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

Subscribe to the Way Too Indiecast

• Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes
• Subscribe on Stitcher

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.

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.

Our Bay Area readers will finally get a chance to see Michael Cera and Gaby Hoffman in Crystal Fairy when it hits theaters tonight. We learned in our interview with director Sebastian Silva and Cera that the story about a wild group of friends who are on a quest to find magical psychedelic cactus San Pedro, was actually based on real life events. We noted that Crystal Fairy is a not drug movie per se, but rather a warm drama about the dynamics between an odd group of people embarking on a new experience in our review. If that is not enough to convince you to see the film, check out the trailer below.

Watch the official trailer for Crystal Fairy:

While stoned at a party in Chile, Jamie (Michael Cera), a boorish American asshole, invites a cosmo-tripping hippy named Crystal Fairy (Gaby Hoffman) on a quest with his friends to obtain San Pedro—a  “magical” cactus—and imbibe the mescaline-rich plant. Much to his surprise, Crystal Fairy actually shows up for the journey the next day. Feeling threatened by her weirdness (or something), Jamie slings nasty barbs and general douchiness in an attempt to drive her away, but their fellow road-trippers have taken quite a liking to her.

Cera and director Sebastian Silva chatted with us before the film’s screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival in May. We spoke about the film’s inception, the risk of improvisation, the real Crystal Fairy, whether Jamie is an asshole or not, their favorite road trip movies, and more.

Review of Crystal Fairy

How did the project get started? You were trying to get Magic Magic made, right?
Michael Cera: Right. We were basically sitting around twiddling our thumbs waiting for somebody to step in and finance Magic Magic. It seemed like that ship had sailed. We had given up. Then Sebastian said, “Why don’t we do this instead?” Just to make something, we’ll go make this movie and no one will stop us.

Sebastian Silva: I had Michael and Gaby there, so that was enough incentive for a Chilean producer to make a tiny movie that could finance itself just by international sales. It was a simple financial, economical figure and a good business idea.

Michael Cera: It was financially sound.

Sebastian Silva: Yeah, from every perspective. My friend’s producers were into it immediately and it was a very easy project to get going. Super easy. It took us, like, two weeks.

Because the film came together so quickly, how structured was the script?
Michael Cera: It was very structured. It was completely conceptualized and figured out.

Sebastian Silva: It’s based on a true story. I went through the same experience fourteen years ago with my best friend. We were going to go take San Pedro in the Chilean desert and I invited this hippy girl that I met at a concert. She was from San Francisco actually, and she went by the name of Crystal Fairy. We’re looking for her.

Michael Cera: We’re really hoping to find her. It just occurred to us today that maybe she’ll show up tonight*.

That would be amazing!
Michael Cera: It would be amazing!

Sebastian Silva: It would be fucking crazy. But anyways, that’s the structure—it actually happened. I would say about 80 percent of the things you see [in the film] are based on true facts. The fact that Jamie and Crystal are fighting so much—Jamie’s embarrassed of her and she’s so annoying—that’s kind of fictionalized. We actually got along with Crystal Fairy. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be looking for her and I probably wouldn’t name the movie after her! We had a very thorough outline, about 12 pages. It’s basically a screenplay without dialog. We knew some of the jokes. Gaby had some of her stuff written. I thought [some of her lines] were improvised, but I found out later that she memorized a lot of her speeches.

Let’s talk a bit about your character, Michael. Do you know anybody like that? You look…
Michael Cera: Awful! (laughs) I don’t know anyone that outwardly toxic off the top of my head, but I do know people who are that way with drugs. They like spouting their knowledge of the onset of LSD…people who have collected experiences in order to be an authority on something. That element was sort of inspired by real people. His terrible energy was inspired by the way the story was constructed. The whole thrust of the conflict in the movie is that he invites this woman [on a trip] and then unfairly turns on her when she takes him up on the invitation and makes her feel very unwanted and unwelcome. He actually tries to campaign against her, campaign to get her excommunicated from the group (laughs). It’s so unfair and so ugly. That’s the root of the character, that he’s so out of touch with himself that he can’t even take responsibility for his actions.

