I hope you have had a wonderful birthday. Your gift, this year (from me and my sister, Christina) is a curated collection of Indie Sci Fi films. You should have received, and will continue to receive Blu Ray shipments from Amazon containing your curated collection.
Weird, wonderful, maddening, and perhaps, in some cases, not your cup of tea. But curated, with love, by your son.
Enjoy.
First up is this mind bender from one of, hands down, the most interesting American directors working today, Shane Carruth. Oh he of the weird other Indie Sci Fi thriller Upstream Color that I made you watch a couple of Christmases ago in Mexico. Primer is his earlier, lower budget and altogether amazing entry about a group of Silicon Valley engineers who decide to make a Time Travel machine. It has been called by no less than The Last Jedi helmer Rian Johnson "the best time travel movie ever made". I can't disagree, and if it leaves your head spinning that is exactly the point.
BTW, from the "interesting trivia department": Carruth was a software programmer in Silicon Valley before he started his career as a film director.
Both Christy and I love this much-higher-budget, but still indie thriller/comedy starting the wonderful Mark Duplass and the equally wonderful Aubrey Plaza. Why? Well, Duplass plays a slightly unhinged fellow in far flung Washington State that apparently has built a time travel device, and advertises for co-time travelers in a Tabloid newspaper. His classified ad concludes with the priceless admonition, "safety not guaranteed", hence the title. Of course, the film is not about Duplass, or about Time Travel, but about the oddball bunch of characters who go chasing him down, including Plaza, Jake Johnson and, in a show-stealing performance as a virginal Indian-American lad, Karan Soni. The interplay between their faux Seattle know-it-all intellectualism and Duplass' earnest just-might-have-actually-built-a-time-travel-machine pseudo-scientist provides the slow burn manic energy of this delightful film.
Fun fact: if you think you don't know Duplass, I can tell you that you do. You saw him, er, lose his limbs in the last Episode of the Second Season of Goliath.
What do you get when you put a group of Millennials in a house during a possibly apocalyptic celestial event? Coherence, the head-twister from director James Ward Byrkit, that poses the question, what is reality, really?
I'm not sure it is possible to actually spoil the plot, because it is hard to figure out exactly what happened, when the film is done. Sufficed to say, a group of friends are having a dinner party at a charming bungalow somewhere in LA, when the "event" occurs. Following it, whatever it is, they start to wonder if in fact something has happened, and as they investigate, and leave the house, they return changed in odd ways. In a nod to the law of Entropy, the more they try to "figure it out" the more it appears to spin out of control. Are there multiple versions of each of them? Has time and space fractured and are they actually now intermingling with alternate time loops? Only the Shadow knows.
Fun stuff.
If the first three films are intellectual "acid trips" then Ink is just a visual feast of a ride, worth just going along with. The director, Jamin Winans has made both of his films (including his other marvel, Frame) entirely in Denver, Colorado, which in some ways should recommend them in and of itself. Like Shane Carruth turning a surprising Dallas into something that looks more like a Heavenly vision, Winans takes an otherwise pedestrian Denver and finds great beauty using it as the background for a truly original story, and remarkable, and remarkably inexpensive, CGI.
Here is the short form summary, courtesy of IMDB: "A mysterious creature, known as Ink, steals a child's soul in hopes of using it as a bargaining chip to join the Incubi - the group of supernatural beings responsible for creating nightmares." Again, just go with it, and enjoy the remarkable photography and effects.
I saved the best, or at least my favorite, for last. The notion of a film-making team is not a new one. The Coen Brothers are perhaps the best known, having burst on the scene low these many years with the still-pungent Blood Simple. The difference here is that Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, the co-writers/directors of Spring are not brothers, but have made now three amazing films together, and seemingly share a common vision of the world, and film-making.
Spring is rather mind-blowing, as it blends at least two, or three genres together into a Gazpacho that is as tart and filling as it is spicy. OK, enough of that metaphor. The film concerns a young-ish LA lad who has just lost his mother, and decides, of all crazy things, to go to Italy to try to re-center his life. There, after a brief jaunt with a couple of Euro-slackers, he ends up in gorgeous Italian sea-side town, meeting an even more gorgeous Italian gal who turns out to be the love of his life. This indie romance is moving along very nicely until we find out that said Italian gal is actually a creature who has lived for thousands of years, constantly shedding her "skin" (for want of a better term) through meaningless sex with unwitting males.
I haven't really spoiled the plot by revealing this much because: a) if you are invested in the film as I was you want to know how it turns out; and b) somewhat contradictorily, it is very much the journey (and not the destination) that is the reward here. The writing, acting, photography and even the music all work together to provide a remarkable cinematic feast.
And, oh by the way, this may be the best romance-cum-horror-cum-sci-fi flick ever made, Or maybe the only one.
Thanks for reading.
- Eric
