This Had Oscar Buzz - BONUS – Sundancing On My Own

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

And we’re backbackback again with a special BONUS episode this week to talk about our experience will the films of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival! The big prize winner for US Dramatic Competition was A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One, and Chris was wowed by it. We talk about our shared love for new films … Continue reading "BONUS – Sundancing On My Own"

Uh-oh, wrong house. No, the right house. No, I didn't get that! We want to talk to Marilyn Hacks. I'm from Canada. I'm from Canada, Water. So, it is with great pleasure that we join together to share the telling of vibrant stories that come from all over the world. If you find yourself far from Park City, you're part of an exciting evolution of the Sundance Vision.

We're all here to experience the festival's magic and celebrate this generation's most innovative storytellers. So again, welcome and enjoy. Hello and welcome to the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast, the only podcast that is taking in that thin, thin mountain air. Every week on this had Oscar Buzz. We'll be talking about a different movie that once upon a time had lofty Academy Award aspirations, but for some reason or another, it all went wrong. This time, however, we are here for a special bonus episode to talk about the films of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. I'm your host, Joe Reed. I'm here, as always, with my blonde-wigged Anne Hathaway, Chris File. Hello, Chris.

What a fucking compliment. You always do very well to compliment me. You always do very well to compliment me usually. But, yeah, I take that in a full respect and stride, Anne Hathaway, having a great week aside from being phenomenal in Eileen, we'll get into it, and dancing to Lady Marmalade. All right, speaking of which, I just want to address that right now, the viral clip that is too short, I want it to be like ten times as long as it is, of Anne Hathaway and a Sunday party dancing in her phenomenal, like, animal print dress to Lady Marmalade. The one, beyond, once I was, like, done, like, death dropping for Anne or whatever,

um, I was the days we never stop. Essentially. I was so struck by the fact that, like, we are now in a place where the LaBelle version of Lady Marmalade has come back. And it's because, like, for a while, they're the only version of Lady Marmalade anybody ever heard was the Mulan Rouge version, which I don't have any specific complaints with. And I've like done that at karaoke plenty of times, because it's so fun because you just divide up the roles. And, you know, you and three of your friends can, or even four of your friends, because

somebody can take them missing. Like, no, but there's no assigned roles. It's just like the mic keeps getting passed around and it's like a hot potato. And if it lands on you when that verse starts, you have to do it. And if you don't do it perfectly, you're kicked out of the bar. I've basically done a version of that. But I've also done the version of, like, Ford starts being like, I'm pink, I'm Maya, I'm whatever. And that's also fun, too. But I'm glad that the LaBelle version of Lady Marmalade has now at least come back into fashion enough that, like, it's the version being played at Sundance parties. Like, that's very cool. I'm very happy about that. I think it was, I don't think she was still at Sundance. I think she was

at some fashion. Oh, was that sea level? Oh, okay. Because it looked like a, it looked like an outfit that she was on the red carpet for at Sundance. Oh, okay. No, this is the thing. We never stop death-dropping for Anne Hathaway. She wore with, like, boots and some type of mini-dress. Oh, I remember that one. A corseted puffer coat. Yes. Corseted puffer coat.

Yeah. I mean, come on. That's one of those things where if somebody had done that as a drag race, like, design challenge or whatever, it would be, like, the most legendary thing. It would be, like, detox, what detox showed up in all black and white? I mean, it's not, not Utica's sleeping bag dress. It's so much better than Utica. sleeping bag dress. How dare you? How dare you? I mean,

Utica's sleeping bag dress was great. This is better. You could buy those at the same store. That's what we're saying. We need to talk about the movies. Okay, let's talk about the movies. I saw, okay, so Sundance as ever, this is such a dumb complaint, I'm sorry, but like Sundance as ever comes at the most inopportune time on the calendar for me specifically, for a lot of people, but like for me specifically and my confluence of interests where like not only am I, and I also, like, I don't take off time from work to cover Sundance, especially, like, I'm doing Sundance virtually, so I'm trying to do it from home, and I'm trying to, like, fit it in the margins

of my jobs and my life, and it comes at the confluence of Oscar nominations, like, Oscar nomination week, and for me, the NFL playoffs, which I had, like, a significant vested interest in, especially this year, where the bills were in it up until last Sunday when it all came crashing down. But all of that is to say that, like, I had so much less time for Sundance movies than I thought. And, like, I've been up to, like, two in the morning almost every day this week, trying to squeeze in Sundance movies, just because that's the only time, like, late nights

and early mornings, that I've been able to do Sundance movies. And so I only saw 10, and I say only, except for the fact that, like, I'm really, really glad that I was able to squeeze in 10, because, like, it was really hard to, you. even do that. So, um, you seeing three times that is so impressive to me. Like, genuinely so impressive to me. I saw 34. I was lucky enough to screen some early. Yeah. Um, but yeah. Kudos to you. So I'm going to be deferring to you on a lot of these, but, um, I have seen at least a few that you haven't seen. So we can kind of like trade off and tag off. I want to start with the awards, though, and I'll sort of

hand this to you, because I don't think I've seen any of the awards winners at Sundance, which is kind of a bummer, because I did see a bunch of the award winners last year. You saw theater camp, which got an ensemble prize. I did. That's the one. That's the one

award winner that I did end up seeing. We'll talk about that in a second, but talk to me about a thousand and one, which won the U.S. dramatic competition. One of my favorite movies of the festival. I was so happy that it won listeners can and should see it in theaters at the end of March. It's coming from our beloved focus features. A thousand and one is, I believe, A.V. Rockwell's debut feature film.

