2016 is the perfect time to make a sequel to the 2001 cult-ish classic, Zoolander. The vapid, narcissistic, pea-brained male models that populated that movie have now taken over the earth in the real world, in the form of the “selfie generation,” a bunch of real-life Derek Zoolanders, Mugatus and Hansels running around, staring at themselves like idiots in their little, digital mirrors as they dream of YouTube stardom and Kardashian-level success. I’m a big, fat, thirtysomething, generationally supplanted crank (make me young and beautiful again!) and I would love nothing more than to watch Ben Stiller and his middle-aged cohorts rip this new wave of self-obsessed monsters to shreds (too harsh?) via a new go-round with Mr. Magnum himself.

Zoolander 2 tries to do that and, and fails at all of it. Hard. Like, heartbreakingly hard. The movie opens with Justin Bieber being brutally shot to death and then taking a selfie before he peaces out. That and a selfie-stick car crash are really the only jokes we get about selfie culture, and they feel in bad taste, almost too real to laugh at (people applauded at the sight of Bieber getting shot to death in my theater, which I found to be more than a little sick). Zoolander is one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen, its male-model characters gifting us with the some of the most glorious displays of sheer stupidity put to screen. There was orange-mocha-frappuccino; the Mer-Man commercial; the iconic “Hansel. He’s so hot right now. Hansel.” That movie was a non-stop shit show of giant laughs that I enjoy to this day, so the fact that its sequel is so unfunny and off-base is a really tough pill to swallow.

The new story picks up with Derek (Stiller) and Hansel (Owen Wilson) estranged, both from each other and the outside world. Derek’s living as a “hermit crab” in a snowy cabin somewhere in “extreme northern New Jersey;” Hansel’s living in a desert hut, in a serious relationship with an orgy of lovers (which includes Keifer Sutherland, playing a straight-faced version of himself). They were driven apart by a freak accident at the Derek Zoolander Center For Kids Who Can’t Read Good and Who Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too that killed Derek’s wife and mother of his child, Matilda (Christine Taylor, who makes a couple of brief cameos) and scarred Hansel’s face irreparably. As a single parent, Derek fails again, losing his son, Derek Jr., to child services when he “can’t remember how mom made the spaghetti soft,” depriving his son of nourishment completely, apparently.

Derek and Hansel make up and reunite when they’re beckoned by the world’s latest, greatest designer, Don Atari (SNL’s Kyle Mooney, whose interpretation of passive-aggressive hipster youths is the movie’s highlight) to walk the runway in his ultra-hip garb. The joke’s on them when they’re shoved onto the runway in cheap shirts with the words “OLD” and “LAME” printed on them and they’re ridiculed by their glitzy, fresh-faced onlookers. The world’s passed them by (sob). There’s a larger, more pressing issue, however: There’s been a string of celebrity murders being investigated by the Fashion Police, led by Valentina (Penelope Cruz), who believes Derek has the key to finding the people responsible. Derek agrees, as long as she helps him reunite with his lost son.

The plot’s as uninteresting and flat as it sounds, a trashy send-up of the international spy thriller that chose to spoof that genre seemingly arbitrarily. But all that could be quickly forgiven with some good, solid comedy. Alas, Zoolander 2 isn’t funny, not one bit. The botch is in the approach: Stiller, who directed and co-wrote with Justin Theroux, Nicholas Stoller and John Hamburg, makes that godawful mistake most bad sequels make, attempting to emulate and bottle the magic of the first movie. This never works, and the fact that it’s now 15 years since Zoolander was released only makes things worse: Comedy has evolved many times over since 2001, and the same tricks don’t work anymore. A character being woefully uneducated and small-brained, for example, has been taken to new levels by, say, a show like It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia (Charlie Kelly is the new king of dumb-funny). For this second installment to really work, it would have needed to reach new levels of stupid, in a sense. Instead, it reaches new depths of disappointing, leaning on nostalgia and old, worn-out tricks. Watching Derek go on a joy ride “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” was funny the first time, but not so much in 2016.

There’s a freaking ass-load of celebrity cameos in this thing, and not one of them is worth the dough it cost to get them on-screen. Sting pops up. Arianna Grande’s in there. Katy Perry. Benedict Cumberbatch. Billy Zane returns. Will Ferrell‘s back as walking bitch-fest Mugatu, and he’s even joined by Kristen Wiig, playing his vaguely European partner in crime, but even they seem off their game. None of these or the myriad other appearances are amusing and, in fact, they’re a bit uncomfortable to watch. Neil Degrasse Tyson shows up to say, directly at the camera, “I’m Neil Degrasse Tyson…BITCH!” Ooh! A respected educator and astrophysicist cursed! The moment’s clearly designed to make audiences explode in applause; instead, it only elicits groans and eye-rolls. We’re familiar with these cheap parlor tricks and we’re ready for something new, and all Stiller gives us is a regurgitated mess.

Bernard is joined by Zach this week, who brings with him an interview with Chilean filmmaker Sebastian Silva about his new film Nasty Baby, starring Tunde Adebimpe and Kristen Wiig and the director himself. Also, with the release of Netflix’s Beasts of No Nation, the boys try to predict what the future of digital distribution will look like and how streaming sites like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and the like will impact the movie theater industry. PLUS, (you guessed it) our Indie Picks of the Week!

Topics

• Indie Picks (1:21)
• Digital Distribution (11:24)
• Sebastian Silva (24:21)

Articles Referenced

Beasts of No Nation Review
Cary Joji Fukunaga Interview
Junun Review
Nasty Baby Review
Sebastian Silva Interview

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On my list of Saturday Night Live‘s greatest alum, Kristen Wiig is quickly climbing the charts. Of course her terrific work on the show is a key part of that, but it’s what Wiig has done outside of the show, especially since leaving, that puts her in a special place. Like other SNLers who traded TV for movies (Will Ferrell, Mike Myers, Adam Sandler, Eddie Murphy), Wiig has found great success in her comedy comfort zone. She starred in the hugely successful Bridesmaids, a film that not only ranks as the highest-grossing SNL alum debut, it also earned Wiig a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination (with co-writer Annie Mumolo). But rather than wallow in a familiar well until it runs dry (like those aforementioned alum), Wiig has taken a much quirkier career path. A quick glimpse at her resume shows strong work in indie darlings like The Skeleton Twins and Diary of a Teenage Girl, as well as riskier choices in more offbeat offerings like Hateship Loveship and Welcome to Me. Her latest film falls into that risky, offbeat category.

In writer/director Sebastián Silva‘s Nasty Baby, Wiig stars as Polly, a woman trying to have a baby with her gay best friend, multi-media artist Freddy (Silva, also starring). After months of failure, testing shows Freddy’s sperm count to be low. With some persuading, Freddy’s boyfriend, Mo (Tunde Adebimpe), agrees to donate his sperm to the cause. Meanwhile, tension mounts in the trio’s New York City neighborhood as the behavior of an unhinged neighbor, a man who calls himself The Bishop (Reg E. Cathey), grows more and more confrontational, even becoming dangerous. His behavior escalates from annoying early-morning leaf-blowing sessions to vicious homophobic verbal assaults lobbed at Freddy. This ever-growing rift comes to threaten Freddy’s world.

Early on, Nasty Baby is a charming film about three characters who defy conventionality. Two minorities, in a same-sex relationship, are attempting surrogate pregnancy with a woman who, by all accounts, will be a part of the child’s life. That would be one baby with three parents, none of whom fit what society has come to expect as the traditional parental mold. And yet filmmaker Silva, along with his cast, make this arrangement feel incredibly natural, even familiar. There’s never a doubt this arrangement is insincere, nor is there any notion it might fail, post-baby. The charisma and chemistry among the leads solves that and is the film’s great strength.

Beneath the surface of this pleasantly offbeat story, the film wants to be a meditation on the universal balance of creation and destruction. Mo is a horticulturist by hobby but a woodworker by trade. Creation/destruction. When Mo is donating his sperm at the medical clinic where Polly is a nurse, she suddenly can’t chat with him because a battered woman comes in (one Polly knows from previous abusive incidents) and requires immediate attention. Creation/destruction. When Freddy and Polly travel to meet Mo’s family, tension is created by a few of Mo’s narrow-minded family members. Mo, Freddy and Polly are trying to do something borne of love while others judge them based on intolerance. Creation/destruction.

Then the third act comes in and irreparably damages the film. Don’t worry, no spoilers ahead.

Three key events that occur in succession in the third act are designed and presented in such a way as to be collectively considered inconceivable. The first event, involving Freddy’s art, is believable, but only to a point; beyond that, the eyebrow cocks. The second event, involving circumstances related to Polly’s attempted pregnancy, betrays the very character she has been to that point; something about the film now seems amiss. As for the third and final event, it is so far removed from anything remotely rational, the viewer is left wondering if what is being presented is a reel from an entirely different film, or maybe some form of catharsis for Silva. Either way, what should have been the “final conflict and resolution” is instead so tonally foreign, it renders the first two acts mostly irrelevant.

Two things make this disappointing and frustrating. First is that the core of that third event—not its final design or execution, but the basic conflict and the general path to it—makes sense. (In fact, it’s almost predictable.) The execution, though, is stupefying. Related to that (and other than seeing a terrific effort taken out back and set on fire) is that the trio of events, despite the devil in the details, still work within the thematic construct of creation/destruction. Somehow Silva managed to hang onto his core theme even though he realized he couldn’t close, opting instead to jam the pedal to the floor and hope for the best.

The net is the worst possible result: not a bad effort made nor a great effort flawed, but a good effort wasted.

Thankfully Kristin Wiig’s cinematic selections aren’t wasted though. It might be a mixed bag from a qualitative perspective, but her choices have ranged from confident to bold, and Nasty Baby is no exception. Her next few films bring her back to her comedic comfort zone, but I’m already looking beyond those to see what unique and daring choices she’ll make in the future.

Nasty Baby lulls you into thinking it’s one type of movie before revealing its true intention. Chilean filmmaker Sebastian Silva (The Maid, Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus) has no qualms with pulling the rug out from underneath his audience. In fact, he designed Nasty Baby that way specifically. “How much can I stretch the time for my characters to hang out,” began Silva, “so my audience will have the hardest time possible judging them when they commit a crime?”

Telling the story of gay couple Freddy (Silva, in his acting debut) and Mo (TV on the Radio frontman Tunde Adebimpe), and their attempts to artificially inseminate their friend Polly (Kristen Wiig) while contending with a disruptive neighbor named The Bishop (Reg E. Cathey), Nasty Baby skirts around expectations up through its jarring final moments. In his sit down with Way Too Indie, Sebastian Silva discusses drawing influence from real-life urban landscapes, balancing behind-the-camera duties with acting, and the benefits of introducing new plot elements mid-way through the final act.