Sebastian Silva: I need to defend Jamie because I personally feel like it’s crazy…(trails off). If you’re all coked up at a party, all high and drunk, and you invite someone on a trip, you don’t expect them to call you! If you don’t pick up your phone, they don’t go! She’s kind of crazy [for going out there.]

Michael Cera: They’re both crazy.

Sebastian Silva: Jamie had a point. She’s embarrassing. The first thing they [see from her] is that she’s fighting a whole group of gypsies, she’s crying, she has no money. It’s a drag. It’s such a drag. The kid’s aren’t excited that you invited her. Champa (one of the guys on the trip) is like, “Are you serious? She’s going to come?” Jamie’s got a point. She’s pretty annoying.

Michael Cera: It’s really objective in that way. They’re both annoying (laughs).

Not having written dialog requires a measure of trust between the actor and director, right?
Michael Cera: I don’t think anyone had any feelings of doubt about whether we could do it or not. Gaby was expressing that she was a little nervous.

Sebastian Silva: She said she was really bad at improv, but she was an improve genius! I personally was more scared of my brothers (who act in the film) who had never acted. One of them had acted before…

Agustín
Sebastian Silva: Yeah, Agustín had acted before. Juan plays the second most important character after Jamie and Gaby. I was really scared for him. The first night he was nervous. You could see his veins really bulging. Luckily, the characters had done cocaine, so his tension was justified by the overuse of cocaine. The next morning he already felt more comfortable with the cameras and the crew and started pulling off an amazing performance. He was really good at improvising as well.

Michael Cera: They’re such present people. They could just sit there and have a conversation and not overdo it. They had really good instincts about what human beings are like. They’re all really intuitive. They played off of each other incredibly, too. It was really good for them to be doing those things with each other.

Sebastian Silva: In terms of the improv and the risk of it, for me, it was the inexperience of my brothers. But, that was solved the very first day of shooting. I was in one of the first talking scenes…

Michael Cera: You really set the tone with that. There’s a scene at the beginning of the movie where we go into a bedroom and we’re doing cocaine and getting stoned. Sebastian is in there. He’s the guy who’s done San Pedro before. It was a good way to kick-start the entire experience.

I like that, when we arrive at the inevitable “trippin’ on San Pedro” scene, you don’t overdo it. The screen doesn’t get hazy, there aren’t crazy colors everywhere. You do some interesting things with the sound.
Sebastian Silva: It’s actually more of a panic attack than the effect of the drug. Any drug can give you a panic attack, right? Even marijuana can give you a panic attack. In that scene, we’re not really portraying the effects of mescaline. We’re portraying the effects of the sudden paranoia attack that Jamie gets from being so crazy. I never even thought that we would get all psychedelic and visual about it. It’s not that kind of movie.

Why isn’t it the right movie for that?
Sebastian Silva: The movie isn’t about the effects of mescaline. If you know about mescaline, [you know] it affects people differently. To make something visually would frame the experience in a weird way and not allow the audience to project their own experiences with recreational drugs onto the story. It felt like the wrong thing to do.

Michael Cera: It’s done often, too. I don’t think Sebastian ever falls into the trap of doing movie tropes. (To Sebastian) If you smell that, you try to do something different.

Sebastian Silva: Yeah, absolutely.

The film is kind of this odyssey, a journey across Chile for San Pedro. What’s your favorite road trip movie?
Sebastian Silva: Thelma and Louise! That’s a road trip film, right? I like that movie a lot. It made me want to be a woman and shoot men.

Michael Cera: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It makes you want to drive.

Sebastian Silva: That’s a fun one.

Michael Cera: Oh! Wild at Heart! It’s great.

Crystal Fairy opens in San Francisco Friday, July 19^th and is available now on demand.

* As far as we know, Crystal Fairy did not show up to the screening.