There's shorts of hers that are also really well-liked. The movie stars Tiana Taylor as a mother who is at the start of the movie. We'll also try not to get into spoilers for some of these movies that people may not see for months. At the beginning of the movie is a mother who is reconnected with her son who is in the foster care system and she ends up kidnapping him and, you know, changing his name and starting a life together. And the movie isn't the movie that it quite sounds like, it's almost like, I mean, it's the most cliche thing in the world to call a movie novelistic, but it really, by the time that this movie was over, I, got, I had the sensation that you really only get from, you know, reading a novel that you get the interior lives of these characters across a wide span of time. That's, I think, one of the surprises of the movie, though. By the time there's a trailer out, it won't be a surprise. It spans,

you know, maybe a decade's worth of time. Yeah. And it's not just about this mother's son's story. It's set in Harlem, beginning in 1994, and, you know, going through about the next decade and a half or towards a decade and a half, with the, you know, it seems like it's on the margins, but I think it's ultimately the text of the movie talking about the gentrification of the neighborhood and, you know, just the, like, over-commercialization in the way that New York City is shoving people out of their neighborhoods and such. And I think that the relationships in the movie

rather than being their own thing and you know this subtext running through the movie being its own thing, I think there is in terms of like thematics and like what how the relationship develops it's very reflective

of what's going on in the neighborhood I find. And Tiana Taylor is absolutely incredible. Wonderful. So yeah, go see that this March. I'm looking through some of the other award winners, and I don't, I'm trying to think of what other ones. You saw the audience award winner for the World Dramatic.

You're saying you missed most of them. I missed a lot of the awards winners, too. Yeah, I don't think either one of us saw a bunch. Yeah, I don't think either one of us saw Scrapper, which was the World Dramatic Competition jury prize winner, or the Persian version, which was the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award winner, but you did see Shida, the World Cinema Dramatic Competition Audience Award winner. So tell me about that one. That stars the same lead actress that won the Cannes Acting Prize for Holy Spiders

are Amir Abrahimi. She is equally as great in this movie. She is an Iranian woman in Australia. she is going through basically like a safe house situation with her daughter trying to escape her abusive husband um this movie is maybe more close to what it sounds like from a log line than a thousand and one is uh-huh uh but it's still carried by this really really strong performance by this actress that i think we're only going to keep seeing exciting work from so like i would say the reason to see it is that really really strong performance very cool

Cool. You saw one of the busiest titles at Sundance, which was Jonathan Majors in Magazine Dreams, which won the Special Jury Award for Creative Vision, which was one of those. All these words salad prizes. And this year they at least made them be creative vision in the different competition. Everything, so I've been hearing a bunch about magazine dreams and everybody is very much raving about Jonathan Major's performance. I didn't see it. I now I wish that I had made it a priority to see it, just because I do feel like, even if we don't think, and I've talked to you privately, and I know that you don't think it's going to be an awards contender, it is now in the conversation. It just is. And it's going to be something that I'm going to need to see at some point. I'm worried now that I'm going to have to take a TIF slot and see it. One of the nice things about having done virtual Sundance last year was it allowed me to see more things at TIF because I had seen a bunch of the Sundance stuff that went to TIF. like living for example which I had to catch up to it like living

exactly but in everything that I've been hearing about Jonathan Major's performance everybody's really impressed by it everybody says the movie is hard to watch I still don't quite know what the movie is about so maybe enlighten me a little bit on why it's so hard

to watch without sport Jonathan Majors is this you know amateur bodybuilder he it spends a lot of the movie it's an incredible incredibly interior movie, so it's like, it's very much quite well placing you within his psyche, his, you know, mental state, but he is a very isolated man, his kind of meant, the way he expresses himself is kind of like man-child a little bit. So it's, it's like he's a 10-year-old boy in a, a 30-year-old like very physically fit

man's body it's hard to watch because it is it's also when people say it's hard to watch as a pejorative I would say partly that's because there's nothing you really get from this movie

by the end of it that you haven't gotten in the first five to ten minutes of this movie so it's incredibly repetitive in a very grim headspace. I mean, a lot of people have said they hope before it gets released that

it, you know, goes back in the edit room. Sure. I wouldn't be surprised if it is. At over two hours long, it is far too long. There are literally three, maybe four possible endings to this movie where the movie does a hard cut to black and you think it's over and then it jumps back in.

I either told you or I told another friend that I was like it felt the end of this movie felt like watching a alternate ending DVD reel where it's like these are four different endings we shot because the heart the cut to blacks were such a hard like separation between the next ending right um it is a really unpleasant movie it's putting you in in cell brain for like two hours got It's clearly from a filmmaker that's going to make a really great movie. I just don't think that, at least with this screenplay, this movie has much going on. Is Jonathan Major's really great in it? Yeah, but I would rather see him in better material. And I think because it just kind of puts you on this ferrous wheel of unpleasantness that it won't let you off of, I don't really think that that's going to translate to a better. Best Actor campaign. Sight on scene for me for this, my rejoinder to that has been currently one of the five nominated best actor performances in Brendan Fraser in The Whale, another movie that for everything that I've heard from people is also a bad movie and not pleasant to watch. And I just wonder if like sometimes these things aren't like the quality of the film is not as much of a disqualifying factor as we would like it to be, especially when the actor in question

There is a swell of support, and I think Jonathan Majors is an ascending star to the degree to which I could see people getting behind him as a sort of like, he's arrived kind of thing. I understand the comparison. However, I think Brendan Fraser is, you know, in a movie directed by someone who's already won people Oscars before. Yep. Yep. I see that. Yep. I gotcha. The other thing that I didn't realize this until I'm sort of perusing the headlines about this, but apparently the open captioning at the film's premiere malfunctioned, and Marley Matlin

was on the jury for Sundance's year. It was an open captioned device, not the captions on the movie. Gotcha. And this has been part of a push to get open captioning on the prints of the movies, to make the screenings much more accessible to people. And there obviously was debate about that and why filmmakers or their producers were hesitant to do so. For this case, you know, the director came forward and he made a statement and it sounds like it was more the production side to go against that. Yeah.

