Why Festivals? Part I
Compared to the conventional moviegoing experience, the festival experience is unmatched.
For one, the excitement of walking into a movie blind is harder to come by with mainstream releases. They’re marketed and advertised so insistently that even when I try to avoid hearing a movie’s premise before buying a ticket I end up running into hints about the movie’s plot, as is what happened with Jordan Peele’s Nope. Yet when I attended a local film fest in my town, I had the ability to jump from screening to screening and let the art speak for itself as it played out in front of me.
The organic film festival atmosphere is where I finally experienced a personal favorite film of mine from this year, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. An animation/live-action hybrid with a faux-documentary element, Marcel is practically tailor-made for my media taste. I’m a die-hard animation loyalist, and the craft on display in Marcel is something special. The tactile detail and dedication to realism preserves the stop-motion aesthetic of the original short, but adds just the right amount of polish to what could have easily been another computer-generated abomination of modern character animation. The scenes also mirror the creativity, innocence, and untethered energy of Marcel’s debut.
The groundedness of the animation is a perfect fit for the faux-documentary style, and the movie’s meta framing around the original viral video is clever for those who know Marcel’s history. The film also uses the viral personality dimension to riff on modern livestream culture, a newer media development of the past decade. Marcel’s streams manage to feel authentic to real life, which is a relief when films so often misunderstand or misrepresent modern internet culture. Hey, leave it to a shell that originated from the internet to properly represent that very culture! Marcel is wish fulfillment for those of us who wanted to enter the world of the original shorts all those years ago.
Other Festival Favorites
A less talked about but equally emotionally affecting watch from my festival experience was a local production titled Three Headed Beast.
On the surface, the film follows a mid-30s millennial couple in an open relationship, an arrangement manifested by one half of the relationship entering an emotionally intense sexual relationship with a man in his early 20s. The undercurrent of zillennial ennui and loneliness felt personal and well-realized (the filmmakers mentioned in the QnA that they wrote from personal experience).
The mostly silent-film approach the film took to storytelling made it stand out stylistically among other indie movies. It never felt like a gimmick or cry for attention (in fact, I didn’t even notice that barely a word had been spoken until 20 or so minutes in!). Instead, the directors used their penchant for visual storytelling to create a world full of realizations left unspoken.
Films I also enjoyed:
Why Festivals? Part II
I have a theory about mainstream movies, and a lot of mainstream media in general.
Among mainstream movie watchers, the premise or the “hook” takes precedent when deciding what to watch. Seeing a movie with a recognizable property or with a synopsis that sounds enticing is enough to give said movie a chance. But for film appreciators, the “hook” doesn’t crack the top three in a list of important attributes. Instead, they prioritize their next watches based on a director’s previous work, critical reception, festival reception (if the film debuted at one), and personal taste in genre or style.
In other words, for movies like Three Headed Beast and other indie releases, the execution itself is the “hook”.
📼 A/N: As much as internet nostalgia has been discussed online, no movie captures it in the same way as Marcel. I think the core of creativity that fueled early YouTube is still palpable in it, even with its bigger budget. I really hope younger people who hadn’t heard of the original short (me, before I heard about the movie) seek out that original video, to at least peek at what the internet used to be before their time.
I want to go see Marcel so bad!