Spoilers begin mid-way through article and are identified by the “Spoilers Section” heading.

There are a lot of people in this story who could be considered outsiders, but they feel familiar. Anybody who has lived in a city knows of someone like The Bishop.
Yeah, everybody knows a Bishop for sure. If you’ve been in New York, or any city.

Are you drawing from your own experiences in Fort Greene?
There’s a lot of, I don’t know, beggars or people collecting things. People mumbling to themselves, being crazy in the streets, they are part of the urban landscape. They are there every day. I have experienced that more superficially here. I never got into a quarrel with any of those people. Maybe an exchange of words if they are assholes.

[The Bishop] comes more from one of these characters that I found in Chile. I was in Chile, probably shooting a film, and then I was staying in a neighborhood that is pretty hip. There was a neighbor that lived around there that was very much like The Bishop.

What was weird about him… even though everybody knows a Bishop this one in the movie he has keys to a house. Like, next door. He has access to one of these privileged home. These fancy brownstones in this neighbor. So he’s not a complete invader. He has his place. Nevertheless he’s terrorizing the neighborhood in its own way but it is a very ambiguous character. You don’t know what his business is… This is more based on a Chilean Bishop.

That’s the interesting contrast, Freddy doesn’t think The Bishop belongs but The Bishop doesn’t think Freddy belongs either. There’s a lot of people testing their limits with other people. Were you looking to push these characters outside of their comfort zones?
I feel that all writing is that. You have somebody in a comfortable position and then you give them a challenge. That’s pretty much where storytelling begins. I was not consciously thinking exactly that way just because it seems like a thing I take for granted. You need to push them out of their comfort zone.

The shooting style has lots of handheld, close-up shots, hanging out with these characters in very private moments. Did you want to capture an intimate feel to bring audiences into these characters?
Handheld is mostly what I’ve done in my movies, anyway. The way that I work with my DP Sergio Armstrong it’s always [like that]. On my first film, Life Kills Me, it was more sticks (i.e. tripods) and dollies but after that everything’s been handheld. The kind of stories I’m telling… when you’re telling a story that’s naturalistic, you want to portray some sense of reality to make people feel that they’re actually witnessing a piece of reality. I feel that only handheld makes sense.

Even our heads move. If you’re sitting on a chair, and witnessing something on a street, the way that you see things still feels more handheld than sticks because your head is moving up and down or things get in your way. You never see life as you see it on sticks. Your face is never fixed. In order to reproduce a sense of reality, I feel that handheld is the most effective method.

We also had time constraints as we always do in small, independent films. Going handheld also helps with the pace of shooting. You can move back and forth, do a close-up and a wide in the same shot without ever turning the camera off. It was a movie that was just begging for handheld. I don’t know how else I would have shot this film.

This is also the first time you’ve starred in one of your own films, how much of a challenge was it for you to balance those on-set responsibilities?
It was very challenging. I knew I was not going to have any issues playing Freddy when he’s doing normal shit – celebrating his boyfriend’s birthday, biking on the streets or rock climbing with a friend – I was never scared of playing that part of it. When Freddy has to [do more dramatic, spoiler-related actions] and then react to it, I was terrified of that scene and how I was going to pull that off. I did a little bit of a rehearsal and it was terrible.

I was like, “Fuck! I cannot share this with anyone because I really, truly suck at this.” But then that same fear pushed me to do it. The fear of failure that I could actually ruin this film with the stupid idea of starring in it. It was fun and I overcame the challenge. I don’t think I’m the best performer at all but I think that I look like Freddy. I look like that dude.

The most difficult thing for me that I hadn’t thought of, strangely, was the fact that I was going to be in front of the camera all of the time. I forgot, me as the director, I’m always behind it. We had such little time to shoot the film, I did not have time to look at footage. I was unaware of my performance, really. I would look at some things on the camera when I felt that things were weird or something, but most of the time I was trusting my co-actors like Kristen and Tunde, whoever was with me in the scene, and also my DP who has a really good eye for bad acting. I was among really smart people with good taste and bad acting alertness.

People who could keep you in check.
Pretty much. Also, I have to say, when you’re part of a scene, even more than being behind the camera, you can sense if things feel real. When you are in the situation, there are cameras filming you but you can forget about that for a second. You’re drinking water, you’re interacting with people. If the interactions somehow feel fake you know. You just know because you’re part of it. How could you not know that there’s something odd about it?

If there was something odd about it, I would try my best to overcome that oddness and make it natural. Make myself feel that I was really going through the situation we were portraying. It didn’t feel as hard, to be honest, as I thought it would be but it was definitely adrenaline inducing. At some points you had to delegate your trust to friends. It was a great exercise in letting go and trust.

SPOILERS SECTION

What kicked off your interest in this story?
I think it was the storyline of the Bishop, a gay couple, and the confrontations between them. A figure like The Bishop – an unwanted man in a neighborhood that is really harmonious – and a gay couple with one of them getting really frustrated by the presence of this man then taking the law in his hands by accident. That was the initial idea for a film and it had so many elements, like the crime, the moral question of whether good people do bad things. In the end, if you make [The Bishop] disappear and make this gay couple get away with murder, would the audience hate them forever? Can you make the audience forgive them or have a hard time judging them?

That was kind of the original idea and then it transformed into this hybrid that also mixes in the compulsive desire to reproduce among mid-30s or early-40s people. Why do they want to have babies? How far would they go to have a baby? Those two things then mixed up and created this idea.

Then the Nasty Baby aspect of it, Freddy doing these disgusting performances, came out of a really old idea I had, like, 15 years ago. It was like what Freddy describes in the beginning of the film. I thought that that could be a fun performance, portraying a baby. Embodying a baby in front of an audience and making a total ass of myself, go through the embarrassment of it with other people. Those three things created this film.

You have this trio of characters coming together to form a sort of family just in time for them to face their biggest challenge, I was curious what was the thought process behind combining these two distinctly disparate elements in Nasty Baby?
It’s a very manipulative movie in the first place. I know what I’m doing. I’m adding a very horrifying act for our main characters to perpetrate in the second half of the third act, which is really late in storytelling. By that moment, when this happens, things should be closing out. They should be brainstorming names for the baby at that point. They shouldn’t be trying to clean up blood in a bathtub. It’s a very conscious experiment to make my audience identify or love or understand where these characters are coming from for as long as I possibly can. How much can I stretch the time for my characters to hang out so my audience will have the hardest time possible judging them when they commit a crime?

If they commit the crime in the first half of the movie, the audience is not so involved with them. They will find them completely white, gentrified assholes who are killing a black, mentally handicapped man in a bathtub. But then, by the moment that they do it, you even find out that she’s pregnant. So you’re rooting for them so much that you fail to see the fucked-up-ness and the social injustice of what they’re doing in that bathtub. Which I also have conflicts judging. I, personally, as a writer, even as a human being. I’m not completely sure if I want them to get caught for what they did.

I think that the politics in the movie are really obvious. There’s not much to discuss. We all know that shit is very unjust and sad, but for me it’s more about the moral doubts that I leave my audience with. Do good people do bad things or are they actually fucking evil? These people might not be prepared to have a baby. It could even be seen as a homophobic movie. The moral confusion that’s left by the end of the film is the success for me. The open questions to all of these moral riddles.

I feel like in a lot of films a death loses its meaning because we see filmic deaths so often, but to have this one come so late really hits you
Yeah, you have it so late and you don’t even give the audience time to really process it. All the processing comes at their houses after watching the movie or in their cars or when they’re having dinner. I appreciate that, I feel that it’s something that I’m exploring again in a movie that I want to make now. A little bigger film, where again there is a plot that comes in very late and you just don’t expect it.

Nasty Baby, after they kill The Bishop, everything is kind of an epilog. They get rid of the body and it becomes a sort of urban fable. We don’t care about logistics. It’s not important, like, “How did they get the body inside the car? How come nobody saw them?” We’re not caring about that verisimilitude. Is that the word?

Probably.
[laughs] It’s not important to me, for me it’s more important that what’s eating the audience is, “Oh my god, these guys! We like you! How could you kill somebody? Please, god, let them get away with this. Let them have their baby in peace.” Or, “These motherfucking hipsters. I hope they get caught. I hope the police find them.”

You leave people with all of these questions, all of these expectations, projections, desires. These three people who you bond with, an audience projects all of their fears and sense of justice onto them. I find that to be the most fascinating part of this film, to be honest. If this film did not have that twist by the very end, yeah maybe it would be a sweet movie about three friends having a baby in Brooklyn, but it’s very uninteresting as a piece. I would not be into it.

Do you want all your films to leave that kind of impact?
I hope so. I think that maybe Magic Magic has it a little bit but I think even Magic Magic ends in a way that’s a relief. Death comes as a relief for Alicia especially who is suffering so much in this schizophrenic, paranoid episode she’s suffering from makes her so miserable. When she finally dies you’re relieved, at least myself. I don’t see death as the ultimate punishment, either. There are things way worse than death.

I think Magic Magic and Nasty Baby, and more so Nasty Baby, the morals of the story are not clear. You leave the audience with a lot to chew. I like that a lot. I feel that the movie closes nicely. It’s not a movie that all of a sudden cuts to black in the middle of nowhere. It cuts to black in a place that makes sense. I’m not pushing my audience off a cliff, I’m leading them to an end that is a little abrupt but at the same time, there’s nothing left to say.

It’s not quite ambiguous.
Yeah, it’s not ambiguous. You are left with moral ambiguity. That’s an achievement to me. I hope that’s what people take out of it.

What we see on-screen, for the most part, in Ridley Scott‘s The Martian (based on Andy Weir’s popular sci-fi novel) is Matt Damon playing an astronaut, stranded on Mars, who must be resourceful on a resource-less planet in order to return to earth. From that simple premise spawns more entertainment than we’ve seen from Scott in years as we follow the Martian misadventures of Damon’s Mark Watney as he “sciences the shit” out of his dire situation with the (remote) help of his earth-bound astronautic team and the bright minds at NASA.

The movie’s trailers would have you expecting a white-knuckle, isolation-horror story along the lines of Gravity. I was pleasantly surprised, however (as someone who hasn’t read the book), to find a movie that’s optimistic, warm, very funny, and very much un-scary. This is much lighter material than the marketing would have you believe, and that’s a good thing.

The tone is set from the beginning with Mark and his team surveying the martian surface for, uh, science reasons. Mark rattles off smartass quips rapid-fire, and judging from his crew-mates’ joking, amused reactions, it’s clear they’re a tight-knit group. Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain) leads the team, who refer to each other on a last-name basis. Martinez (Michael Peña), Johanssen (Kate Mara), Beck (Sebastian Stan), and Vogel (Aksel Hennie) find outer-space comfort in clowning on their good buddy Watney. Suddenly, a violent rock storm barrels through the work site and a piece of equipment slams into Mark, hurtling him into the darkness. Believing their friend dead, the team leaves the planet surface before the storm tears their ship to pieces.