All right. Moving on through the other titles, though, I want to talk about the stuff that we've both seen. So why don't you peruse my meager list of 10? While I do that, since we're still talking about the award winners, and I did not see it, I'd like to hear you talk about Theater Camp, which won the ensemble prize. Theater Camp, okay, so in going through the list of titles that I was going to see, I saw Theater Camp, which comes from Director Molly Gordon, and you know we have both enthused, Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman, are a shared direction credit.

But Molly Gordon in particular, who we've seen in... Shiva Baby. Shiva Baby, but also what's the book smart? Book smart, she's quite good. But yeah, she's great in Shiva Baby. She's an actress who the both of us have sort of latched on to. Co-wrote this with Nick Lieberman and Ben Platt and Noah Galvin, who are both Broadway actors, Evans Hanson, the betrothed Evans Hansons of fame.

Not my favorite folks. But really love Molly Gordon. So I was like, well, this movie is about like, whatever, like essentially stage door manner, but not in name, right? Which is like the movie camp, which I love, the Anacendric movie camp, was essentially also about stage door manner. So I was just like, I'm going to have to see this. It's sort of like, it's one of those things that's like up my alley, but I also feel like it's on the razor's edge of I could find it really insufferable. And so like, hold my breath, jump right in. I'm going to go see theater camp.

I ended up liking it more than I want, more than, not more than I wanted to, I wanted to like it. I ended up liking it more than I expected to while at the same time having some pretty significant quibbles with it. On the whole, I think it's a funny movie and I laughed pretty much throughout it. And like that at Sundance is a, can be a rarity. So I can see why it won a prize and it won, you know, some really goodwill. without spoiling it, one of the things that I found irksome about it was indeed the fact that a lot of this movie sort of like seems to have the express purpose of making you realize just how incredibly talented Noah Galvin is.

And like, you're one of the writers. Oh, I'm going to hate this movie. That aspect of it, yes. Even though like his character is incredibly likable and you do end up really rooting for him. And then it's just like by the end of this movie, you're just like, was that the whole point of it? Were you really just trying to sell me on like, you know, the triple threat nature of this one guy who was the co-writer of this movie?

I kind of wanted it to be, in the end, a little bit more about the kids, which, like, that's the one thing about Camp that I really like is that it's about the kids. This is the thing that people who enjoy this movie seem to enjoy most about the movie is the kids. Yeah, and the kids are great. And, like, it's got a good sense of humor about all this stuff. And, like, Nathan Lee Graham is the movement coach, and he's really, really funny in a very sort of, like, grandum of the theater kind of way. Caroline Aaron is one of the co-owners of the camp, and, like, I adore Caroline Aaron. She gets the with credit.

This is with Caroline Aaron and Amy Sedaris, which, like, you can't really go wrong with that. Iowa Debris is in this as one of the... Patty Harrison is in it playing essentially like a suit from like Pseudo Goldman Sachs or whatever. Jimmy Tatro from American Vandal is the acting director of the camp who has no idea what theater is all about and he's very funny. So like there's a lot that's very, very funny about it. If you have less of a hang up about Ben Platt and Noah Galvin than I do, then you will probably like it even more. So we may end up talking about this when we talk about when we eventually. do dear Evan Hanson in the future spoiler alert but um yes I enjoyed it I can see why it's so

funny then the reactions that I'm seeing to it I think the people who are less and less um embedded within like theater folk like it better I think I think sir there's some people that are maybe like it's too close you know it's too close to home I think um which bodes well I think for the movie as a crowd pleaser fist ends up on like it did get acquired by searchlight so it's going to end up on Hulu and like I think people will watch it on a Friday night on Hulu and be very very happy with it. The searchlight pickup though from what I read is theatrical so it'll eventually be on Hulu but the intention is to put it in theaters. See that should have happened to Fire Island. I'm glad that they're like learning their

lesson from this but like it's too bad that like Fire Island had to be the casualty there because Fire Island that should have been the path for that movie as well. I should also say in a small role, but in a very welcome one. Manari's Alan Kim, sweet little Alan Kim is in this movie. And, like, that was very fun. Let's talk about some of the ones that we've both seen, which luckily also includes my other

favorite movies of the festival. All right. You really loved Eileen. I think you liked Eileen quite a bit better than I did. I almost feel like I like Eileen more than anyone else I talk to. Yes. You're the most positive on Eileen that I see. I mean, like, I'm not trying to.

to, like, build myself up here. I think people don't get it. Maybe. I can see that. I mean, like, maybe some of them have read the book. Maybe some of them haven't. I've seen some dumb shit saying that the movie is queer baiting. And it's like...

Oh, I don't agree with that at all. It's so stupid because, like, we won't get into spoiler territory. But it's a movie that... Talk to me about the author for a second, though, because, like, this woman... Potessa Moshfag. She's kind of a big deal in a way that, like, you know, I'm very not plugged into books. So, like, I had no idea that this woman was, like, a big deal. So talk to me about her.

She has, I think the most famous book of hers, though Latvona, her newest book is, you know, kind of taking over. My Year of Rest and Relaxation, her books and her voice is on the caustic side. I mean, that was maybe something that I could have used a little more of in Eileen. But Eileen is a first-person narrative as a book. And I think it's smart for the movie to not have narration, because that would have maybe been annoying, and I don't love that as a device in movies generally, but it does lose some of that bite. And I think because it loses some of that bite, when you get to this third act twist or pivot, the thing that I think that, you know, kind of underlines what this movie is ultimately doing and what it's about and recontextualizes every. everything you've watched. It's throwing people for a loop in a way that they are like, well, what the hell did I just watch? I was unsatisfied by the final third of this movie.

