The New/Next Film Festival is back, baby! From October 2-5, the WYPR-founded fest—now in its third year—invites cinephiles to view a variety of expertly curated independent features, documentaries, and shorts at the Charles Theatre.
If you need some help choosing which screenings to catch, here are a couple of reviews to consider.
Alice-Heart
3 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Alice-Heart, written and directed by Mike Macera, is about that liminal space between childhood and adulthood, when you crave independence and a meaningful creative life, but don’t quite know who you are yet. Also, you’re broke.
Appealing newcomer Lissa Carandang-Sweeney, who also produces, plays our heroine, Alice Heart (yes, that’s her full name—and it’s what everyone calls her)—an aspiring writer and student at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
On the first day of class, she does something impulsive: She calls out her performatively Luddite creative writing teacher for being an asshole. He kicks her out of class. Then, in rapid succession, she drops out of college, gets dumped by her pseudo-evolved boyfriend (Adam McAlonie), and gets cut off financially by her Filipino mother.
She’s rescued in a way, by her next door neighbor, Tony (Tony McCall), a shaggy freelance photographer who clearly loves her but plays it cool. He lets her stay with him while she sorts thing out. They get fried chicken together, he photographs her, and they talk about the people in their lives who have betrayed them—mostly ex-lovers.
Alice Heart tries to get back in the creative writing class, but the teacher is recalcitrant, until she gets some dirt on him and essentially blackmails him. (I’m team Alice Heart on this one—a teacher’s ego shouldn’t be so fragile he can’t accept an apology from a desperate student.)
There are other men in her life who do her dirty: a cocky editor at Simon & Simon publishing house, who mocks her for bringing in a class assignment as an example of her work. A friend of Tony’s who wants to buy a photo of her for less than savory reasons. And that ex-boyfriend, who manages to briefly win her back, because women that age never seem to learn the first time.
Filmed in black and white and rather conspicuously low budget, Alice-Heart is a throwback to the kinds of films I watched when I was a kid, back when the indie film movement was in its infancy—films like Hal Hartley’s Trust, Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, and Kevin Smith’s Clerks.
Not much happens, but the characters feel real and relatable—and you do want Tony and Alice Heart to realize they’re perfect for each other. The penultimate shot of the film has the wistfulness of The Graduate.
Alice-Heart screens on Sunday, October 5 at noon.
American Theater
3.5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
When I first watched the trailer for Nicholas Clark and Dylan Frederick’s American Theater, I assumed it was a mockumentary, in the style of Waiting For Guffman. It was all a bit too on-the-nose: a troupe of conservative and/or “canceled” actors and dancers staging an immersive outdoor musical production of the Salem Witch Trials. They were calling their play—wait for it—The Salem Experience.
Christopher Guest himself could not have made a film this trenchantly satirical. But better still, the film occupies that Guest-like sweet spot of loving its characters as much as it spoofs them.
Leading this unlikely troupe is Brian Clowdus, a charismatic, gay director with Corky St. Clair-style delusions of grandeur. He was once the director of a theater company that specialized in these interactive outdoor performances—one was Titanic: The Musical, naturally—but he was forced to resign in disgrace after he was accused by multiple people of being a racist and a sexual predator.
The film doesn’t take a stance on those accusations, and Clowdus, of course, claims he was the victim of a “witch hunt.” He also does the thing so many “canceled” people before him have done—he goes full MAGA, even running for Congress as a gun-loving, Trump quoting conservative.
Indeed, almost everyone in the troupe is MAGA, and some say they lost work or were cast out of their friend groups because of it. They wear their political defiance, literally, on their bodies. One sports a tee-shirt that says, “Slow the Spread (of Socialism),” another wears a cap emblazoned with the words “Fake News,” and Clowdus drinks from a thermos that reads, “Leftist Tears.”
They talk a lot about how they feel like outsiders in the artistic world and, as is the case with all good documentaries, you grow to understand their perspective—even if you don’t agree with them. These are the kind of people who believe the expression “Black Lives Matter” is racist because it excludes white people. Bless their hearts.
Clowdus reveals the hypocrisy of his MAGA beliefs in a telling moment. He boasts that Mike Pence called in to a gay conservative convention he attended to thank them for their support. “One of his charities is a Christian camp that does conversion therapy,” someone counters. “Well, that’s bad,” Clowdus says, laughing sheepishly. “I can’t get into that.”
At its core, American Theater is a backstage drama with all its attendant chaos and uncertainty. Actors are not off-book. The pyrotechnics keep failing. One “witch” dangles too loosely from the noose tied to the tree, looking more ridiculous than deadly. The sound guy cues “Sleigh Bells” instead of the eerie music meant to launch the show.
Will the show go on as planned? And will the protesters who are planning to assemble actually show up?
The Salem Experience had a (extremely) limited engagement in Georgia. I’m kind of jealous of the people who saw the extravaganza in person. They can say they were there. But at least we can say we saw the movie.
American Theater screens on Friday, October 3 at 9:20 p.m.