Despite being left to his own devices, Mark finds a way to keep yapping: returning to the Mars base, he starts keeping a video log for whoever or whatever. It mostly keeps him sane as he MacGuyvers his way through the litany of problems that comes with being stranded on an inhospitable planet. The most pressing issue initially is Mark’s limited food supply; should he eventually find a way to contact earth or his crewmates, his current stock of NASA microwaveable meals wouldn’t keep him alive long enough for a rescue team to reach him. Thankfully, Mark’s a botanist, and he figures out a way to make his own water and grow an indoor garden, which bears enough potatoes to keep him going for the foreseeable future.

Much like in Robinson Crusoe and Robert Zemeckis’ Castaway, it’s a delight to watch our hero use his brainpower and willpower to gradually build a little life for himself in a hopeless place. It also doesn’t hurt that Damon finds his groove with the smart and savvy material, adapted by Drew Goddard from the book. Some of the jokes are pretty corny, but Goddard’s always had a knack for making even the cornball-iest comedy sing. Mark’s bright-side attitude is charming: when he runs out of ketchup for his potatoes, he dips them in crushed-up Adderall and jokes bout it; when it dawns on him that, because he’s grown potatoes on Martian soil, he’s technically colonized the planet, he sticks his chin up in the air like a proud child. The movie’s nearly two-and-a-half hours long, but Damon’s so entertaining that it’s a swift, streamlined watch.

The story hops back to earth regularly, where a crowded cast of mostly insignificant NASA officials debate how to tell the grieving public that Mark Watney is not deceased, as they originally reported, as well as figure out a way to bring him back home before his food runs out or a random equipment malfunction kills him. Jeff Daniels and Chiwetel Ejiofor have the most prominent roles as the two highest ranking NASA brains, with the rest of the home planet cast filled out by the likes of Donald Glover, Sean Bean, Mackenzie Davis, Benedict Wong, and Kristen Wiig, who’s in such a nothing role it’s sad. Chastain and the rest of the crew rejoin the story later, after NASA decides how to break the news to them that their friend is still alive.

The visual effects are as spectacular as they need to be, but the movie isn’t enamored with them like too many sci-fi dramas are. Mars looks totally convincing and serene, but the focus is always on what and how Mark’s doing. In essence, Weir’s story is about the wonder and power of science and how the human spirit can unlock its true beauty. None of the action scenes rival anything you’ll see in Interstellar or Gravity, but the that’s not what this movie’s about, after all, which is refreshing. The Martian won’t please those expecting a dark, terrorizing thrill ride where the heroes are in constant peril, but it’ll make the rest of us laugh and cheer, which is something sci-fi blockbusters don’t do enough these days.

Now in its seventh year, BAMcinemaFest is once again kicking off the summer season with a wide variety of independent cinema from this year. While film fests happen throughout the year, there seems to be a flood of festivals in the winter/spring (Sundance, Berlin, SXSW, Cannes) and the fall (TIFF, Telluride, Venice, NYFF), leaving the summer season wide open for the most part. That’s what’s so nice about BAM; it acts as a nice bridge between the two major festival seasons, providing a nice selection of this year’s biggest highlights in independent cinema so far.

This year, the festival has gotten a hold of some big titles that we’ve all been eagerly anticipating since their premieres earlier this year. Opening the fest is James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour, with Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth getting a Centerpiece slot and Sean Baker’s Tangerine closing the fest (keep reading to see our thoughts on two of these titles). But that’s only a small portion of the 35 films playing at BAM from this week until the end of June, and some of these films might be your only shot at catching them in theaters (but let’s hope they all get distribution of some sort!). The same goes for some of their excellent retrospective programming, which includes an outdoor screening of Richard Linklater’s Slacker and a 20th anniversary screening of Larry Clark’s Kids.

While we weren’t able to catch everything playing at BAMfest this year (we’ll see you soon enough, Queen of Earth and Krisha), we did get a chance to check out more than a few films that’ll be playing over the next two weeks. Read on to see our thoughts on what’s playing, and be sure to check out the full line-up and buy tickets over at the BAMcinemaFest website.

Call Me Lucky

For the first half of Call Me Lucky, Bobcat Goldthwait’s tribute to Boston comedy legend Barry Crimmins, it feels like a boilerplate documentary portrait. Complimented by talking head interviews with David Cross, Marc Maron, Steven Wright and Goldthwait himself, the documentary’s beginning details Crimmins’ roots as a rare liberal in his conservative upstate New York town to his status among the elite Boston comics and founder of the Stitches comedy club. Catalogued clips from Crimmins’ past shows a man whose timelessly hysterical satirical stand-up was far ahead of its time. Gradually, Call Me Lucky reveals its intentions to be significantly more altruistic, as it delves into a darker aspect to Barry Crimmins’ story. By the end, the film becomes a stunning look at a survivor’s story, and how a man changed his life to settle the demons of his past. This surprisingly emotional doc is not one to overlook. [Zach]

The End of the Tour

When iconic American author David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008, writer David Lipsky returned to the tape recorded interviews he conducted with Wallace for a planned 1996 Rolling Stone profile. Over the course of a few days at the end of Wallace’s book tour for Infinite Jest, the writers spent many long hours together in the snowy Midwest having a conversation that Lipsky would later describe as “the best one I ever had.” Indeed, their talks, as portrayed in The End of the Tour by Jesse Eisenberg (Lipsky) and Jason Segel (Wallace) are funny, poignant, and considered. Adapted from Lipsky’s 2010 book Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, The End of the Tour continues writer/director James Ponsoldt’s (Smashed, The Spectacular Now) streak of empathetic, humanist stories that explore people struggling to cope with internal pains. This new film is like the best, most analytical late night sleepover talk. The rich, dialog-heavy The End of the Tour is completely engrossing, occasionally profound, and deeply moving. [Zach]

The Invitation

As far as horror films go, Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation is one of the best slow burns I’ve seen in years. Will (Logan Marshall-Green), still grieving after a tragic accident that destroyed his marriage 2 years ago, gets an invite out of nowhere from his ex-wife Eden (Tammy Blanchard) to join her and their old friends for a dinner party. Will hasn’t seen Eden or his friends since his marriage fell apart, but he goes with his girlfriend Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi), hoping to reconnect and move on from the past.

From the moment Will arrives, things seem off to him, and as the night goes on he suspects that Eden and her new boyfriend David (Michiel Huisman) have something sinister in mind for him and the other guests. Kusama thankfully doesn’t make the central mystery about whether or not Will’s suspicions are valid (this is, after all, a horror movie). This is more about how and when things will go terribly wrong, and Kusama (along with cinematographer Bobby Shore) masterfully dangles the other shoe over viewers’ heads as they wait for it to drop. Every scene leading up to the exhilarating final act—which had me so involved I started yelling at the screen any time I disagreed with a character’s actions—is meticulously composed to increase the paranoia and dread exponentially with each passing moment. And once things finally take a turn for the worse, Kusama and Shore brilliantly betray their own form from the first hour, relying on frantic, handheld camera work and jagged cuts to amplify the tension. Their method works extremely well, and turns The Invitation into one of those rare delights where the payoff works just as well as the buildup. [C.J.]

Jason and Shirley

This low-budget biographical drama focuses on the day in 1966 when Oscar-winning filmmaker Shirley Clarke invited black gay hustler and drug addict Jason Holiday into her room at the Chelsea Hotel. She filmed Holiday for several consecutive hours as he told the story of his life, and the result was Clarke’s daring documentary Portrait of Jason, which was both hailed for its uncompromising look at many of the period’s most controversial social issues, and criticized for its exploitative nature. Jason and Shirley is a recreation of this day, and it consists primarily of intensely personal interview segments between actors Sarah Schulman and Jack Waters, who play the documentary filmmaker and her subject. The film’s brief 77 minute runtime is also intercut with short skit-like portions alternating between surreal depictions of Holiday’s fragile, drug-induced mental state and interactions with his friends of the time, including a heroin dealer and a fellow male prostitute. The intimate exchanges between Schulman and Waters come across as surprisingly genuine, which can be a difficult feat for biographical films. This one manages to transport its viewers into the past, and into the minds of its characters, rather smoothly, even though the more experimental aspects of the film, such as the insert skits, don’t work quite as well. In the end, Jason and Shirley is certainly worth spending just over an hour with; it’s the graphic nature of the content, rather than the quality of the filmmaking, that may frighten off some viewers. [Eli]

Nasty Baby

Nasty Baby is a bait-and-switch kind of movie, one that offers up a perfectly adequate story, only to pull the rug out from underneath audiences at some point in the third act with a dark tonal shift. Starring writer/director Sebastián Silva as a gay Brooklyn-based multimedia artist working on an exhibit of adults as babies, Silva’s Freddy gets extremely excited about the idea of becoming a father by artificially inseminating his friend Polly (Kristen Wiig); however, when Freddy’s sperm won’t take, he and Polly attempt to convince Freddy’s boyfriend Mo (Tunde Adebimpe) to become the donor. Freddy finds himself caught between Polly’s anxieties about her ticking internal clock, and Mo’s hesitation to launch himself into fatherhood. As it develops and introduces outside unsettling elements, Nasty Baby subtly builds the tension in its subplot until a climactic moment. Silva’s film serves as an intimate portrait of a group of characters that grow into family unit just in time to face an unthinkable challenge. [Zach]

Pervert Park

“Because of its subject matter, Pervert Park is a challenging watch, but one very much worth the effort. Over the course of the film’s lean 77-minute run time, the filmmakers find success in presenting their subjects as honestly as possible. They don’t ask for sympathy, but they do ask for consideration, and they earn it.” Read our full-length review of Pervert Park from Hot Docs earlier this year.

