I’ve never been to Park City, Utah, where the Sundance Film Festival is held, but I’ve been to Sundance in New York for years thanks to press conferences from some of the festival’s most notable offerings. It’s here. And since the pandemic created digital festivals, a wider range of Sundance films have become available for viewing online. Of course, there are very few celebrations for online festivals. Stamping a crash course of movies at home is also a very different experience than focusing on the films offered by face-to-face attendance while living a normal life. And because not all Park City screens are available online, it is impossible to backtrack and discuss the festivals experienced at Small. Nevertheless, it is already clear that this year’s Sundance Festival has introduced a film that is not only unworthy of a theatrical release, but also notable for its distinctive artistry.
Until now, filmmaker Mary Bronstein has been a film-like, one-hit wonder. Her decorative feature, “Yeast” (2008), was a crazy drama about three women who charge (and sometimes separated) at one another in their quest for self-definition. Her second feature, “If I have a leg, I’ll kick you” shares some important features with its predecessor. It is a film of almost constant conflict and tension, and its cinematography is essential to its Frey’s nervous sensibility. The action itself. Rose Byrne stars as Linda. Linda is seen in extreme close-ups to start the film. She has been taking part in a group therapy session, and is said to be “stretchable” by her young daughter (Delaney Quinn).
It quickly became clear that Linda’s elasticity was a painful need that was imposed by some very difficult circumstances and is being tested. Her main concern is the health of her daughter. The girl is using a feeding tube, but Linda hopes it can be removed soon. Her husband, Charles (Christian Slater), has been away from home for a long time and is the captain of the sea for most movies, so she is the main caregiver. He shows the stiffness of his character by the long distance accusations to Linda when things don’t run through the shipyard at home. It’s not a very iconic stretch to see the equivalent of a wreck in a shipwreck in a catastrophic leak that temporarily prevents family apartments from residing in residence. Linda and her daughter (their name has not been revealed) will be moved to a nearby motel while the landlord’s contractor performs repairs. Meanwhile, Linda works full-time as a therapist in private practice, but she closes her daughter to the hospital for exams and treatment, and works and prepares her special meals where she is being fed through tubes. It’s there.
Linda doesn’t grow infinitely, but as her nerves contest, all her relationships become so new and more and more unbearable. Linda finds herself to embrace her own therapist (Conan O’Brien) in her heart excruciatingly. One of her own patients (Daniel MacDonald) is ignored at the moment of crisis. A man named James (A$ap Rocky), a motel supermarket, becomes friends with her, rarely showing it, but insults and injuries. Despite Linda’s dedication, the daughter never gets better, and the girl who has never heard of but is barely seen sucks out her own frustration. Linda occasionally snaps, sometimes ignoring her, turning the girl’s doctor (played by Bronstein) into a ruthless enemy. She even managed to make enemies of the hospital parking lot (Mark Stolzenberg).
Cinematography by Christopher Messina feels worn out like Linda’s spirit. Bronstein’s relentless orientation brings the camera provocatively closer to the entire character. Byrne’s performance has hair trigger impulsivity. When you empathize with Linda’s heart-blazing, physically exhausting efforts to deal with the many demands she has on her, the film sets up a conflict between her and the medical institution. However, Bronstein did not remove Linda from the hook. There are practical abilities that she doesn’t seem to have mastered. Here, as Bronstein did with “Yeast,” she sees the fascinating horror of unrestrained rage as a catastrophe, as she turns the film into a kind of rubber neck. “If I have feet……” Linda creates an emotional and practical space for more controlled people who blow up hostilely, and finely crafted the support actors (especially O’Brien and A$AP Rocky). Adjusted performance gives them a dramatic measure of justice.
Still from “Obex” by Albert Birney.Pete Ohs / Photosy / Courtesy Sundance Institute
While there is no festival spirit alone in streaming films at home, it is very important to the closure spirit of one of the festival’s best product, “Obex,” by independent film veteran Albert Bernie. Bernie’s most notable films to date are “Silvio” (he also stars as a gorilla working in the office), “Tux and Fanny” (animated comedy in the style of an 8-bit video game) ) was. “Strawberry Mansion” (a retrofutistic sci-fi romance about the occupational dangers of dream auditors). “Obex” is also a fantasy, but it is also a work of meticulous realism, but the reality that it is dramatic is so rare and so subtly observed that it makes imaginative speculations they stand up. It’s surpassed. “OBEX” is a slightly historical story set in Baltimore (where Bernie lives). Bernie herself is a computer nerd who lives in a normal, small, two-storey row house with a dog named Sandy, who promotes in computer magazines as “Computer Connor,” a computer portrait artist. The customer mails him a photo and check, and he sends back a rendering of portraits made with the characters of the Dot Matrix Printer.