I think that this is ultimately a movie for people who, whether you want to say they're queer people, whether they are, you know, women who don't see themselves as housewives, women who don't see themselves as mothers, et cetera. This is a movie about how stifling the suburbs and small towns can be, and not only how it can be awful to live there, but how it can bring out the worst in you, how that stiflingness, that, you know, level of demand can turn you into a monster. And I'm surprised that people aren't getting that. I don't, it's not that I don't get it. I wish the movie would have a little bit more meat on the bone for that portion of the movie. It feels abrupt and it feels, and because it feels abrupt, it feels a little

glib in that final third to me. I did want to bring up one more thing before we get off the subject of Otessa Mosheg, which is my favorite thing about the career tab in her Wikipedia entry, which says, after contracting cat scratch fever, she left New York City and earned an MFA from Brown University, which is the funniest sentence I've read in anything ever. And it's like, what, like, what? Okay, all right. Katow Tesha Mosh fag, pulling a lydia tar.

She vandalized by Wikipedia. It's one of those things where it's like, if you told me in 10 years that this person completely fabricated her identity, I'd absolutely believe you. But anyway, let's talk about Anne Hathaway. Good for her. Anne Hathaway's tremendous in this movie. I loved her so much.

She is absolutely magnetic. You can't take your eyes off of her. she's making a meal out of this performance, but in a way that doesn't feel self-indulgent, and she's worth the price of admission alone, and I'm glad I saw it for that reason. I also feel like this is a movie if people go back and re-watch it because, like, I was watching it knowing where it was going. I think everywhere where this movie goes is right there in her performance, like, burrowed underneath the surface. She's tremendous. I saw it compared somewhere, and I can't remember whether it was

Hathaway herself who did, compared it to, she said, it was um carol meets reservoir dogs and i somebody who hadn't seen the movie saw that quote and was like that's weird and i'm like honestly if you see the movie it's there like both of those aspects of the movie are there i think the comparison to carol is why people are like this movie's queer baiting and it's like aesthetically you could see how something like carol or cirque is an influence point for this movie but yeah i think i mean i i saw i definitely saw hints of Carolyn there in a way that like I didn't certainly didn't object to it all. I'll also say it is one of two tremendous Marin, Ireland performances that I

saw at the festival. She's only in one scene in Eileen, but she rules. She rules in Eileen, but she's also in a movie that I wouldn't have seen if you hadn't recommended it so highly. So let's talk about Birth Rebirth. One of my other favorite movies of the festival, Birth Rebirth, directed by Laura Sok, or Sock, there, she, I bros put onto the radar of this movie because I love their short Friday, which you can watch on Criterion Channel, about the, it's, without spoiling too much of it, it's set during, I believe, Ted Bundy's execution day. So it's not Friday as in on a calendar, but Friday. Oh, God. Oh, Lord.

Okay. It's not about Ted Bundy, though. It's about a young photographer. You know I love a pun, but that's maybe a little bit much even for me. It's in a tremendous short, and I loved birth-rebirth, really different than they're short. But it stars Marin, Ireland, as basically a morgue attendant who also is fashioning herself as a modern-day Victor Frankenstein. Yeah. And Judy Reyes, who is a nurse at the same hospital, who, I mean,

I suppose this is the first 15 minutes, so it's not much of a spoiler. Her daughter dies suddenly, and then the two of them, as I'm sure you can imagine how, go into partnership together. And I saw some people being kind of underwhelmed by this movie. I kind of found it unpredictable at every turn. Yeah, I was pretty riveted. I thought by the end of the way the movie ended, some people thought, felt a little open-ended, but I thought it was a real

interesting and nasty way to end this movie that I had a good amount of time with. Less gory than I expected, but when it was gory, oh boy. And it'll be released by IFC Midnight and on Shudder at some point this year. It'll be on Shudder, which if Shudder is still around by then, which hopefully it is, because... Oh, I don't know about this. Well, Shudder, there was, during the whole AMC was letting

go a whole bunch of people back during this is all part and parcel of these sort of like corporate shakeups or whatever and I remember there was anxiety for a moment that like shutter was maybe going to go away and maybe it's out of the woods now and maybe it's not I haven't really stayed that plugged in but I hope it is because like shutter is a really really great resource for a horror film and I know so many people who are like not as plugged into the film industry as we are who like swear by shutter and I think it's a really good streaming service for that. If I had one, and again, I'm not in the position of telling somebody how to make their movie.

Like, what the fuck do I know? If the beginning of this movie had featured the Judy Reyes character sort of like having to dig into the sort of like the whereabouts, because like her daughter, as you mentioned, dies and then like the body goes missing. And if there had been more of like a little bit of a, you know, detective search for like finding out where her body is and then the realization, you know, she uncovers because the big twist in this is where this body is and what's being done with it. And I thought that could have been like a real fucking holy shit moment in the movie. And instead it's sort of like treated a little bit just sort of like, well, this is the next thing that happens.