According to a recent New York Times article, Michael Cera’s latest film, Crystal Fairy, began to shoot when financing for a different film with Chilean director Sebastián Silva fell through. The result, based on an outline by Silva about an obnoxious foreigner studying abroad in Chile, who will stop at nothing to try the psychedelic cactus San Pedro, presents a seemingly effortless character study with subtle, yet joyous revelations. Crystal Fairy is especially welcome this summer as it emerges on Friday amongst the din of soulless blockbusters to gently penetrate our hearts with a surprisingly universal story. While the film embraces the device of drug use it is not a drug movie, but a warm drama about the dynamics between an odd group of people embarking on a new experience.

Silva takes his time setting up the different members of his “team,” first revealing the obnoxious, self-conscious Jamie, played with startling honesty by Cera, and his Chilean roommate, Champa. We meet these two at a house party where Jamie laments the availability of good Chilean cocaine, like an absence of fine wines in Napa, while Champa reassures everyone that Jesse isn’t really such an asshole. Jamie’s drug connoisseurship at once makes him unfortunately familiar and immediately unlikable, yet Cera’s easy humor sustains him. Jamie and Champa’s plan to try mescaline slips out when Jamie meets Crystal Fairy, an eccentric hippy played brilliantly by Gaby Hoffman, who he disingenuously invites along without considering she would actually accept. The next day, Champa, his two younger brothers, and Jamie cruise toward the Northern coast until Crystal intersects them by bus at a village along the way. Jamie, beside himself, cannot fathom that she would crash their plans, to which Champa calmly replies, “you invited her, man.” The dynamic of their drug bound bro-trip shifts wildly as this wayward pixie inserts herself into the clan, which hilariously jives well with everyone except Jamie.

Once the team is assembled Crystal Fairy becomes startlingly familiar on a primal level as every oddly matched group trip you’ve ever taken slowly oozes into the back of your mind. Silva’s scenario presents a more colorful and exotic version of our collective adventure-memory as the gang road-trips their way through expansive deserts, strange villages, and finally the serene ocean. Cinematographer, Cristián Petit-Laurent, captures both the beauty of the surroundings and the subtle interactions between characters with an easy going style of loose framing and natural light that firmly places viewers within the story.

As (almost) everyone begins taking the hard won psychedelics, the film’s style remains firmly planted in reality, avoiding any Fear and Loathing hallucinations, in order to further examine the raw fears, joys, and insecurities previously hinted at within each character. Silva graciously grants all his characters their moment, although it’s Jamie who has the most growing to do. Each small revelation thankfully manages to skirt cliché and Silva’s masterful control of his cast allows for a natural, yet subtle epiphany for Jamie, while the drug use diffuses his vulnerability with a welcome degree of humor without diminishing its impact. Whether you like it or not you’ll see familiar glimmers of yourself within all the characters of Crystal Fairy and hopefully Silva’s touching film will provide a much needed respite from the current slew of inhuman Hollywood mediocrity.

Crystal Fairy

Sebastián Silva just directed two Michael Cera features and at least one, Crystal Fairy, is bizarre and excellent. The story is rather simple, an American dick studies abroad in Chile in order to party and try the uber-psychedelic San Pedro, a cactus native to the Northern regions. Cera, his Chilian roommate, and brothers have a trip all planned out, but Cera sabotages their own intentions by trying to impress the groovy hippie chick, Crystal Fairy, at a party and drunkenly invites her along on their journey.

The beauty of Crystal Fairy evolves from the shifting group dynamic between Cera and the Chilian brothers, portrayed with honest naïveté by Silva’s three younger brothers and how it falters when Fairy joins them. Cera’s abrasive, insensitive American plays well against his established innocent persona, while feeling like a totally honest character. Gaby Hoffman’s fearless portrayal of the hypocritical hippie, Fairy, is something to behold. She literally bears all in a moving and disturbing performance.

The film weaves between a hipster comedy of manors, road trip, drug film, and honest drama but never settles long enough to get stale. Not much happens in Crystal Fairy, but its small character driven rewards feel like grand revelations. The excellent, yet sloppy cinematography and great music selection only elevate its already assured scenes. I’m eager to see this film again and to see Silva’s other Cera picture, Magic Magic, but I hear lightning doesn’t strike twice.

