfortable way, even. And you might even expect to see the character transform and/or go through some major conflict(s) and hopefully come to some resolutions. You don't necessarily want and/or expect to see the main character's perpetual parade of antics and behaviors that lead to a path of self-destruction, but then again, sometimes in life, when you get a glimpse of someone or even experience their life with them during a specific time of their life, that's exactly what you get, and even though you want them to crawl out the other side having seen the light, sometimes shit has to get even worse before it can get better.
The two options offered to James, of mellowing into a functioning adult or continuing on as a reckless, antisocial delinquent, are echoed structurally by the film, which dramatizes this duality through a series of discordantly staged scenarios. The first occurs in the seething, violet-hued club in which the story opens, with the soundtrack toggling between the harsh Danny Brown track blasting from the over-driven sound system and the sweet sounds of Ray Charles pouring from James's earbuds. He chats up a girl at the bar, coerces her into a bathroom tryst, then impulsively bails, tumbling out the backdoor to a startling burst of morning sunlight. Jumping into a cab, he heads home, where he's confronted with an apartment packed with people sitting Shiva for his father, whose death he'll never have time to appropriately process.
With a great script and an awesome performance from Christopher Abbott (who I had seen in "Girls" prior to this), we get to see an incomplete character of a boy who should be working towards becoming a man or more specifically the man his mom wants him to be. We see two extreme aspects of James White: the sweet and the misanthropic, which allows the viewer to feel sympathetic towards him, especially as shit just seems to keep hitting the fan. Adding to James' story is his cancer-stricken mother (Nixon) whom he has cared for over the years of her illness and continues to, after his father's passing.
This maternal relationship is equally complex, with Gail both yearning for him to leave the nest and genuinely needing his assistance, further muddying the familial dynamic. Just as James makes his first entreaty toward independence, he gets more bad news regarding his mother's health. This forces him back into the dual role of child and protector, with the accompanying realization that, as an orphan, he'll end up as an independent adult whether he likes it or not.
This is a coming-of-age story about a conflicted and heavily tragic man-child with less warm feelings exchanged then perhaps James White really needs and no clear lesson ever learned by the main character.
It's an unbelievable film, especially for a first-time director/writer and these are the type of indie films I find myself drawn to. It sort of reminded me of "Good Will Hunting," in ways.
This is a definite must see, but be prepared to feel terrible.
..................................................................................
"Deathgasm"
starring: Milo Cawthorne, James Blake, Kimberley Crossman, Sam Berkley, Daniel Cresswell, Delaney Tabron, Stephen Ure
written and directed by: James Lei Howden
Full disclosure: I love these type of ridiculously cheesy/campy films. I mean, with a title like "Deathgasm" and the heavy metal/goth metal, face-painting influence, you have to know you're in for a good time. There certainly won't be any kind of epiphany happening by the film's end.
If you see only one movie this year that climaxes with demon-possessed evangelical Christians being beaten into submission by metalheads wielding double-headed black dildos and flailing anal beads, well, obviously, Deathgasm should be it. First-time director and avowed metal maniac Jason Lei Howden sprays his splatstick influences (Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste, Sam Raimi’s first two Evil Dead films, Shaun of the Dead) all over the place, but still manages to leave his own hyperactive signature on the genre.
Plot, as if you need to know anything:
Brodie is the new heavy metal misfit in a small New Zealand town. Sent to live with his white-bread relations following a family fracas, Brodie’s a beat-down magnet, with his chief nemesis being his own cousin. While digging through the metal section at the local record store – Deathgasm has a very Eighties vibe to it – he makes friends with elder metal statesman Zakk (Blake), recruits two school chums (Berkley and Cresswell, both goofily wonderful in their roles), and together they form the titular band. Through a gnarly but compacted bit of business involving a satanic hymnal and a reclusive metal legend, they end up invoking a hellacious demon that threatens not only the world but tests their friendships and loyalties as well. Chaos, you know, reigns.
It's a good, New Zealand-funded film. Enjoy.
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