The Russian Woodpecker

If The Russian Woodpecker doesn’t turn out to be one of the most talked about documentaries of 2015, it will be a shame. Fortunately, the fact that it was awarded the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema at this year’s Sundance Film Festival will likely help spread the word about this courageous and well-meaning work of nonfiction. The focus of the film is a man by the name of Fedor Alexandrovich who uncovers a terrifying theory regarding the potential true cause of Ukraine’s 1986 Chernobyl disaster. However, this is less a film about conspiracies, and more about how the notion of “conspiracies” can impact a person’s relationship with their friends, their family, their country and even themselves. Throughout the duration of its concise runtime, The Russian Woodpecker shifts from being a detailed history lesson to a political mystery to a character study of a man, his paranoia and his national pride. Crisp cinematography and sharp editing aside, this film is essential viewing for anyone interested in international politics or, as Alexandrovich himself would describe it, the ever-present ghost of the Soviet Union. [Eli]

Stinking Heaven

Taking place in 1990 and shot on Betacam video, Nathan Silver’s experimental Stinking Heaven feels like an ideal guide for showing off how improvisation can help and hurt a film. Silver’s film takes place at a New Jersey home, where married couple Jim (Keith Poulson) and Lucy (Deragh Campbell) host a group of people who, like them, are trying to overcome their battle with addiction. From the outset, the living situation is a fragile one, and with the arrival of a new member named Ann (Hannah Gross), the group dynamic turns into a toxic one.

Silver actually had his cast live together on set during the entire length of shooting, and let everything play out through improvisation. When this method works, Silver and his ensemble produce some remarkable results, giving the film a visceral energy that couldn’t be created through more conventional means. But for every sublime moment, there’s another that feels like watching an awkward actor’s workshop. It’s hard to shake the feeling that a lot of Stinking Heaven is a work in progress, as if we’re getting a glimpse into the cast beginning to explore their own characters. It’s an interesting combination of intensity (some scenes here can give Heaven Knows What a run for its money) and uncomfortable histrionics, one that works in fleeting glimpses, but it’s enough to see that Silver is working towards something special. [C.J.]

Tangerine

Filmmaker Sean Baker’s third feature Tangerine is a hilarious, raw glimpse into the lives of characters rarely depicted with a comparable level of complexity. This chaotic, colorful, vulgar adventure through the grimy streets of Hollywood follows two transgender prostitutes, Alexandra and Sin-dee (Mya Taylor and Kiki Rodriguez, respectively), as they spend their Christmas Eve tracking down Sin-dee’s cheating boyfriend and pimp, Chester (James Ransone). It’s the day after Sin-dee’s been released from jail, and as soon as Alexandra lets Chester’s infidelity slip while the two eat donuts, Sin-dee is out the door pounding the pavement in search of answers. Baker swiftly cuts from scene to scene keeping the pace of his film at a dizzying high. It’s a ridiculous amount of trashy, lurid fun to spend time in the company of these precisely drawn characters. Their sharp quips and flair for melodrama make Tangerine consistently entertaining. [Zach]

Uncle Kent 2

Remember Uncle Kent? No? That’s understandable, considering it was one of six films Joe Swanberg made back in 2011. The film was a funny, melancholy look at its title character (writer/animator Kent Osborne, playing himself) as he spends an awkward weekend with a woman he met on Chatroulette. Now, over 4 years later, Osborne wants to make a sequel, and in a meta opening sequence—directed by Swanberg, with directing duties for the rest of the film handled by Todd Rohal—Swanberg rejects Osborne’s pitch because he hates sequels. Swanberg does allow him to find someone else to make the sequel though, and in a matter of minutes the aspect ratio changes (from full-screen to widescreen) and Osborne starts jiggling his man boobs over the credits.

If you’re like me and find the idea of making a sequel to a barely seen micro-budget indie funny (a decision made even funnier by its recklessness, considering it guarantees almost no one will want to release it), Uncle Kent 2 is the film for you. The fact that this sequel owes little to the original means that Rohal and Osborne (who wrote the film) have carte blanche, and they make the most of it. Uncle Kent 2 continually makes one surreal and hilarious turn after another, starting with a weird visit to the doctor (Steve Little, who seems incapable of being unfunny) before involving Ray Kurzweil, Comic-Con, simulation theory and an apocalyptic scenario where people get datamoshed to death. It all amounts to a bunch of zany, frequently funny nonsense that will probably end up being the best sequel of this year (a specific honour befitting a film that’s all about specificity). Uncle Kent 2 is the sequel none of us knew we needed, and even though I can’t believe I’m saying this, I can’t wait for Uncle Kent 3. [C.J.]

Unexpected

After seeing the absolutely embarrassing treatment of Earl in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl—a stereotypical African-American character whose only purpose is to help the white, male protagonist become a better person—Kris Swanberg’s Unexpected feels like a breath of fresh air. The film opens with Samantha (Cobie Smulders), a Chicago high school teacher whose workplace is about to shut down, discovering she’s pregnant. It’s unplanned, but she decides to keep it, and soon finds out that Jasmine (Gail Bean), one of the best students in her class, is also expecting. Samantha decides to help Jasmine try to continue pursuing college applications, and the two strike up a bond.

It sounds like yet another mushy white saviour story that Sundance audiences eat up, but Swanberg and co-writer Megan Mercier have enough awareness to call out and avoid the pitfalls their story could fall into. Jasmine doesn’t turn out to be the poor, helpless student Samantha thinks she is, and Swanberg goes a long way to developing Jasmine into a fully-rounded character who really doesn’t need Samantha’s help. Smulders gives a fine performance (although it doesn’t match her excellent turn in Results from earlier this year), but the film’s MVP is Bean, who has an electric presence any time she’s on screen. Unexpected’s low-key nature might make it come across as slight, but it’s a surprisingly accomplished and slightly subversive take on a story that could have easily turned into something far worse. [C.J.]

A Woman Like Me

“Describing A Woman Like Me to an outsider gets a little complicated. When put as simply as possible its a documentary made by director Alex Sichel, who upon receiving the news that she has metastatic breast cancer decides to process this information by directing a film about a woman facing the same diagnosis with as much positivity as she can…while simultaneously documenting this process and her own treatment for what would become this documentary. It’s not quite a movie within a movie so much as it is two movies playing out side by side with behind-the-scenes footage playing at the same time as well. Confusing? Yes. Meta? Maybe. Moving? Absolutely.” Read our full-length review of A Woman Like Me from SXSW earlier this year.

With Welcome to Me, director Shira Piven and star Kristen Wiig ride a fine line. It’s a depiction of mental illness that manages to make you laugh without ever being offensive, and it’s by far Wiig’s most thought-provoking performance to date. She plays Alice Klieg, a small-town woman obsessed with television and showbiz (she worships Oprah on a daily basis on VHS tapes she’s memorized word for word). When she wins 85 million bucks in a lottery, she grabs her dream by the throat, throwing oodles of cash at a local broadcast company to produce and beam out her very own show, “Welcome to Me.” She’s mentally unstable, though, and when she quits her psychiatric meds, she begins to wobble off the rails, a full-on train wreck surely on her horizon.

In her sophomore feature, Piven’s crafted a film that’s deceptively elegant in its earnestness; a comedy on the surface, a piercing observation piece at its core. In a press roundtable interview, I spoke to Piven about the film’s subtleties, Wiig’s performance, and the tricky business of portraying mental illness on-screen.

Mental illness are stigmatized in society. How did that affect your approach?
If your main character is mentally ill, you have to tread lightly and very sensitively. For me, there are two things that come to mind. One is, it’s important to separate the person from the diagnosis. Two, [you have to be] really respectful and never laugh at the mental illness or the person, exactly. There’s a lot of humor in this movie, but me and Kristen felt that we want to laugh because the situation is absurd. Alice is a real person in a real world. I love her and I love the script because she’s someone who we recognize. I feel like we all know Alice, or we are Alice in some way. We have to give her dignity. I also think, on a social level, it’s more and more important that we become more open about mental illness, that it’s not stigmatized and marginalized.

I think we’re conditioned to accept portrayals of mental illness in movies a certain way. They’re often caricatures. Kristen doesn’t do that here, though, and I don’t think many other actors have the skill required to walk the fine line she does here.
Yeah, I think it really is a fine line. I sometimes like to call her performances a little bit death-defying, like a high-wire act. But it’s also how we cut the performance together in the edit room; creating a performance for film is a tricky business, and it’s a collaboration between the writer, the performer and the director. I feel like if you take all the things I said into account of being respectful of the mental illness and treating the script with sensitivity and allowing the actress to be who she is, hopefully the collision of those things will come out well. I think it’s so funny at moments—Alice is hilarious—but she doesn’t know she’s hilarious. She’s just living her life. We laugh in recognition.

For me, it was important to cast an actress with a basic comic center. I feel like she lives and breathes in that comic center, but she also has a vulnerable side. She can go to those dark places, darker than I imagined she could as an actress.

Darker than you intended?
Not intended, but she goes to places in this movie she’s never gone before. So I’m not gonna say, “Could you audition for me and show me that you can go there?” She did it so honestly and beautifully.

Was Kristen in mind for the character?
The script wasn’t written with her in mind, but she was my first choice. There were a lot of ideas floating around for actresses, and initially I thought a lot about Joan Cusack. She was kind of a muse for this character in my mind. I think Joan and Kristen have similar sensibilities. There was a boardroom scene where Joan Cusack, Kristen Wiig, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Wes Bentley and James Marsden are all together, and it was really fun. They were excited to work together.

I like that Alice has a distinct look: her fanny pack, the way her apartment is decorated. When did that vision come together?
The fanny pack was in the script, but I had this vision of how she should look. Kristen and I agreed on the heart of the character, but we didn’t necessarily agree on how she looked at first. I think Kristen thought Alice would look a little more realistic and plain, and I felt Alice was a little bit of a heightened character. I didn’t want her to play her in a heightened way, but I saw her in colorful dresses that might be from the ’40s or the ’50s. I felt like she shopped in thrift stores. The costume designer, Susan Matheson, agreed with me. “She would shop in Palm Desert thrift stores! She’s a desert flower!” She came up with this orange terrycloth dress. Kristen was eventually won over by these ideas and embraced them.

Something that came to mind for me was that a personality like Alice wouldn’t need a cent of that 85 million dollars to be successful on Youtube. Was that in mind for the movie’s ending?
Yes, in a way. It’s funny, we found some interesting people on Youtube when we were in pre-production. There are some amazing Youtubers going off in a similar way to Alice. I hate to talk about the end of the movie because it’s so open to interpretation, but it goes back to James Marsden’s line when he says, “She wants to be televised.” And Gabe (Bentley) knows she’s found this form of expression, as narcissistic as it might be, so he gives her a camera.

I read that this was originally a TV pilot.
I think Eliot Laurence (the screenwriter) was hoping for it to be a Showtime or HBO series, but when I read it, I felt I was reading a screenplay. I felt obsessed with it being a movie. I didn’t even know if I was giving him good advice or not, but I said, “Would you like to rewrite this as a screenplay?” He was thrilled with the idea.

