GEMS: Day 0 (no. 21)
The (long) calm before the storm.
Hello, y’all! It’s a sunny (in spirit) week here at the Rent’s Due offices (any table I can type) as we (eye) get ready for a double-dose of Halloween festivities and the local fall film festival. As is tradition, I’m already tired, but can’t stop the grind now. Read on for more!
There are many things in this world that bring me joy in life. Spending time with family, a fresh new book, the entire spectrum of cool ranch flavoring, and some Vince Guaraldi music are just some of these pleasures. But few in that laundry list of jazz tracks and packages of Doritos stand hold up the same way I feel when Halloween comes slicing around the corner, and this year is certainly no exception.
In previous years, I usually had a clear idea of what I’d be doing by the time summer starts to end. I’d get myself some silly ass costume to wear a few months in advance and make sure my schedule didn’t conflict with my semi-annual pairing of a glass of Skrewball and another viewing of The Shining. This year however, like most shit in life, got so busy to the point that my initial plans became incredibly clouded.
But not clouded by way of your typical work event or unavoidable birthday party, but with the sudden onslaught of quality films being screened and concerts headlined by people who can Actually DJ. I suddenly have some new things to do during my regularly-scheduled outings, with new and old friends I like hanging out with. Halloween’s great already, but it’s even better when you’re out on the town doing shit with people.
To avoid making this entry entirely about myself, I’ll redirect by stating what exactly I’m gonna talk about these next few days: The GEMS Film Festival, known by many in the community as the shorter/more substantial festival in South Florida, is this week. I have a lot of tickets to films I’ve been dying to see this year, and I’m gonna give a detailed debrief for each day I watch something.
I might talk about some other things, too (like I already have) but I’ll try to keep this focused mainly on movies I’ll hopefully have some thoughts about. A film like Castration Movie Anthology i: Traps, for example, which kicked off my festival activities yesterday.
First: An ignorant rant about the concept of time.
Consider where you live or work and how long it might take you to get to the nearest city. It can be an hour or even a little more than that.
Maybe you already live in the city and everything’s within some walking distance for you.
If you belong in this bracket, understand that I despise you.
Miami traffic can be a pain in the ass on any given day, so I feel bad in saying that the mixture of hauling ass to make it to one city in the morning during school hours, and then continuing to haul ass over to downtown on a Monday night for a film that felt like it was gonna end 16 times until it ended past midnight kinda fucked my mood for the week.
Which is already a lot consider how raw and depressing Castration Movie Anthology i: Traps is.
The film, itself the first installment of a three-part crowdfunded project from Toronto filmmaker Louise Weard, is for good bad and worse the most tedious film I may see all year.
It’s segmented into chapters that feel like a nightmare that refuses to end.
The performances feel earnest and drawn out in long tracking shots where they talk about things both minute and substantial (breast reduction surgery, sexual assault in the sex-worker industry, and taking too long to read Dune to name a few).
I felt like I wanted to die and decompose with each and every scene, but with just a shred of (perhaps morbid) curiosity to continue watching to see what the fuck was going to happen next. Having a part of your film be titled “Incel Superman” be exactly what you’d expect it to be in an Extremely Online world could’ve been utter shit if handled by someone else, but Weard’s writing, direction and editing plays a delicate game in driving me insane *just* enough to continue watching.
There are a handful of moments in this long ass movie that I never expected to see in a film before. I can’t say that I wasted my time watching this because those small bits of catharsis, disgust, tenderness and horror made up for it. And I think that’s supposed to be the point; to attempt to make a film about trans people by trans people, there’s some really ugly shit that shouldn’t be discarded if you want to show someone who doesn’t know much about the community why they still persevere. There’s a lot of self-hatred in the characters you meet here, but also those intimate moments where you can see what gets them going. A reminder that, despite the harsh roads ahead, there’s still something to live for.
I don’t want to go too much further than that, but I’d recommend this if you love this style of DIY indie filmmaking, love films like Love & Pop and I Saw the TV Glow, and have an early morning to yourself. Parts one and two are available to buy on Gumroad (you can also rent part one on Vimeo, but I hate their buggy video player so maybe don’t).
Hello, all! Me from the future (today) here. There was more screenings that have already occurred at the time of this writing (specifically a screening of No Other Choice with fucking Park Chan-wook in attendance), but I couldn’t make it due to work and Jägershot commitments. See y’all tomorrow for some thoughts on It Was Just An Accident and Nouvelle Vague. Bye for now!