With that very, very minor quibble aside, I was riveted. by this movie. I think it's really well done. I'm so glad you liked it. Marin, Ireland is tremendous. She's, she's playing a really, like, she's almost, uh, she's incredibly isolated woman, and her work is her work. And she is very, she's diabolical, but she's, it's just matter of factness. There is no, there's no wickedness to her. There's no, like, sinister intent. It's just the work. And be, and that makes her sinister enough. You know what I mean? Like, that makes her sort of terrifying. But it also, like, makes her, like the rules of that character stay very, very rigid, and she stays within that

parameter, and she does such a good job with it. Judy Reyes is an actress I have loved for years. She's been primarily a television actress. She has recently been on Claws. She got, to my attention, she was one of the four main characters and Scrubs. I really loved Scrubs. She's tremendous on the show. She's my favorite. Carlo was my favorite on Scrubs by like a mile. I absolutely And Judy Reyes was fantastic, so I've rooted for her ever since. And I don't know how big this movie can be. You know what I mean? There's probably a ceiling to how sort of like a crossover this thing can get. But like I want as many people as possible to see this movie because I think Marin Island gives the performance of the movie. But like Judy Reyes is really, really great too. She's the desperateness of her character and the guilt that her character is taking on for, you know, not being there with her daughter when she died. and the lengths to which she's going to go. But also the, like, weird little domestic partnership that the two of them forge during the middle portion of this movie

is really fascinating and really interesting. And I liked it a lot. It's twisted and fun. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So thank you because I would not have sought this movie out. I'm just so happy that you liked it that much

because I was like, I'm maybe going out on a limb selling him on this movie that I loved because it's gnarly in terms of, of the psychology of it, like, there's going to be a lot of people who are just going to check out because they're like, uh-uh, but, um, it's, I'm glad you liked it. I liked it better than the other sort of uki-spooky movie that I saw, which I'm not sure if you did. Did you see divinity? I didn't. I was curious about this. It's an interesting movie, and I'm glad that I saw it. It got really, really buzzy for like a day or two there. Like, the Sundance Buzz really does sort of like flare up very quickly because like it's a fest as a festival it goes very fast like

sundance is just like boom boom boom and then you're out and um that one got like a flare up of interest um you know i love stephen dorf and so uh the film comes from writer-director eddie alcazar uh dorff plays essentially the speaking of mad scientists sort of the son of a scientist who has commercialized this is this movie that takes place sort of like in the future, has commercialized this product called divinity that is meant to extend life and, you know, essentially make people immortal and, and sort of is selling it on these sort of like infomercial things that reminded me a lot of the nostalgia interludes in Watchman, especially the Watchman comic book.

But anyway, he is sort of the main character, but there's a There's also these two brothers, played by Moises, Arias, and Jason Janow, who are essentially like star children, who, like, come down from the heavens and are encountering him. But there's also a character named Nikita, played by Karuchi Tran, who is a sort of, like, comes upon this situation and finds herself embroiled in it. I don't really want to spoil too much of the plot. It's a very sort of, like, self-consciously weird movie about the next. It's all in black and white, and it's very much like, this is somebody who watched that one episode of Twin Peaks, The Return, like, eight million times. You know what I mean?

I think ultimately it runs out of steam, and I think it just kind of, to me, wears out its novelty a little bit. But, like, it's certainly interesting. It is, again, you talk about with and credits. This is a with Bella Thorne and Scott Bacula, which you're just not going to get any way. sure it's interesting there's body horror aspects to it there's sort of like classic like alien invasion stuff it is like weird shit's going on in the desert kind of a movie um it's interesting it is compelling for a while i don't think it it lasts all the way through it is only you know 88 minutes so if it whenever it becomes available i'm not sure if it got it doesn't have distribution yet Stephen Soderberg is a producer, though, and it literally, like, he's a presenting, like, his, his name is very prominently featured on this. So, like, I imagine it will get distribution somewhere. So when it does, check it out. It's not like anything you're really going to see. I liked it. And I think it's worth watching just for that. Looping back quickly, I got my notes criss-crossed on some stuff. The director of Birth Rebirth is Lorum. Moss, want to get their name

correct. You mentioned Divinity, which was in the next section and was in black and white. I saw another movie in the next section that was also in black and white and was fantastic. It's Kokomo City. It is a documentary about black

trans sex workers. And I just have to, like, this is not to shit to like compliment one movie by shitting on others, but like four of this year's five best documentary features nominated for Oscar are from some debuted at sundance the previous year yes that is not going to happen again in this coming year yeah the only real

documentary that i would like wholeheartedly recommend is cocomo city okay cocoma city fucking rules magnolia is releasing it i think this summer but they said later in the year um it has real vibes of like And I mean this as a full compliment, like HBO after dark documentaries, it felt alive and having its own, like, visual, stylistic identity in a way that absolutely no other documentary I watched this year did. Check out Kokomo City. Nice. All right. The time has come for us to talk about Iris Axis Passages. My other favorite movie of the festival.

It's very good. It is, I'm going to, you know, it's a snap judgment, so I'm going to, you know, want to take, you know, some time with it. It is still not my favorite of the Iris Sacks movies. I think I like it a little bit less than Little Men and love is strange. It possibly has to do with the fact that Franz Rogowski is tremendous in this movie, has it gives a phenomenal performance of the festival, playing a character that I literally wanted to banish to the outer rim of the universe. I what a fucking loathsome character this guy plays a monster oh I hated him so much an absolute monster but the best performance I saw at the festival I think what's interesting about this for irisaxon you know I love irisaxe and we both love irisaxx this movie kind of hits a little harder than his other

movies in a way that he doesn't really hit you know like it's and partly it's because France Rikowski's character is so noxious, and, you know, it's, I've seen people compare this movie to closer. That's not a bad comparison. I thought of that, too, closer. It's a bisexual love triangle, but it's also a character study of France Ruggowski's character, who's a film director who kind of, you know, goes with the breeze. He is partnered with Ben Wischaw, has this affair with Adela X. Rikopoulos. It's the first time he's had. sex with a woman, apparently, or at least, you know, one of the significant times. Technically, he's having the affair with an adult exarchopolis. What he really is doing is having

an affair with his own navel, because he really is so enamored of the fact that he's like, I've never done this with a woman before. It's a whole new experience for me. Let's talk about it. I want to talk about it. This is so, look at me. I'm expanding my horizon. He's like, can you talk about this with me, please? God, nightmare person. Absolutely nightmare person. a narcissist of the first order, absolutely. I mean, like, in that way, I do think, I mean, this movie is a comedy. It is a, like, very caustic comedy, but, like, all of those horrible things that would come out of his mouth, I could not stop laughing because it's someone who is so absolutely up their own ass. And it's, you know, it's just a very exposing character study on top of being a very exposing.

