BmoreArt

Obex

Directed by Albert Birney
Screens on 10/2 at 8pm

Set in 1987, Obex hangs around with Conor Marsh (director Albert Birney), an ostensible shut-in living a life of quiet inspiration who makes money turning people’s photos into ASCII art and watches videotapes with his dog Sandy. Conor’s content, cloistered world opens up when he mail-orders a computer game called Obex. Soon, a dot matrix printer delivers a haunted message (“Remove your skin”), Sandy goes missing, and Conor enters a fantastical world that’s like Alefgard from Dragon Warrior transported to the leafy Midatlantic woods. Deadpan setpieces (Conor lying in bed, singing along to Gary Numan’s “Cars” is one of the best scenes in any movie this year) give way to encounters with the awful and the surreal once Conor, sword in hand, with that yellow hat Dan Deacon always wears on his head, explores Obex.

What comes to mind watching Obex is the janky, handmade dread of Eraserhead (a phantasmagoric anxiety dream shot in brutalist black and white) and, in a scene where insects in camo jackets torture a man with a television for a head, 70s Doctor Who. But the movie Obex reminds me of the most is David Lowery’s trippy, visceral The Green Knight, a relatively recent “low-budget” (by Hollywood standards) epic that still probably cost like, 100 times more than this film.

Obex is New/Next’s opening night film and it is inspired—and important—programming. This is a Baltimore movie crafted by Birney, who has been making movies here for quite some time and keeps getting better the more he doggedly pursues his very specific vision. Obex should get before as many local folks’ eyes as possible.

Lockjaw

Directed by Sabrina Greco
Screens on 10/3 at 7:00pm
Powered by the psychotic charm of its lead, Lockjaw is about Rayna (Blu Hunt), a young woman who, as a result of a drunk driving accident, has had her jaw wired shut. Besides a prologue that includes some perfectly calibrated “annoying drunk”-acting, Hunt is limited to speaking through the wire for much of the movie. It is a brave and intense comedic performance.

A remarkable “trick” Lockjaw pulls off is that across its 90 minutes, the viewer becomes more accustomed to Rayna’s speech and literally gets better at understanding her words—while also better understanding her as a person. The central “joke” here is “a movie where the main character can’t open their mouth to speak” and it never stops being funny. But it is also a useful metaphor for how difficult it is for any of us to communicate and actually feel understood by other people. A fairly devastating monologue in this movie is delivered via text-to-speech.

Set six weeks after Rayna’s accident and taking place over the course of one night, Lockjaw is worth experiencing without a sense of where it’s all headed. The movie doesn’t veer in outrageous directions or anything, but knowing less will make you feel more like a participant in Lockjaw’s desperate, endless night out. Elaine May’s movies are a useful comparison and so is the episode of The Office where Micheal and Jan hold a dinner party.

Dance Freak

Directed by Alan Resnick and Robby Rackleff
Screens at 10/3 at 9:50pm

A surreal, parapolitical thriller with rancid vibes. Dance Freak is 90 minutes long and feels like it’s three hours long (this is a good thing) and should be like, six hours long. The title, by the way, is not an instruction. It is the name of a sort of cryptid. The Dance Freak (Robby Rackleff, with new wave hair and a leather jacket), who escaped from a government research facility and appears in front of people where it dances like, well, a freak, and then kills. The movie’s protagonist, Obie (also Rackleff) looks just like the Dance Freak and experiences lost time, so he’s the prime suspect in these murders. Distorting computer effects and stark black and white cinematography provide a sense that anything can happen or anybody can show up and take this movie over for a little while. And they often do. Especially Stavros Halkias as a sleazy office manager named Megaman.