Could you talk about what it was like shooting the dog neutering scene?
The dog neutering was a little like life imitating art. We had a lot of meetings about dog neutering. [laughs] It was some big conundrum of how to do this. We had a vet tech on set who was advising us and brilliant prop people. The prop people got these amazing props that looked incredibly real, and Kristen had these delicate hands; she really did the surgery. The surgery looked really good, but at one point we had the vet tech—who had similar hands, amazingly—come in and do some of the really exacting surgical stuff. We had some taxidermy dogs we filmed. The dog wrangler, who was fantastic, said she could get Alice’s dog to play dead on the table, and she did!

I’ve been asking everybody about this because I’m kind of obsessed: I think not enough attention is given to actors who act with their bodies. When you see Academy Awards clips, they always show actors yelling in a small room, or crying. Kristen tells stories with her body very well. Can you talk about her physical performance?
That’s cool! Such a great observation. I love it. I come from a theater background, and on stage you can’t just be a talking head. Really good actresses have intense physical training. She’s very in her body. Even in the first scene when she’s watching Oprah, you can see her just leaning into the TV. One of my favorite physical moments was a scene where she’s listening to her theme song. She’s supposed to just be lying around, listening, but I thought it would be really great if she did that dancing we do when we’re alone in our apartment. I thought Kristen would be great at that. That was just delightful.

I think it’s really haunting the way she walks through the casino in that pivotal scene.
That’s an even better example, because she’s not doing movement, per se, but just owning the space she’s in in an incredible way.

Before Alice wins the money, she has a very scheduled existence. After she wins the money, she throws all that to the wind. Part of it has to do with the meds, but what about the money made her throw away her routine?
That’s where the teeny hint of fairy tale comes in. She has this lonely life, going to a convenience store to get her pudding and issue of O magazine. I think Alice is someone who fantasized about what she’d do when her ship came in. Her ship comes in, and she just goes for it, takes that leap off the bridge. Her apartment is still there, with her sleeping bag and the whole thing, but I think she takes that leap of faith. That’s what makes it a great story, in a way, because we all fantasize about that leap of faith, and she does it. She inspires people around her, and I think Gabe sees her just going whole-hog for what she’s going to do. Even though everyone’s trying to stop her and she unravels and it’s a big mess, it says something about the dangers of following that narcissistic path, but she’s also inspiring at the same time.

Was there any improvisation involved in the film?
There was a lot of improvisation. We definitely shot the script and got everything we wanted from the script. We didn’t use whole new setups for the improvisation, but we used the setups we were in and had them riff within it. I would throw lines or ideas out for an alternate moment, and Elliot would sometimes hand rewrites to Kristen. She trusted him so much because she really loved the writing. I think her prepared statement in the casino was one of those alternate takes he wrote on the fly. She and Tim Robbins improvised the banana moment.

Joan Cusack has one of my favorite movie voices of all time. I could listen to her talk all day. Tim Robbins, too. I love the way Joan says “baby” to Alice in studio.
I’ve known Tim since I was 24 years old and I’ve known Joan since we were 8 years old. They’re both kind of heroes of mine. They’re friends, but they’re both people who I creatively admire so much.

Do you think Alice and Gabe’s relationship goes anywhere?
I think people like Alice with borderline personality disorder who have relationships…they have to have a devoted partner. It’s an unpredictable roller coaster, and I think Gabe is limited in his own way. I think they’ve found a match in each other, but it’s always hard to say how it’s going to turn out. One of the great lines is when Gabe says, “I’ve been divorced twice. And by twice I mean three times.” We hope for them.

There’s something poetically comical about self-help jargon escaping the mouths of the world’s least qualified advice givers. Most recently Jake Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom in Nightcrawler dispensed memorized wisdom while in the throes of sincere depravity. Now we have Alice Klieg, plagued by borderline personality disorder and well versed in Oprah-ese. Off and on on her medications, she spends her days in her color coded house watching hours of recorded talk shows, reciting along with their hosts all the life enhancing mumbo jumbo that daytime TV can offer. Kristen Wiig plays Alice’s mentally unsound and painfully awkward protagonist, and it’s because of her this film doesn’t end up feeling mean hearted, since Alice’s behavior make for some serious laughs at the expense of mental disease and the people who take advantage of an unwell woman. Because of Wiig’s charm and the line-toeing nuance of Eliot Laurence’s script, Welcome to Me explores the larger themes of self-medication and personal treatment and how artistry and imagination plays into finding a middle ground where one can at least live a satisfying life if not one defined as “normal.”

Alice lives a life of routine. She sleeps in a sleeping bag above her bed covers, her TV is not allowed to turn off and constantly plays a slew of her favorite Oprah episodes, and every day she buys herself a lottery ticket. One day her numbers match and her life is changed. Alice is functional enough to understand money can change your life. So, along with her best friend Gina (Linda Cardellini) she starts to have some fun. She moves into a penthouse in a Palm Springs hotel, buys herself colorful clothing, and treats her friends and family to expensive meals, among them her supportive gay ex-husband (Alan Tudyk). When she and Gina serve as audience members in an infomercial and Alice gets to be on stage in front of the camera, she finds a new high to achieve to. And with money, she doesn’t even have to try that hard.

Gabe and Rich (Wes Bentley and James Marsden) are the brothers who own the studio where Alice visited the informercial and their business is dying. When Alice marches in and lays down cash to buy herself a weekly two hour talk show, Rich agrees immediately, while Gabe seems to understand Alice’s demands come from someplace unhinged. And so Welcome to Me is born, much to the annoyance of the studio’s producers (Jennifer Jason Leigh and Joan Cusack). Alice’s terms are met in detail, so her show has her coming in on a swan, she spends portions of the show cooking low-“carbohydrant” meals (she’s convinced herself a high protein diet will aid in her therapy), and most awkwardly of all she directs elaborate reenactments of the most distressing and humiliating moments from her life in an attempt to get the last word.

It’s all quite hilarious, even if you aren’t sure at every moment if you ought to be laughing. And when Alice throws more and more money into the show to up its production value and glorify herself, her narcissism and blatant use of others starts to take its toll. Her downward spiral into her disease in the end is much grittier than expected, given the lightness up until then, but in that way it very effectively expresses the highs and lows of borderline personality disorder. It’s volatile and uncomfortable.

Wiig has proved she’s branching out past the safe humor of SNL, riding the dramedy line in such films as Hateship Loveship and The Skeleton Twins. Her deadpan sincerity to her roles adds the dramatic seriousness needed, but only in Welcome to Me do I feel we’re really seeing the vulnerability she’s capable of. Not to mention her ability to so quickly go from Alice’s hissy fit style hysteria when talking about past wrongs to calculated monotone-delivered speeches on reaching one’s personal potential. Her range has never been more evident.

Director Shira Piven, relatively unknown with only one other feature and a TV documentary under her belt, most proves her abilities in the performances of her actors, allowing their talent to play out. Bentley especially impresses as a shy and rather broken man who joins Alice in finding personal therapy. With its bright coloring and Gondry-esque TV set Piven’s world in Welcome to Me is a bit exaggerated, which may draw away from the gravity of Alice’s condition, but never seems to make light of it. Much like Alice’s zen-like therapist played by Tim Robbins, Piven creates a safe place to explore.

It’s not too far fetched to believe if we say our mantras and layer on the systems, something will catch and we may just fix ourselves. Its why those who buy one self-help book are the most likely to buy another. Welcome to Me touches on a need in all of us to try to reach some level of self-proclaimed normalcy as well as the innate need to feel accepted by others for all our flaws and quirks. Borderline personality disorder is mostly a heightened emotional state and a distorted sense of self-image, and I doubt there’s anyone out there who can’t identify to some degree with what Alice feels. Mental illness is no laughing matter, but therapy absolutely is, and this film’s strength lies in Alice as the face of what we’re all searching for—and that the seemingly-put-together life gurus just don’t imbue—someone searching for help who actually looks like they need it.

There’s an indelible spark that exists between actors who trust each other fully. Through 9 years of making millions pop with laughter together on Saturday Night Live, Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader have developed a rare rapport few other on-screen pairings can touch. With the legendary variety show now in the rear view mirror, the duo hope to ditch the silly sketch costumes, expand their repertoire, and evolve as actors. Wiig’s already gotten a head-start with Hateship Loveship and Bridesmaids (to a lesser extent), but Hader is taking his first stab at dramatic acting with The Skeleton Twins. Lucky for him, he’s got his old partner-in-crime to ease him into the brave new world of the un-hammy.

Hader’s luck is doubled by the film’s writer-director, Craig Johnson, who sets he and the rest of the cast up for success. The smartly written material (co-penned by Mark Heyman) is optimized to challenge Wiig and Hader with emotionally charged dialogue while utilizing their comedic gifts whenever levity or tonal contrast is appropriate. Johnson creates the perfect environment for his actors to excel, and they do; Wiig steps up, Hader steps up, and the result is a fine picture that makes all parties involved look good.

Wiig plays Maggie, a dental assistant living in Nyack, N.Y. who’s so dissatisfied with her marriage to her husband (Luke Wilson) that when we meet her she’s in a bathroom with a fistful of pills, seconds away from ending it all. Suddenly, a phone call. Her twin brother Milo (Hader), a struggling actor in L.A. whom she hasn’t spoken to in 10 years, has narrowly survived his own suicide attempt, his slit wrists being mended by hospital staffers. Maggie insists her brother leave L.A. and stay with her in upstate New York where they grew up to rehabilitate and hopefully reconnect. Death and happenstance bring the estranged siblings together, and suddenly the film’s title clicks into place. Just in case we didn’t get the message, we’re shown a fuzzy flashback of their late father (he took his own life) dangling Mexican skeleton toys in front of them when they were kids. It’s straightforward symbolism for sure, but it does the job and the image sticks.

Aside from his sister and her bubbling marital anxiety, waiting for Milo back home is some serious baggage in the form of his old English teacher Rich (Ty Burrell), who seduced him back in high school. When Milo visits his former educator at the bookstore he works at now, Rich goes pale; his worst nightmare just walked through the door. He’s got a wife and a 16-year-old son now, but it’s clear he’s still got a deep affection for Milo. Hader and Burrell’s exchanges are at once tender and crushing, and it’s in these scenes that Hader reveals the depth of his abilities as an actor.

Meanwhile, Maggie’s got her own demons to reckon with. She begins to hate herself all over again as she gives in to the advances of her young diving instructor (Boyd Holbrook), her latest affair (of which there have been many). But the real romance here is between the siblings themselves, strange as it sounds. Incestuous the film is not, but when we see Maggie and Milo (dressed in drag for Halloween) slow dancing and holding each other in a deep embrace; or when we see them lock eyes blissfully as they lip-synch Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” (they sing the entire song, and it’s hilarious and sweet); or when they get high on laughing gas together at the dentist’s office and lay on the floor, heads touching, it’s clear that this is a love story about soul mates, albeit an unconventional one. This peculiarity is to the film’s benefit.