Connor is definitely Agora dodge, if not Agora Fovik. When he goes out, it is mostly on his patio. The neighbor shopes his food and leaves it at his front door so he can bring it after she leaves. Someone who knows whether he gets a haircut or goes to a doctor or dentist. He is a movie guy, and more, a video guy at home, with a wall of VHS tapes and three TV sets arranged vertically. His house is neat, his habits are orderly, careful focus on practical details, and with loving attention to Sandy, his systematic life is full. It looks busy. He has two problems. First, his neighbor announces that she will be leaving soon, so he needs to make other arrangements for the groceries. Second, Cicadas, who appeared in a billion people that year, screeching outside Connor’s door, finding a way to sneak up on his home through cracks and gaps. (The annoying problem with his printer is not a feature, it’s a bug.)
Pete Maus’s silky muted black and white palette of cinematography reminds us of an air of one-irick abstraction that matches the action. (Ohs co-written and co-edited the film with Birney, but since 2022 he directed his own characteristics, including “Jethica.”) Birney has performed Conor as everyone of a singular kind. Masu. For everyone, it has become a total life for him. Connor’s passionately absorbed self-cleavage from hilariously observed personality to singularity gives him the unreality of his very reality. Next, in the same magazine he promotes, Connor sees the ad: sends your own home video and receives a disc in a video game featuring you as a character. Connor (at the time, charmingly Gorky) who loves video games makes tapes, sends them, and plays the game. He then discovers that his image is not the only thing that is included in his fantastical behavior. Sandy goes missing and in the resulting search, the fantasy takes over both Connor’s life and the film. There is much to admire about what follows. All the flashy, iconic excavations that Connor continues to be restrained by the stiffness of his lonely routine – but it’s actually more of a stranger than being totally engrossed with fine-grained whimsical Not (and will not be revealed in the end). His normal family life.
Not yet from “Life After” by Reid Davenport.Reuters/Courtesy Sundance Institute Photos
Personal documentaries in which the filmmakers are themselves subjects of their quest, and other more dialectical documentaries where the filmmakers’ journalistic quests turn out to be inherently personal. there is. Reid Davenport’s film “Life After” is in the second category, and this is one of the most amazing, insightful, moving, and politically widespread documentaries I’ve seen in a long time. . It begins with his account of the story of Elizabeth Boubia, a woman who sought the right to die in 1983 through suicide support. Although she was not a terminal illness, she suffered from disorders, including cerebral palsy and arthritis, which caused her severe pain and prevented her from ending her life independently. She lost the incident. Davenport found her TV interview in 1998’s “60 Minutes” but he found no trace of her recent – not her life, not her death, he investigates I decided to do it.
This investigation not only brings information about Boubia, but also takes into account political and legal decisions that are expanding far beyond her case, and more generally reflects the government’s attitudes towards obstacles and government approaches. I’m doing it. Davenport herself has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair, and his research into Boubia’s case is deeply enriched by his empathetic and sympathetic considerations of her experiences. He said that through interviews and archival studies, much of the pain Boubia endured was caused by surgery imposed on her by a doctor who presumed she knew best about what constituted her quality of life. I discovered it. Davenport frequently appears on the camera itself, drawing links between legislative measures to expand their rights to support suicide and expand their rights to disability legislators’ assumptions and quality of life. He found that a major factor in the quality of life for people with disabilities is the availability of care that enables autonomy, and that government cost reductions are the main reason for dependence and misery. .
In general, Davenport believes that the so-called advocacy of death is inseparable from the widespread public will, in order to avoid spending money and dedicating resources to people with disabilities. “Life After” is made with personal enthusiasm that never loses sight of the details of the report, and the merciless murder of mercy that allows disabled people to obtain the right to die, as they have little recognition of the right to live. An outline of the horrifying vision of ♦
