Nashville Film Festival: Dispatch 1
The log-line for Thomas Simon’s Bowlhead is harmless enough: "A passionate bowler resorts to nefarious ways to improve his game.” How much heinous activity could one bowler get into to improve? A lot, as it turns out. The short film reveals itself little by little, and, as the shocking methods unfold, game viewers will follow along with wide smiles.
Simon knows how to make the most of a short timespan and never tries to overextend the film with too many subplots or characters. There is a fill circle symmetry at play that’s playful and dark, from the title of the film and the opening few seconds to its darkly poetic end. The cinematography and editing are top notch, and the wink-and-nod payoff is well worth the time invested. Grade: A —Joel Winstead
Photo by Rebecca Greenfield
Meet Me in the Bathroom is pure catnip for me. With its combination of music and insights from seminal early 2000s NYC rock bands and a presentation that eschews such documentary filmmaking conventions as talking head interviews and dramatic recreations, the cinematic adaptation of Lizzie Goodman’s phenomenal oral history book is easily the year’s best nonfiction film thus far.
Directors Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern clearly likewise love this noteworthy era of modern music, and compile archival footage and original audio interviews with members of The Strokes, The Moldy Peaches, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, TV on the Radio, and The Rapture into what feels like the definitive visual chronicle of that place, time, and scene. That the film doesn’t quite offer a concluding sentiment proves both anticlimactic and exhilarating, though aren’t those the two words that perhaps best describe that magical stretch in history? Grade: A-minus —Edwin Arnaudin
Whether you see it as a violent and disturbing expose of disaffected and marginalized youth or an ethereal fairytale based on premonition and dream logic, for good or bad, Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s Beautiful Beings is not a film you will soon forget. Taking place among the poor and forgotten of Icelandic society, it paints a grim picture of life on an island country often painted as an idyllic tourist destination. Guðmundsson’s Iceland runs in direct contradiction to this serenity, unapologetically demonstrating that poverty and abuse exist in even the most idealized places on earth.
Dwelling somewhere in the dark spaces between A Clockwork Orange and Harmony Korine’s Gummo, Beautiful Beings is at times almost unbearable to watch. Its main characters walk an ever-changing line between compassion and savagery, often with the former outwardly manifesting as the latter. This dynamic creates an ever-present sense of menace and dread that’s hard to shake, even when it's clear that these boys are all each other has. When something bad happens to one (and it does plenty of times), they band together with an inspiring amount of fellowship, even if their formula for justice isn’t much more than poorly-planned acts of spontaneous violence.
However, wedged into this brutal narrative are a few moments of pure wonder. These welcomed respites reveal themselves as beautifully rendered supernatural visions and dream sequences that might be considered nightmarish if they weren’t so exquisitely mystical. These psychic phenomena are hinted at early, but don’t appear until well into the film, causing them feel somewhat out of place. But once these uncanny apparitions have had some time to settle in and become part of the film’s mythology, they’re nothing short of spectacular, if creepy, displays of pure magic that elevate Beautiful Beings to a level beyond the dismal severity of its principal narrative. Grade: A-minus —James Rosario
(Photos courtesy of the Nashville Film Festival)