Like in any good love story, Maggie and Milo go through periods of disdain for one another, exacerbated by the fact that they know precisely how to hurt each other worst (it’s a twin thing). These moments of conflict cut deep and, like Hader’s scenes with Burrell, are heartbreaking because they’re given time to breathe and bloom, to the credit of Johnson and his crew. If it was Wiig and Hader’s aim to show the breadth of their range, mission accomplished.

Wildly entertaining as they are, the incidental bursts of sibling bonding (Starship, laughing gas) feel somewhat obligatory considering the leads’ reputations as broad comics, though “shoehorned” is a word that never comes to mind. The true value of the film exists in the subtle push-and-pull dynamics of the more restrained, weightier exchanges. Structurally, Johnson and Heyman lean on rom-com conventions too often, with plot developments feeling too orderly and neat. It’s a little too easy to stay one step ahead of the story, which doesn’t reflect the spontaneity of the performances.

It’ll be interesting to see if Hader and Wiig continue to team up for movies, if only to see their partnership blossom and mature over the years. Perhaps one day they’ll be two of the industries premiere dramatic actors, collecting Oscars left and right, and we’ll look back on The Skeleton Twins as a watershed moment in their careers. They show enough potential here that the idea isn’t entirely wacky. But for now, the film is just fine as an amusing, unexpectedly poignant take on the inextricable link shared by twins (miserable ones, to be exact).

The Skeleton Twins trailer

Taking the electric chemistry they had on Saturday Night Live and exercising it in a more dramatic arena, Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader reunite in The Skeleton Twins, in which they play estranged twins brought together by tragedy who are forced to reckon with their dark past, where it’s led them, and try to keep each other laughing before they mope themselves to death. The film, directed by Craig Johnson, also stars Luke Wilson and Ty Burrell.

In a roundtable interview with other journalists, we spoke to Wiig, Hader, and Johnson about the script taking eight years to complete, Hader tackling his first dramatic role, the importance of the film’s unique tone, Wiig and Hader’s “Starship” duet, and more. The Skeleton Twins hits select theaters this Friday, with a wider release to follow.

You’ve been working on the script with Mark Heyman for around eight years. How did the final film differentiate from the initial script?
Craig: We had a couple versions of it where we hadn’t figured out the tone yet. There were versions where Milo was a drag queen and some were over-the-top. There was a road trip element…

Kristen: Maggie was a cat…

Bill: But they were still twins! [laughs]

Craig: They’re joking, but it was not too far off. [laughs] Mark and I just said, “What kind of movie do we want to make?” We wanted to do something that was tonally down-to-earth, bittersweet, funny, sad, reflective…We’re fans of Alexander Payne’s movies. We went back into it, and that draft was much more similar to how the final movie ended up. The eight years in between wasn’t consistent. There were two-and-a-half years where the script sat in a drawer.

Kristen: Then you heard [in a nasal-y voice], “Ooooh let me out! Remember me!” from the drawer.

Bill: “You submitted me to the WGA in 2003! My tummy hurts…”

Craig: [laughs] Does that answer your question?

Bill and Kristen, you’ve established a strong comedic chemistry over many years at SNL. Doing these more emotionally intense scenes, does the dynamic feel different?
Kristen: No, it doesn’t.

Bill: Yeah, not really. We’ve worked with each other for so long. Acting is acting, and I feel very lucky and privileged to come up with Kristen and do Saturday Night Live. You fail together and you learn from each other. Any time Kristen would do something we would go out on the floor to watch it because she’s such a good live performer. You learn from her. When you do something like this, it’s a different style of acting, but it’s the same thing of, you’re thinking about your character, you have ideas, you show up having done your homework…

Kristen: The outcome is different, but you still want to get to the best place. [At] SNL, yes we would be in crazy wigs and characters and stuff, but we knew the job was to make the characters funny and make it work. This [film] was like, who are these two people? We have to make them believable and real.

Bill: You’re going over your material…It’s like homework for me. You go over it so that you’re confident when you show up on the day.

Was it hard for you to keep everything in check tonally? The subject matter can be pretty touchy at times.
Bill: We were all over the place. The tone of the movie is really hard to achieve. Craig and the editor, Jenny, did an amazing job, because they’re very disciplined. There was a lot of stuff that we did that was really, really funny, and some things that were incredibly bleak and more hard to watch. Craig was disciplined enough to say, “This is what’s right for the movie.”

Craig: Getting the tone right to a movie like this was critical. It was everything. We knew that that was marching order number 1. There are so many things that factor into that: How comedic do we go? How dark do we go? Music is huge for that. Music is really important to me, so finding the right music for the score and source music was critical. It’s intuitive. It’s hard to say when you know you’ve got it, but there’s this feeling of, “This is starting to feel right.” We’d screen rough cuts of it to get feedback. It has so much to do with gut-checking yourself and being honest. “Am I leaving this in because it makes me laugh, when it doesn’t feel like what the characters would do?”

Kristen: It’s so interesting that people say that it’s a different tone and doesn’t fall into total comedy or total drama. It’s funny, because that’s what life is. We watch these stories of these people’s lives, and it’s not all just one thing.

Craig: Movies are ruled by genres so often, and things go binary and go black & white pretty quickly. Many movies don’t; there’s a whole tradition of wonderful movies that are similar in tone to this one. I just watched The Ice Storm by Ang Lee, and that’s in a similar world.

Bill: [In old news reporter voice] “Craig Johnson compares himself to Ang Lee! What do you think?”

Kristen: “He implies he’s even better!”

Bill: “Ang Lee angry! Craig Johnson’s body found eaten by a tiger! Probably Ang Lee!”

When you two do the sing-along to Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”, I was surprised you ended up doing the whole song. It was stuck in my head for five days.
Craig: You’re welcome!

Bill: It’s still in our heads…

Craig: [To Bill] When you first saw that cut, I remember you saying, “You really go punk rock on that Starship scene!”

Bill: Yeah, ’cause you keep going!

Craig: It was never written in my head to actually be that song, but when we found it and it was a duet with Milo trying to get Maggie to sing, it just naturally turned into a little more of a showpiece.

Having just gone through a debate of, “Which is more craptastic, Starship or Steve Miller Band?”, how did you arrive at that particular song?
Craig: “We Built This City” is often on the top of lists of worst songs of all time, but it’s of an era.

Kristen: We all know it.

Bill: Whether you like it or not, that’s what they’re saying! They’re sitting on a big pile of money like, “Craptastic paid for all of this!”

Craig: I knew that I wanted a song from the ’80s, a song that they probably grooved on as little kids, and they probably did that routine as little kids. I listened to a ton of different ’80s hook-y ballads and lip-synced them to see what worked. That duet just worked. It had the right amount of uplift and back-and-forth.

Bill, being that this is your first dramatic role, what made Milo stand out?
Bill: I’d always wanted to do something like this. Avy Kaufman, the casting director, saw me do a table read for a drama and she thought it was really good and recommended me to Craig. I read the script, and it was the first script I’d ever received that was like this. Every script before it was very much in tone like either SNL stuff or Judd Apatow stuff, which isn’t bad, but I like a lot of different types of movies. It was cool. Craig had a lot of faith in me, and it was great when Kristen got brought on. I was a little anxious doing this, so having Kristen there…She’s such an amazing actor, and there’s a security to that. Working together feels very effortless. That’s what I needed to do my job.

Your scenes with Ty Burrell are really heavy and intense. What was your chemistry like with him?
Bill: The first three days of shooting was with Ty. It was great because he totally set the tone for the movie. I was a huge fan of his. He was so nice. Having him there going, “This is really cool what you’re doing,” meant the world to me. Those scenes were some of the toughest scenes subject-wise. Everything about those scenes was pretty tough.

Craig: It was the first three days, so we were all finding our footing. At the end of those three days I was breathing a sigh of relief, because everything felt right. The tone felt right, Ty and Bill had chemistry…

Bill: The last scene we shot was the scene where Ty’s talking to me on the couch, and he improvised the line…

Craig: When Bill says, “What am I to you? Am I just a blowup doll?”, Ty says, “I treated you terribly, but it’s not because I don’t care about you, or don’t respect you, or don’t love you.” The “don’t love you” wasn’t in the script. I could see the heartbeat of the movie at that point. I like working with actors that are willing to improvise. I’m very specific when I write the script, but I always like it when there is a bit of wiggle room.

Bill: He felt something, and in the moment he just said it. He did that, and it sparked a reaction in me.

What are your favorite comedian-turned-dramatic-actors?
Craig: I like what Adam Sandler does in Punch Drunk Love.

Kristen: Peter Sellers is up there.

Bill: I don’t really think in those terms. I think it puts you in a box, in a way. I like people who swerve. I always like Jeff Bridges, because you never knew what you were going to get from him.

I think it’s inspiring for audiences to see actors branch out.
Bill: That is true. That’s 100% true. I guess I always lose sight of that because you sit at home going, “I can do all these things! I can do anything!” But those are the actors I like. Lately, I’ve liked what Bryan Cranston did in Breaking Bad and knowing him from Malcolm in the Middle.

We were just talking about Bill’s relationship with Ty, but now Kristen I want to talk to you about your relationship with Luke Wilson. At the beginning of the movie I thought we would end up disliking Lance, but that never happened.
Kristen: Just because something’s good on paper doesn’t mean it’s right for you, and I think that’s one of the reasons why she and people stay with people who may not be the best thing for them. It’s hard to talk yourself out of it. “What’s my problem?” I think she thought something was wrong with her because she wasn’t fulfilled by this seemingly great person. I think that added to her depression a bit. When you wake up every day and ask, “What’s wrong with me?”, it’ get’s a little tiring. She and hopefully the audience realize that sometimes it’s not a fit, and that’s okay. When you release someone you’re actually doing them a favor, because he needs to be with someone who thinks he’s really great and loves his weird shoes.

Craig: It was really important for us when we were writing that relationship that, because Lance is an innocent in it, we saw her racked with guilt and pain about her behavior. It’s killing her. That put it more on a balanced level.

Kristen: It’s hard not to immediately take sides. “He’s so great! What’s her problem?” I think you do feel that way at times in the movie.

Craig: We tried to make it harder to judge each character, which I think is what life is like.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen that shows how family dysfunction is a generational thing. You see the mother, and there are hints about what the father is about. Did you have a backstory for what the dynamic was within the family?
Craig: I certainly do.

Bill: When we finally got Kristen on and we had a start date, Craig and I walked around my neighborhood, and he just told me the whole backstory. It was helpful.

Craig: I kind of want to leave it up to the audience. I think if you go back to it and start thinking about timelines and when the mother left in relation to when the father died, you can start piecing together dynamics.