Monsters University

Pixar is dead. If the back-to-back of Cars 2 and Brave didn’t seal the deal, then Monsters University will. While the past two pictures were so obviously missteps, this one trips and plunges into the indiscernible Hollywood slurry. Monsters University gets under my fingernails like bamboo spikes because of its mediocrity.

Monsters University brings nothing new to the Monsters universe that was not already created in the excellent first film, yet seems fine with it as it skips along at a brisk pace. I found myself chuckling at a few of the lame jokes and was happy with the inclusion of Always Sunny In Philadelphia’s Charlie Day as a wacky new monster. People of my generation (late 20s) grew up on Pixar in a way that we were young enough to be enchanted, but old enough to appreciate the new films and analytically follow their progression. It pains me to see a studio, who used to produce only amazing films, fall so far with only varying degrees of recent success. It seems that Pixar is now fine with producing the same old recycled crap, just with newer and better animation. Pour out a little Old E on the sidewalk. A giant has fallen.

Time behaves very strangely here in Cannes. Days feel like they are short changed the 24 hours that they are supposed to contain. Thus, there does not seem to be enough hours in the day to do everything that you want to do. Most often time ceases to exist all together. Other times it is irrelevant like when all-night parties bleed into the next day. But then there are times when you are standing in line for a film for an hour and it feels like an eternity. Physics explains time is relative, Cannes is able to prove it.

Director Sebastián Silva and stars Juno Temple and Michael Cera on stage for Magic Magic

Only God Forgives

Only God Forgives is methodically paced, save for sudden outbursts of ruthless violence from time to time. The film resembles a jack-in-the-box as most of the time you know what is going to happen, just not when it is going to happen. The ending feels abrupt and rushed, which is actually a bit bizarre as Gosling moves so turtle like that you mistake many of his scenes to be in slow motion. The weak ending might be because it used its great showdown between characters in the middle of the film, which feels out of place and leaves for a rather anticlimactic ending. Though some broad elements from Drive are present in Only God Forgives, fans of one will by no means guarantees that you will be a fan of the other.

RATING: 5.9

Read my full review of Only God Forgives

Magic Magic

Magic Magic is a peculiar film about a girl named Alicia (Juno Temple) who travels outside of the United States for the first time to meet up with her friend Sarah (Emily Browning). As soon as she arrives into South America Alicia is greeted by Sarah and her three friends who all plan to road trip to a remote getaway together. Not long into their trip Sarah receives a phone call about an exam she must take at school that forces her to leave for a couple of days. This leaves Alicia alone with three strangers that all seem a little quirky.

But quirky might not be the right adjective to describe their character. Alicia spends only two days with them before she is calling them Satanists. One character in particular, Brink (Michael Cera), seems as if he might either be mildly mentally handicapped or on some kind of drugs. One thing is for certain, these people are not stable. But when Alicia does not sleep for four days due to her insomnia, her perception on reality is morphed.

As a whole, Magic Magic was a big letdown for me. This was one of two films Sebastián Silva had premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this year, with his other one (Crystal Fairy) earning great remarks from us from our SFIFF coverage. In this film Cera’s bizarre antics make for an interesting character, but that is about all. It is welcoming to see him play a character that is outside his typical one, but his performance was not at the top of his game. Magic Magic is a unique film featuring a mysteriously eerie vibe, though it ultimately goes to waste due to unconvincing situations and characters found within the film.

RATING: 5

Way Too Indie was on the red carpet of the San Francisco International Film Festival to capture photos of Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof from Much Ado About Nothing as well as legendary award winners such as Harrison Ford, George Lucus, and Philip Kaufman. We also have some more exclusive photos from private interviews with Michael Cera, Sebastian Silva, Richard Linklater, and Julie Delpy.

Crystal Fairy

The ever-awkward Michael Cera plays Jamie, a self-absorbed asshole who goes on a road trip through Chile with some friends to find some San Pedro—a cactus which, when ingested, sends you on a different kind of ‘trip’ altogether. The problem is, on the eve of their quest for the cactus, Jamie—in a drunken stupor—invites a hippie-ish wild child named Crystal Fairy (Gaby Hoffmann) to join them on their journey. Much to Jamie’s surprise, Crystal Fairy takes him up on his drunken offer, and the two develop a harsh, contentious relationship. Tensions rise, and when the group finally acquire the precious plant, things escalate even further.