I was going to say the thing that everybody's talking about is the sex scene between him and Ben Washah. And, like, for good reason, it is one of the hottest and, like, most, like, real feeling. And this is sexy in, too, because, like, it is incredibly revealing of what that relationship dynamic is at the same time. 100%. Uh, there, like, I hate, I hate, I hate, glib, top and bottom, uh, um, stuff when Twitter gets really in like when gay Twitter gets really into like I'm a tap the top and bottom politics at play in this relationship is surprising and really really revealing and and you know sort of unexpected and still not quite easily boxed you know

based off of exactly what else is happening in the scene slash where hands are wandering etc It will absolutely not be released with an R rating. Not with that scene intact, and I hope they do keep that scene intact. So, yeah, it was picked up by Mooby, and Mooby distributed decision to leave this year, which we just got finished talking about how that got blanked by the Oscars. But I also feel like a lot of people saw a decision to leave this year. Like, there's a lot of... Decision to leave had a good box office run considering... Mooby did well by that movie.

So I think movie can do good things for passages as well. So I'm happy about that. I will be talking about Fran Franskowski all year long. Can we talk about my favorite movie of the festival, which I don't know if you actually saw? Did you see a little prayer? I did. Okay. I did.

Angus McLaughlin wrote and directed this. He wrote Junebug. Yes. It is very aligned, I think, with Junebug, though maybe not aesthetically. It's his most Junebug-y kind of a movie that I've seen. from him. He's made sort of smaller movies. He directed, was it called goodbye to all that, or was that somebody else?

What were the other? Give me a second. Sony Classics picked this up, though. So it's one of the movies that, as of now, has distribution. And they announced it for this movie pretty quickly after its premiere compared to some other things. Because even like fair play, it took a few days for that big Netflix by. Yeah, he wrote and directed. in a movie in 2014 called Goodbye to All That that that starred

Paul Schneider and Melanie Olinsky. Anna Camp is also in that movie. Anna Camp is in a little prayer. That one I saw at, I believe, Tribeca. Anna Camp, this movie kind of drove me insane. I think Anna Camp's really good in this movie, actually. But the attraction here is David Stritharon and Jane Levy

as a father-in-law and daughter-in-law who are living in this sort of small-town situation. he comes to suspect that his son is cheating on her. They sort of live in the house out back, essentially, like on, you know, they live with them. They've taken, you know, this couple in while they're getting on their feet. Essentially, Celia Weston plays David Stratharine's wife. There's a moment.

Who also does guided tours of, I guess it was North Carolina. Yes. Puritan, puritan guess, whatever, like guided tours or whatever. She also at the very beginning of this movie She LARPS puts an ice cube in a cup of coffee in a way that I find so incredibly endearing She's just having her coffee with an ice cube in it

I think David Stratherin gives a tremendous performance in this movie Sony Pictures classics picking up this movie On the heels of getting two Oscar nominations for living I think is very encouraging I think if Stratherin gets the kind of campaign that Bill Nye got this coming year

I will be very very happy about it Jane Levy is also really tremendous, the two of them. Jane Levy is great. I think they're going to have an uphill climb for that because the movie is, I would say, even smaller than it sounds. I mean, probably what I think would be the good... I mean, I am not a distribution or award strategist, but if they went the Junebug route and released it in the summer

and could still ride that wave of having a long tail for people to catch up to this very small movie. It could work by my life. It's funny that this conversation here, this dynamic we have on this movie, is the exact opposite of what we had about living, where you were very high on Bill Nye's chances, and I was like, it's a really small movie.

It's like, it's going to have a struggle. So I'm hoping that... Living is massive compared to this movie. I don't agree. I think it's, I think the scale of it is... There's a lot of big feeling in this movie, but, like, the movie doesn't exactly... I mean, like, aesthetically,

I thought it looked a tiny bit cheap. aesthetically, sure, but I don't think this is the kind of movie that sells itself on aesthetics. I think the fact that it is as emotionally demonstrative as it is, I think, is a plus for this movie. And I don't know. I think you could get a Stratharine campaign out of it, and he's just really tremendous.

He's just really, really good in this movie, and I loved him a lot. But that was your favorite of the festival. That was my favorite of the festival. Yes. What else should we talk about, though? Call of Center. Oh, my gosh.

You hurt my feelings, maybe my second favorite of the festival. Can't wait to see it. It opens. 824 has got it. It opens in March. Is that what I had heard? I think that's a rumor at this point. They haven't announced that at least. Let's hope that it's true. I thought for, I mean, you know, we also love Nicole Hollis Center. Yeah. I thought for her movies, she bounced back from do it from Land of Steady Habits, her Netflix movie that was not well received. doesn't really feel like hers, and doing the grimness of the screenplay for The Last

Duel with some of her hardest-hitting jokes of her career. Do I agree with people that it's one of her best movies of her career? I don't quite go that far. It's a high bar. She sets a high bar to clear. It's a very, very funny movie. I will say, we've talked about, we've done an episode on enough set here on this podcast, and we both really love that movie.

And Friends with Money. And Friends with Money. But Enough Sed specifically because of the Julia Louis-Dreyfus connection. I might be more impressed even by Julia Louis-Dreyfus in this movie than I was even in Enough Set. I think she's really, really great. I can't agree with that. Okay. Well, sorry. Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays an author who changes genres and overhears her husband saying that he doesn't like the book. And that's basically the thrust of the movie. It was less about... The plot was less central to that event than I was expecting, but ultimately in the way that, you know, you get to the end of a Nicole Hollif Center movie and you have, you feel like you've gone through actual rich, profound character study of like the way we are as people. This movie, I think, is about our capacity and inability to take and accept feedback and the type of tender gloves we, uh, care for each other with and sometimes should and sometimes shouldn't. Yeah.