Bill: Okay, now I’m backtracking on by big, righteous thing. John Candy in Planes, Trains, & Automobiles. He breaks my heart in that movie, and he’s really funny.

Craig Johnson is now getting some artwork for his Sundance hit The Skeleton Twins, a film that stars Saturday Night Live alums Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader as estranged twins who reunite after reaching rock bottom. The film also stars Luke Wilson, Ty Burrell, and Boyd Holbrook and hits theaters on September 19th. The official movie poster for The Skeleton Twins first premiered on EW.com, check out the image below.

Official Movie poster of The Skeleton Twins

SNL-alums Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader confront harsh realities in the upcoming release from Roadside Attractions The Skeleton Twins. Writer/director Craig Johnson (previously of True Adolescents) won the Walt Salt Screenwriting Award along with his co-writer Mark Heyman (Black Swan) at this year’s Sundance Film Festival for The Skeleton Twins, which received many positive notices including one here at Way Too Indie.

In this dramatic comedy, Hader and Wiig play siblings living with one another after failed suicide attempts. Wiig shows anxiety as the wife of Luke Wilson, who happily announces to her brother that, “We’re trying to get pregnant,” because ‘phrasing it with “we” makes it not sexist.’ Hader, an unsuccessful gay actor, struggles with living in a small town and lip-synchs with his sister to Starship’s “Nothing Going to Stop Us Now.”

The Skeleton Twins will be in theaters on September 19th, watch the trailer below:

The Skeleton Twins trailer

SFFS Awards Night

On May 1st, right in the middle of the 57th annual San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF57), the San Francisco Film Society (SFFS) held and awards night gala, honoring some of the industry’s most vital filmmakers and contributors. It was a star-studded event, with Richard Linklater, John Lasseter, Jeremy Irons, screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, and more receiving awards presented by young stars including Zooey Deschanel, Josh Gad, and Parker Posey. Check out pics from the red carpet below:

The Skeleton Twins

On the same night, a few blocks away in Japantown, Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig were in attendance to introduce their dramedy (heavy on the drama) collaboration with director Craig Johnson, The Skeleton Twins. Hader, ever the entertainer, had fun with the press on the red carpet, pretending to cough to screw with photographers (I still managed to snap a couple good ones), and even conducting almost an entire interview in an Australian accent. Check out the hilarity below:

Palo Alto

Adding to the illustrious Coppola family legacy at SFIFF57 was Gia Coppola, niece of Sofia and granddaughter of Francis, with her gritty slice of teen life Palo Alto. Based on a book of short stories written by James Franco (who also acts in the film), it’s the best representation of modern day teens I’ve ever seen, an impressive outing for a first time filmmaker. Coppola and star Emma Roberts made an appearance on the red carpet at the Kabuki, both looking gorgeous as usual. (Photo credit: Adam Clay)

Last Weekend

Taking over the red carpet this past weekend were the directors and stars of Lake Tahoe-set family drama Last Weekend, which made its world premiere at the festival. Many of the ensemble cast were in attendance, including Patricia Clarkson, Joseph Cross, Chris Mulkey, Alexia Rasmussen, Devon Graye, and Fran Kranz. First time co-directors Tom Dolby and Tom Williams (lovingly referred to by the cast members as “Tom-Tom”) celebrated the film’s successful launch on the red carpet with their stars, as well as on a second carpet at the film’s after party. (Photo credit: Adam Clay)

A 3rd generation filmmaker of one of cinema’s most lauded families, Gia Coppola impresses in her debut feature, Palo Alto, an adaptation of a book by James Franco (who’s also in the movie) that captures the listless, limbo-like haze of high school through interweaving stories of several troubled teens. While the film technically falls into the “teen drama” column, its authentic, unapologetically filthy depiction of adolescence sets it apart.

Click to view slideshow.
Photos Courtesy Adam Clay

Much of Palo Alto‘s authenticity stems from its cast, all appropriately aged (this is important) and all quite…normal looking. It’s a good thing, as most teen movies’ stars are too prettied up to be relatable. Jack Kilmer, son of Val (who makes a brief, comical appearance), and Emma Roberts lead the brilliant cast, who all convince as conflicted, bored, lustful youths partying, getting in trouble, and goofing around in parking lots. Coppola, a photographer whose work impressed Franco enough to entrust the stories of his hometown to her, has a natural eye for composition and color, capturing the intensity and urgency of teen life with her luscious, moody imagery. Each character is chaotically emotional and has a unique set of inner conflicts to reckon with. This is the best representation of modern teens in memory.

SFIFF57 offered up another debut feature, this time from co-directors Tom Dolby and Tom Williams with the world premier of the Lake Tahoe-set Last Weekend. A family drama about an affluent couple (Patricia Clarkson and Chris Mulkey) hosting their spoiled adult children and their significant others for a weekend in their home on the sparkling lake, the film has its moments but is hampered by a script that needs more sharpening. Watching entitled rich folk complain about everything while feasting in paradise is a joke that gets old quick.

Click to view slideshow.
Photos Courtesy Adam Clay

The film, which has almost zero plot to speak of (not a knock), is completely fueled by the contentious family dynamics. The savvy young cast, which includes Zachary Booth, Alexia Rasmussen (Proxy), Joseph Cross (Milk), Devon Graye (Dexter), and Jayma Mays (Glee), all approaching their prime, embody their bratty roles tastefully, never going overboard or outshining each other. Clarkson and Mulkey guide them along, and the fresh faces keep up without a stutter. Cross and Clarkson share some particularly venomous scenes together, epic mother-son spats that steal the show. Fran Kranz (Cabin in the Woods) and Rutina Wesley (True Blood) play nothing roles that amount to a well-acted waste of time.

Tsai Ming-Liang made a Miyazaki-like announcement at the premiere of his new film Stray Dogs in Venice that the stunning film about an impoverished family would be his last, to the sadness of many arthouse aficionados. The lauded auteur is leaving the cinema world on a high note, however, as Stray Dogs is as gorgeous, boundary-pushing, and incomparable as his previous work (What Time is it There?, The Hole).

As has become his signature style, Tsai presents his tale in a series of fixed, ultra-long shots whose uncompromisingly elongated form reveals intricacies and shifting emotion unseeable by way of conventional quick cuts or even shots like Scorsese’s Copacabana classic. Spectacle is not the objective here, with the shot lengths surpassing the ten minute mark in some cases. Tsai paints a dark, stark portrait of a family living in squalor on the streets of Taipei. We see the children bathe in a dingy public restroom, the father hold up advertising signs at a busy intersection in the pouring rain. It’s a haunting, gut-wrenching film, and one whose beauty lies not just in Tsai’s immaculately composed shots, but in the 4th dimension of time itself. And you don’t even have to shell out an extra ten bucks for 4-D glasses!

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the festival so far has been Craig Johnson’s The Skeleton Twins, which from movie stills ostensibly appears to be a star vehicle for SNL all-stars Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, but actually turns out to be an unexpectedly affecting sibling drama peppered with funny moments for the comedians to please loyalists. Hader and Wiig play the titular troubled siblings Milo and Maggie, each with self-destructive tendencies.

Click to view slideshow.
After ten years of not speaking, Maggie invites her brother to stay with her after a suicide attempt. She’s in denial about her dissatisfaction with her marriage to the cheerful Lance (Luke Wilson) while Milo, an emotional wreck more aware of his fatal flaws, struggles to tie up loose ends in his past life while trying desperately to keep Maggie afloat in her failing marriage. It would be fair to categorize The Skeleton Twins as a dramedy, though the dramatic element is more intensified here than your average Apatow effort. It’s a dark movie, and Hader and Wiig’s comedic chops translate well to the emotional spectrum of acting (Wiig’s already proven this, but this is Hader’s first dramatic leading role). In fact, the laughs sometimes outstay their welcome, as the comedic scenes are egregiously tailored to the actors’ signature personas and distract from their better, dramatic character moments. This one’s definitely worth keeping on your radar.

2013 was the year for Saturday Night Live alums to break out of their comedic roles to star in smaller indie dramas. First there was Will Forte who set aside his MacGruber impersonations for a more serious father and son road trip film in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska. In Hateship Loveship it’s Kristen Wiig who boldly steps outside of her wheelhouse of wise-cracking joker (Bridesmaids, Knocked Up) for a role in which she barely cracks a smile. Unfortunately, her transition is not quite as smooth or effortless as Forte’s, though the uninspiring material doesn’t do her any favors.

The story begins as a painfully shy personal caregiver named Johanna (Kristen Wiig) must find a new client after the elderly woman she was looking after passes away. She is referred to the McCauley household to look after a teenage girl named Sabitha (Hailee Steinfeld) who has lived with her grandfather (Nick Nolte) ever since her mother passed away. As expected from a rebellious teenager, Sabitha is standoffish towards Johanna from the beginning and eventually exploits the caregiver’s gullible and delicate personality.

From the moment Sabitha’s estranged father Ken (Guy Pearce) arrives on-screen the film attempts to subtly reveal his backstory of addiction problems, but the moments are so deliberately presented that they feel forced. In Johanna’s first interaction with Ken, she finds him stealing prescription pills for which he awkwardly asks her to look the other way. In the very next scene Johanna learns that Ken’s wife passed away and that Sabitha’s best friend is not allowed to get a ride from him. Immediately following that scene, Johanna overhears an argument where Ken is shouting, “It was an accident!” As if it wasn’t obvious enough that he killed his wife while driving under the influence, a gossiping bank teller informs Johanna that he spent time in prison for “what happened”. Each time Hateship Loveship tip-toes around the obvious, it becomes more and more cringe worthy.

It’s frustrating that so much exposition is given to characters other than its main star. It’s easy to see Wiig is a sexually repressed woman, in the film’s best scene she passionately makes out with herself in a mirror, but it’s never revealed why she acts the way she does. She comes off as a flat two-dimensional character incapable of expressing any emotions, despite enduring some colossal ups and downs. Even Pearce, who is normally excellent, has trouble making his out-of-control junkie character seem convincing.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty easy to tell that Hateship Loveship is adapted from a short story. There’s simply not enough material to call for a full-length feature, even the best moments were only mildly interesting and very short-lived. Not only does the film derive from a stifling script full of predictable outcomes, but it also dedicates too much time toward its minor subplots (like Nolte’s relationship with the bank teller), while skimming over important details like marriage and pregnancy. Perhaps Hateship Loveship would have been better suited as a short film, or maybe it should have just remained a short story.

Hateship Loveship trailer

“My biggest fear is for my mind to control me and not the other way around,”Chilean filmmaker Sebastian Silva told us at FilmHouse in San Francisco, when asked about the inspiration behind his 2013 psychological creeper Magic Magic, starring Juno Temple and Michael Cera. We spoke with him at the beginning of his tenure as the San Francisco Film Society’s 2014 artist in residence, which runs through the end of the week. Including student lectures, a screening of Magic Magic, an intimate artist talk, and filmmaker networking events, the residency program is an opportunity for emerging filmmakers to spread their knowledge across the Bay Area filmmaking community.