Dance Freak has been anticipated by fans of Wham City Comedy shorts like Unedited Footage Of A Bear or This House Has People In It for a few years now, though what directors Rackleff and Alan Resick crafted is closer to Messiah Of Evil, Damon Packard’s Reflections Of Evil, or David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Indeed, with Dance Freak and Obex screening at New/Next and both containing unabashed riffs on Lynch, this year’s festival functions as a tribute to the late, visionary filmmaker’s explosive influence. Imagine that scene from Lost Highway where Robert Loggia screams about tailgating and the climactic Rammstein sequence going back and forth for an hour and half and you’re close to comprehending Dance Freak. A future “midnight movie,” which for now you’ll have to see at 9:50 on a Friday, which is basically the midnight movie spot at New/Next. Last year, that “around 10 p.m.” slot was taken up by Rap World in one theater and Vulcanizadora in another.

$POSITIONS 

Directed by Brandon Daley
Screens on 10/4 at 4:00pm

“If it wasn’t this shit, it would be something else,” says Travis (Trevor Dawkins), a Jelly Roll-esque recovering heroin user and cousin to Mike (Michael Kunicki), who has royally screwed Travis over during a cryptocurrency-investing bender that began, as it often does, by trying to make ends meet.

Mike works a crappy job and takes care of his developmentally-disabled brother Vinny (Vinny Kress) when he strikes it “rich” with a crypto investment worth thirty grand and rising. Immediately, Mike gets an ego, tells his job he quits and his girlfriend he wants an open relationship. He then spends the rest of the movie tethered to his phone as his investment fluctuates, kicking off a series of parlays and freak-outs in which he, among other things, sells his family home; reveals over Instagram that his girlfriend has HPV; accidentally drinks piss out of a beer bong; and takes out a dicey loan from a drug dealer who is the only person in the movie with a level head and a stable income.

Combining the late capitalist realism of the Safdie brothers’ Good Time with the soap-eating, self-hating comedy of Friendship, $POSITIONS is a a madcap Midwestern caper about the concentric circles of precarity and desperation spinning around most Americans’ everyday lives. Profoundly compromised people are not often seen in movies—and when they are, they’re rarely portrayed with this degree of tenderness and without any sentimentality.

Alice-Heart

Directed by Mike Macera
Screens on 10/5 at noon.

In this antisocial romantic comedy, Alice-Heart (Lissa Carandang-Sweeney) calls her try-hard literature professor an “asshole,” drops out of college (with only one semester left), and tries to extort her way back in so she can graduate on-time. Meanwhile, Alice-Heart finds out her white, mustachioed boyfriend, Lyman (Adam McElonie), has been cheating on her with a half-Filipino woman that looks a lot like Alice. “White dad?” the women ask one another when they awkwardly meet. After that stupid betrayal, Alice-Heart moves in with Tony (Tony McCall), a relatively Buddha-like photographer, who looks a lot like Lyman. Posters on characters’ walls for Licorice Pizza and The Dish and The Spoon make the kinds of comparisons film obsessives watching this were going to make anyway.

Lissa Carandang-Sweeney’s performance as Alice-Heart is all endearing, frazzled energy that complicates who she seems to be at the start of the movie, a kind of “it girl” to 30 or so people at Drexel University (“Alice-Heart!” pretty much everyone who runs into her exclaims). Carandang-Sweeney emits a howl of rage when she finds out her boyfriend Lyman’s been cheating in one scene and in another, nobly endures her mom telling her to get a job and grow up. A few moments give you the sense that Alice-Heart really, really cares about her pet rabbit.

Alice-Heart scrapes a great deal of humor (and eventually, bittersweet longing) out of situations that will be recognizable to anyone between the age of say, 20 and 60 who was ever mildly “cool” and imagined making art for a living. “Some parties are just meant to suck,” muses Tony, the most self-directed of these Philly fuck-arounds, after leaving a party that definitely sucked. “What are you disappointed in at this exact moment in time?” Alice later asks Tony. Holy jeez, this movie is charming.

This story was produced in partnership with The Baltimore Film Culture Incubator, an organization dedicated to supporting local film writing and facilitating movie-related happenings online and IRL.