That I found that more interesting than I found the execution of the movie. Oh, I see. The jokes are so good in this movie. I'm going to take the opposite track there. I think it's executed quite well. I think the performances are all very, very funny. I think Julia Louis Dreyfus is emotionally on point while also being tremendously, tremendously funny in a lot of ways.

I think she and Michaela Watkins as sisters is inspired. I love the two of them and their dynamic. Jeannie Berlin as their mother, all of the scenes with three of them together. With those two as the sisters and Jeannie Berlin as their mother are really, really tremendous. Tobias Menzies has never been my favorite actor, but I think he holds up pretty well. I was a detriment to the movie. I would not go as far as to say a detriment. I think that's way overstating it, but not my favorite, but like Owen Teague is their son I really, really loved.

I think it's a really, really great movie, and I'm excited for people to see it once, you know, Nicole Hollafsiner makes movies that feel of a conversation with one another, and I think that's one of her great strengths, and I think this one is, like you mentioned, Land of Study Habits feels like an outlier in that way, and like this one feels like she's, you know, back in the realm of her best movies, and I think that's very good, so I really like that. Let's quickly go through the rest of the movies you saw, and maybe I'll mention a few that I saw. You saw the Corey Finley landscape with invisible hand that nobody seemed to like. I was going to ask you about that because I hadn't really seen any chatter about it at all. People didn't really like it very much. Is that what you're saying? I would agree with that. I really wanted to like this.

It really lands flat. It's this sci-fi story about, you know, this sort of like near future where aliens have arrived and have sort of commodified the human race. And they've provided, they now provide the human race with like everything they need in the form of like synthetic everything, food and supplies and everything like that. So of course the Earth economy is in shambles and these two sort of teens are at the center of this movie who are carrying on what is essentially like a TikTok relationship for clicks, which is how like the, only like reliable way that humans can make money and you either like go up into the little spaceship cities and are like this dynamic that sounds insufferable uh it's it's not insufferable but it's also not very interesting tiffany hattish plays one of the kids mothers there is this

odd inversion of like racial politics where like the black family has taken in this like homeless white family the the family of the girl who tiffany hattish's son is seeing and is this TikTok relationship with. Josh Hamilton is the father. Josh Hamilton, as always, is like really tremendous playing an absolutely ridiculous person who you want to slap, as is his specialty. And I think the film feels like it's trying to be very clever about that sort of inversion of racial politics.

We're like this white family feels very aggrieved by, you know, the privilege of the black family because they own a house and yada yada yada and it's like the movie doesn't really do enough with that the aliens there's an absurdity to the aliens and like at some point you sort of like step back and you're just like oh i'm watching these like weird little like cgoo creatures uh sort of have the run of humanity and like that's i guess interesting and absurd way but like it's not that interesting the movie just doesn't hold my attention very well it i i you know i'm checking my watch quite a bit during this movie, and it's only like, I think this movie is like 100 minutes or something like that, so it's not that long. But it gets tedious. It just gets very, very

tedious and to no end. Like, what kinds of things were people saying about it that you were observing? I saw everything that you just said. Okay. You seem to be right in line with everyone else. What about the two, your other two movies were both gay movies, Cassandro and Fairyland. I heard great things about Cassandro. I heard great things about Cassandro. I didn't choose to see it because it will be on Amazon Prime sometime soon. Yeah. And Fairyland, I also didn't see because I heard not good things about it. I think I liked them both around the same, which is to say that, like, they're both very,

very good features for their lead actor performances. But I think Cassandra is the better movie. I sort of bowed to the fomo of it where, like, people were really, really enthusing about this Gail-Garcia Bernal performance. And I knew that I was going to be able to see it soon on Amazon. and I just sort of like I lost my willpower and used one of my Sundance slots on Cassandra, and I probably should have watched something else because I was only able to see 10 things. But yada, yada, yada.

He is very good. He plays a Lucha Libre wrestler in Mexico who you get a little bit of a sense of the kind of internal politics of Lucha Libre where the masked wrestlers are these sort of like great masculine heroes. And he was sort of shunted off to play what's called an exotico. which is essentially just like a feminized, you know, a character who gets defeated by the more masculine wrestlers. And his sort of defiance in that was, I'm going to play in Exotico, but I'm going to play as a hero.

My character is going to be a hero and he's going to win. And he becomes, this is a true life, you know, sort of story, and he becomes one of the great sort of Lucha Libre wrestlers. And he's just very, very good in this. He has a relationship with Rol Castillo from Looking, and what was he in just this year? The inspection. Yes, just this year. He loved Rob Castillo.