In Magic Magic, Temple plays Alicia, an American who travels to Chile to visit her cousin Sarah (Emily Browning). During her stay, Alicia’s mind begins to crack when her interactions with Sarah’s friends turn adversarial. The film also stars Silva’s brother, Agustin, Cera, and Catalina Sandino Moreno. Magic Magic is one of two collaborations Silva had with Cera last year, the other being kooky road trip movie Crystal Fairy, based on a real-life experience Silva had in with a girl named Crystal Fairy (played by Gaby Hoffmann).

During our chat we talked about Silva reconnecting with the real Crystal Fairy, the gift of spontaneity, his residence in San Francisco, questioning his craft, Juno Temple’s tortured acting style, and more.

For More info about Silva’s residence, visit sffs.org.

When I spoke to you last year at the San Francisco International Film Festival, you were hoping that the real Crystal Fairy was going to show up to the film’s screening that night, as you were led to believe she lived in the area.

Sebastian: She didn’t show up at that screening, but we eventually heard from her. Gaby emailed me that she had contacted the real Crystal Fairy and that she was living in Vermont. She sent me her number, and I was petrified. I wasn’t ready to talk to her, you know? I had no idea whether she liked the movie or not. I told Michael [Cera] that I had her number, and he said, “Let’s call her!” We called her on speakerphone, and she said she loved the movie. She freaked the fuck out.

She had no idea you made this movie about her, right?

Sebastian: No! I lost contact with her 13 years ago, but now she’s in my phone.

What I enjoy about this pair of movies you’ve made is that they depict Chile so differently.

Sebastian: One is “feel-good”, and one is “feel-bad”. Crystal Fairy is handheld, improvised, and Magic Magic is the most expensive movie I’ve made, with a rockstar DP, precious photography, artificial lighting…they were very different processes. They do share a lot of similarities; a girl comes to Chile in search of herself, and Michael plays an antagonist to them. There are a lot of similarities, but the movies make you feel very different.

You made Crystal Fairy fairly quickly, and filmed Magic Magic shortly thereafter. Do you think that, because the two processes were so disparate, you felt refreshed going into Magic Magic and that it helped that film?

Sebastian: Definitely. Crystal Fairy was the first movie where I explored improvisation so deeply. We had an outline, but we didn’t have a screenplay. I had to be so much more aware of my surroundings. I was making it on the go. You just feel so much more alive, and it was very challenging. That formula helped me to be more loose and open to change things in Magic Magic, which had a very rigid screenplay and shooting plan. Having shot Crystal Fairy so recently, it made me work more loosely. I’d delete entire scenes, shoot scenes on the front porch instead of the dining room. That spontaneity was a gift from Crystal Fairy, and I’m treasuring it.

I love the chemistry Michael has with Gaby and Juno, but I actually particularly enjoy the dynamic between he and your brother, Agustin.

Sebastian: It’s a great dynamic. He’s a good kid. Such a natural. He and Michael are great friends.

Gaby and Juno both give very intense performances, with Gaby’s character being an extremely positive person and Juno’s being a deeply tortured soul. 

Sebastian: Gaby’s a bit older than Juno, and Juno seems to be a more sensitive, fragile creature. For her, I think this character was a little bit of a spiritual burden, and she was sometimes overwhelmed by it. I’d give her directions to cry, act scared, act insecure, and it would bring her spirit down. Gaby’s character was ridiculous. She was preaching shit that she wasn’t doing herself, a forgivable hypocrite. They are very different women doing very different roles. It’s hard to compare them, in that sense. Gaby is one of those actresses who does a character. She doesn’t become Crystal Fairy. She’s doing a job. On the other hand, Juno started suffering like her character Alicia. When I asked her to cry, she couldn’t stop crying afterwards. She’d go to places that weren’t very healthy to get the emotions I was asking for.

You’re going to be here in San Francisco for a while as the SFFS artist in residence. You have a lot of activities lined up, including lectures for students. Have you ever spoken to students in this kind of forum before?

Sebastian: No, never. But I’ve done a lot of Q&A’s and press. It’s kind of the same. I didn’t prepare or anything. I wouldn’t know how to start a lecture. I’d rather go “Crystal Fairy” on them and improvise the lectures.

Would a younger you have enjoyed having access to a filmmaker like this?

Sebastian: It would have been nice to hear about stuff that isn’t easy, for instance. Tips I know are very useful for if you’re making your first feature, or writing your first script.

Do you think that watching a lot of movies keeps your filmmaking skills sharp?

Sebastian: I don’t really watch a lot of movies. I’m not a cinephile. I even question my craft every day. “What am I doing? Should I just paint?” It’s become my life and my craft, but I don’t completely love it. I find it very superficial at times. I have a love-hate relationship with making movies. I guess some filmmakers are sharper that way. I remember a Chilean filmmaker telling me, “If you want to shoot a car scene, just watch how Quentin Tarantino does it and copy it!” I’d never copy something. If I have to shoot a car scene, I’d figure it out on my own.

I love Michael’s character in Magic Magic, Brink.

Sebastian: He’s the best. I love Brink, too. Michael and I got so addicted to him. He’s such a closeted gay. Very creepy. I love him.

Was it your idea from the beginning to dye his hair dark?

Sebastian: Yeah. I wanted to transform him. I asked him to gain a lot of weight, but he said, “No fucking way.”

Tell me about your next project, Nasty Baby.

Sebastian: We’re locking picture at the end of March. We shot it in my neighborhood in New York, and I’m starring as the main character with Kristen Wiig and Tunde Adebimpe, the lead singer of TV On The Radio. I think we did a really good job. It’s very naturalistic and funny, but it gets a little dark. It’s not a comedy, it’s not a drama. It’s just a piece of life that goes wrong. By the end it becomes a sort of thriller.

This is your first time starring and directing, so that’s another unique filmmaking experience under your belt.

Sebastian: You want to keep it fresh, so that’s why I decided to act. It’s a very small movie so there was no risk. Co-starring with Kristen was very comfortable. She’s a great improvisor and made me feel very safe. The DP I work with on most of my films came from Chile, so I felt at home. Very comfortable. But it was very overwhelming to be directing and acting. I had no monitor to see what I was doing, see the takes. I had to just trust my co-actors. I told them, “If I’m embarrassing myself, just let me know I’m doing a shitty job.”

When I saw that Drew Barrymore directed a film starring Ellen Page, I couldn’t wait to see what they would accomplish together. After being a fan of Drew Barrymore for years, and loving Ellen as Juno, my first instinct was that I would either love the film or have my hopes for something epic dashed by a poor storyline or bad supporting actors. However the screenplay, adapted from the novel Derby Girl by Shauna Cross, gave Page the perfect character to portray and a great narrative to support her. With an awesome storyline about a teenage girl fighting against her mother’s wishes to become a beauty queen by joining a roller derby team, I did have high expectations about what would be produced. I am pleased to say that Whip It did not disappoint, despite what box office figures may have said.

The film begins with Bliss Cavendar (Ellen Page) dying her hair blue while her mother (Marcia Gay Harden) waits anxiously for her to appear on stage at the latest beauty pageant she has entered Bliss into. When she finally emerges, the crowd of pageant-goers and contestants all fall silent, troubled by the sight of her. She does not seem to appear affected by the judgement she is receiving, more uncomfortable to have to endure unnecessary attention.

On a shopping trip with her mother, Bliss encounters three roller derby girls flying past her leave a flyer to promote their first match of the season. Bliss, and her best friend Pash (Alia Shawkat), eager to escape their small town drudgery, head over to Austin to witness a night of kick-ass entertainment. Confronted with a world so different from the one imposed upon her by her mother, Bliss immediately falls in love with the spectacle of roller derby; a world much more in tune with her personality than beauty pageants. Approaching Maggie Mayhem (Kristen Wiig) of the Hurl Scouts roller derby team at the end of the game, she admits that they are her “new heroes”. Maggie tells Bliss that she should try out for the team so that she can be her “own hero”.

Whip It depicts a girl struggling to break free from having to conform to her mother’s fifties female idealism, and of course Ellen Page is the perfect rebellious figure to portray such a character. With the words of Maggie Mayhem encouraging her, she attends the try-outs and successfully achieves a place on the team. At first Bliss is quite timid and doesn’t grasp that roller derby is a ‘contact sport’ – she shies away from confrontation and aggression. However, determined to be accepted as part of the team, her courage and skill improves and the team nickname her “Babe Ruthless”.

After Bliss is christened into the group her confidence to challenge the nuisances in her life almost consumes her entire personality. Nothing holds her back from telling or showing people how she feels about them. Bliss meets Oliver (Landon Pigg), the guitarist and singer for a local rock band, and falls head over heels for his musical talent and boyish charms. Her relationship with Oliver offers one of the most unique moments of beautiful choreography during the film. The happy couple dive, fully clothed, into an abandoned indoor swimming pool. Bliss and Oliver embracing underwater gave has a wonderful energy as they playfully undressed – dancing to a melody only they understand.

Despite Bliss’s awakening, her mother’s staunch idealism is ever-present and she constantly meets opposition from her parents’ due to their expectations. When her mother discovers that rather than fulfilling her own dreams as a beauty pageant queen, she has been pursuing her own dream as a roller derby pin up girl, their disapproval of her new identity as “Babe Ruthless” leaves her little choice other than to leave home. At this point, Bliss’s life goes from bad to worse; her disobedient attitude towards almost everything causes her to experience a lot of hardship.

Throughout the film, Bliss undergoes harsh realities and severe consequences for her new-found care-free attitude, but with this life experience comes comedy, friendship, and confidence building, not only for Bliss, but the audience as well as we relate to her. Page’s dry humor, first seen in Juno, is well-suited to the role and her enthusiasm makes one want to dust off those old skates and hit the streets.

Drew Barrymore has assigned Ellen Page a perfect character; Ellen defines ‘Girl With Attitude’ to the point of pure awesome and thus everything about Bliss just screams Ellen. While I don’t believe Ellen Page was typecast from Juno, there are many similarities between the two characters. Characteristics that are played to perfection by Ellen Page.

Roller derby, a sport I’d never experienced in film before, provides the perfect backdrop to this coming of age tale. Drew Barrymore and Shauna Cross’s depiction of how amazing, energetic and full of adrenaline life can be in a pair of skates is absolutely wonderful. This movie is one I will cherish, and will be added to my list of films to watch when confused about the meaning of life or how to raise my kids.