Cera, typically cast as the good-hearted, smiling, neurotic type, gets a change of pace in this role, playing one of the most dislikable, insensitive people you could imagine. You know, he’s that guy. A group of friends are having a good time, joking around. Then, his ornery ass starts walking their way. “Oh god, here he comes. This asshole.” He’s that guy. Hoffmann is just as convincing as the cloyingly spiritual Crystal Fairy. She’s obsessed with everything astral and cosmic, and relentlessly pushes her strange lifestyle on the group—”Smell this! It’s chamomile. Chaaaaamomile.”

Director Sebastian Silva shows a lot of creativity in how he crafts a story, turning left when you think he’ll turn right, zigging when you expect him to zag. His visual style is tasteful (you’ll find no clichéd psychedelic trip-out scenes here), and he captures Jamie and Crystal Fairy’s opposite energy perfectly.

Look for our full review around the film’s release in July, along with an interview with Michael Cera and Director Sebastian Silva.

Before You Know It

Some of my favorite documentaries are ones that give a voice to the voiceless. Following three very different subjects, all gay men in their twilight years, Before You Know It sheds light on a community that deals with a difficult paradox—they are desexualized by society because they are old, and yet, their sexuality is one of the driving forces in their lives.

Dennis is a lonely widower who discovered his sexuality after his wife’s death. Robert is the matron of a bustling community of drag queens who gather at his bar, ‘Robert’s LaFitte’. Ty, Harlem born and raised, is the head of SAGE, a group that serves aging, gay members of the community. All three have unique lifestyles, but the common thread is that they all belong to a group of people who are doubly neglected. As we observe them struggle with their issues, as we go through their daily routines with them, as we learn their histories, we suddenly find ourselves familiar with a group of people most of us likely never paid any mind. This film helps to make sure these people are neglected no longer.

Director PJ Raval applies very little spin to the film, simply placing us in the subjects’ world to sit, watch, and absorb their lives. Ty’s story is filmed during an historic time in gay rights history, but Raval admirably keeps the film focused on Ty. The closer Raval zooms in his camera on the characters, the more we relate to them. The film is about a very specific community, but there’s a universal message being delivered here—they’re old, and we will be too someday.

RATING: 7.8

Stay tuned to Way Too Indie for an interview with director PJ Raval and subject Dennis.

Nights With Theodore

Centered on a couple’s obsession with spending long nights in a park in Paris, Sebastien Betbeder’s kooky, messy romance feels like an overly-fluffed and elongated short film. A couple meets at a party, hook up in a spooky park, and the nocturnal trysts slowly but surely begin to poison their lives in vaguely supernatural ways. The idea is intriguing, but Betbeder mucks it up by adding in pretentious asides and flourishes that feel like extra weight.

Betbeder inserts footage of a real-life interview with a psychiatrist who specializes in environmental psychology. The segment does add a strange gravity to the film, though what it adds is heavily outweighed by what it detracts, as it is as jarring a scene as I’ve seen in years, killing what little momentum the film had. The film’s opening, detailing the park’s long and storied history, is actually quite nice, creating an air of mystery that unfortunately dissipates quickly.

Aesthetically, Nights With Theodore is shoddy. A lot of the nighttime shots look downright murky, and though a foggy Parisian park at night should be a cinematographer’s dream, most of the shots are as uninteresting as the flat characters.

Pio Marmai and Agathe Bonitzer as Theodore and Anna, respectively, are talented, but are never given the opportunity to let their characters breathe. Odd distractions like the psychiatrist scene break up any connection we begin to make with the two, and there’s a pervading sense of distance between them and us that feels a little off. The pair do have some legitimate chemistry, but the thin story gives them little to chew on. Is it a movie about a park or a summer romance? Who knows? Betbeder certainly doesn’t.

RATING: 5