He also has a couple scenes with Bad Bunny, who plays this sort of, like, straight-ish person in his realm, who, like, Cassandro is very, very heavily flirty with, and those scenes are crackling with sexual chemistry that I found very, very, very interesting. I think the performance outpaces the movie for me, but I think the movie is good. Fairyland is this sort of like decade-spanning story of a father and daughter, who a gay father and his daughter,

who moved to San Francisco when she's very young after her mother dies. And it's sort of like the through-the-years sort of thing growing up in San Francisco. They live in this sort of like flop-house situation, for a while where he's, you know, it's with, you know, several other sort of eccentric characters. Maria Bacalova is one of them. She's not giving a great performance. That's two now between this and Bodies, Bodies, bodies, bodies where I'm just like, did we overrate Maria Bacalova? Maybe

we did. But whatever. Cody Fern is also in this movie for a hot second, and I love him from the Ryan Murphy TV stuff that he's done. But Scoot McNeary plays the father, and he's great in this movie. And I really, really love him. He's playing opposite the girl from Coda. I'm just not remembering anybody's names this morning. Amelia Jones? I was going to say, not Amelia Clark, Amelia Jones. Yes, who was in a couple of movies because I also, she was in Cap person, which everyone hated. Everybody hated, which is why I didn't see it. I was curious about it, but I didn't see it. But Scoot McNary is very good as the father. It's one of those movies where it's like, oh, God, as they move ahead through time and it's like it's first it's the 60s and now we've jumped to the 70s

and you sort of like this horrible realization falls on you like oh god like you know what's coming you know that the AIDS crisis is coming and what's going to sort of probably befall this character and I don't always love that when you know this sort of like this I mean it's a complicated thing right where it's like this is a thing that happened this is the thing you almost can't memorialize it enough because it was not sufficiently you know paid attention to in its day. But I also feel like there is something crushing about, as a viewer, you know, and I guess appropriately crushing, right?

You've connect with this character and then you know what sort of stomps down the road waiting for this guy. But anyway, I thought Scoot McNair was really good. I think Amelia Jones is fine. I like their sort of their parent-child relationship where he sort of lets her grow up. a little laissez-faire, a little sort of like, you know, take the bus to this place. And, you know, I'm going to go out and, like, you can, like, you know, watch TV tonight and don't let anybody in the house. And, you know, he's sort of like is outliving his San Francisco life.

And she ends up resenting him for that. And it's not a ton of novelty to this movie. There's not really a ton in this movie that you're like, I've never seen that in a movie before. but I really I was endeared by the Scoot McNary performance so I was glad that I saw it not my favorite thing that I saw but I was glad that I saw

it Okay Anything else that I... A few other things before we head out that I Think We should mention Fairplay was obviously the big sale Sold to $20 million to Netflix

It's a relationship drama set In the finance world People were calling it a thriller It's not really a thriller It's just a movie of a couple yelling at each other. I thought it was not amazing. I'm excited to see it.

You know how much I love Alden Aaron Reich. I mean, I love Alden Aaron Reich, too, and he's really good in this movie. It's a relationship where they both work for the same finance team. Their relationship is a secret, even though the movie opens with them getting engaged. And she gets a promotion, and it creates all of these type of gender politics between the two of and, uh, yada, yada, yada, things, uh, progress from there and it becomes a lot of yelling and such. I couldn't have believed this relationship less, maybe, in terms of I could believe them as people who were regular fuck buddies, but I could not believe it ever as a relationship of two people

who loved each other enough to get engaged. Never believed that. So like, I thought that movie was at a disadvantage for that for not really establishing this relationship. But then also, everything that comes from it, every type of hot button point that it goes to in terms of gender dynamics feels like it's about three years too late. It's all pretty basic stuff. And as far as the like veneer of like industry or succession, the things that I've seen compared to, it is a very weak tea version of that. I mean, you can just go watch those shows, those characters are way more interesting, and I think they've dealt with some of the sexual politics at play in this movie,

much better on those shows. I would say Raven Jackson's Aldert Road's Taste of Salt is a movie that we might be talking about later this year if A-24 doesn't kind of dump it. I was really surprised to see something so, like, poetic is the cheap word for it, but there is a narrative to this movie, but it is kind of displaced in time in a way that, you know, Huge comparison. I'm not making this as a qualitative comparison, but something like what Terrence Malick does in his movies. I found it to be at an extreme disadvantage seeing this movie at home rather than in a theater. So I will save further thought until I can see it in a theater. Considering what A-24 does to a lot of their movies of this scale, I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that this movie still gets its due and its opportunity. sure um and then the last one i would leave with is fancy dance which uh stars lily gladstone i wanted to see that i missed it yeah a cool breezy 90 minutes um didn't get a whole lot of discussion during the festival partly because i think a lot of people skipped it because it sounds incredibly sundancy yeah it wasn't

not that it is slightly a thriller where she is being a guardian for her niece for her missing wayward sister. She's been conducting a search for her sister. Meanwhile, the teenage niece is preparing to go to a powwow, which is a major cultural event for their tribe and for their local community. It is very much the type of movie you would expect to see, especially at Sundance. However, it has a really, really tremendous ending. and Lily Gladstone is

predictably fantastic in it and we will be talking about her all year long. I was going to say, do you like Lily Gladstone? Is that like an actor who you like really respond to in any way? I mean, after that certain women performance,

I mean, she became a ride or die. Like we will, we will always stand Lily Gladstone. All right. Well, thank you all for joining us for our Sundance 2023 that we always say,

you know, we'll keep it to a half an hour and check your timestamp because we have not done that. But thank you for staying with us for this extra special length insert episode. That's our episode. Tune back in later this week for

another full-length episode. If you want more, ThisHad Oscar Buzz, you can check out the Tumblr at thisheadoscarbuzz.com. You should also follow our Twitter account at Had underscore Oscar Buzz and our Instagram at This Had Oscar Buzz. Chris, where can the

listeners find you in your stuff. On Twitter and letterbox at Chrissy File, that's F-E-I-L. I'm on Twitter and letterboxed as Joe Reed, read-spelt, R-E-I-D. We would like to thank Kyle Cummings for his fantastic artwork and Dave Gonzalez and Gavin Mievous for their technical guidance. Please remember to rate, like, and review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, wherever else you get podcasts. A five-star review in particular really helps us out with Apple Podcasts visibility.

So once you figure out what exactly you have seen of Ben Washan, that sex scene, and head back to your podcast apparatus and give us a nice review. That is all for this week, but we hope you'll be back next week for more buds. Thank you.