We Wish You A Merry Everything

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason on Holidays.

In the immortal words of Bela Lugosi what music the children of the night make, turning the Midnight section of the Tribeca Film Festival into my favorite playground at the fest. Happy times with horror friends! So it was with some consternation when I saw this year the fest has given us a smaller swing-set upon which to swing - there are only six films showing under the "Midnight" banner (and it's a stretchto label at least two of them as Horror).

But wait! This year's opening film of the Midnight program is Holidays, an anthology consisting of eight short films (each one about a different celebratory day of the calendar) by eight different directing and writing teams, so I suppose that doubles their numbers, in a way. We'll take what we can get.

And with Holidays what we get, as is the usual case with anthology films, is a mixed bag - some treats, some tricks, a couple of candied apples with razor wire wrapped around them, a detached finger or ten. Beginning with "Valentine's Day" (directed by the duo that brought us last year's terrific Starry Eyes) and spanning all the way to "New Year's Eve" (which was written by the Starry Eyes team as well, making them the only repeat offenders of the bunch) the film makes microcosmic the fetishization of rituals and rites so annually played out in scary storytelling; think Halloween, Friday the 13th, Silent Night Deadly Night, or Eli Roth's short film "Thanksgiving"  -- for every day a bloodbath!

Truth be told there's only one true stinker in the bunch...

... and that one comes from the biggest name - Kevin Smith's short for "Halloween" is maybe more lead-footed and inept than anything he's ever sharted into existence (and that's clearly saying a lot given his track record). The holiday itself is briefly mentioned and immediately forgotten - whereas John Carpenter's Halloween set the horror movie standard for a generation, Kevin Smith's "Halloween" is just an excuse for one long scatological prank, delivered with all the finesse of an enema through the eye-socket.

That travesty is thankfully lost in the middle of the year, sandwiched between some mostly very good stuff. My guess is that "Easter," from director Nicholas McCarthy (The Pact), will probably lead to the most improbable nightmares, given its twisted mash-up of the religious and secular sides of the so-called moveable feast - you'll never look at the twitching nose of the Easter Bunny the same way again! There's also a palpable sense of dread poured over "Father's Day," which stars Jocelin Donahue (previously so great in The House of the Devil) as a young woman in extended mourning over the disappearance of daddy dearest.

That said it's "Mother's Day" (from director Sarah Adina Smith, making it the lone entry made by a woman) that I found myself most captivated by, even if it was ultimately frustrating - there is a killer idea buried in this story's solar-plexus that's begging for full-length treatment, and the abbreviated way its handled here might actually do it a disservice. "Mother's Day" tells the story of a woman who can't stop getting pregnant, and I think it could be an abortion fable for the ages if nursed to completion - it needs more time and more space to gestate. So this is basically me begging its makers to double back and make this baby proper-like. You've got half a miracle here, people! Push! Push!

Grade: B to Z-

Comments

[Jesus Alonso]

I was kind of expecting Smith's to be the most controversial part of the combo... I have to say, I love his work, all together, despite some flawed outings... he's a man that can show real balls. To my taste, he made three masterpieces: "Clerks", "Chasing Amy" and "Red State", and some truly great films, specially "Clerks 2" and "Dogma". He's a director not really afraid to take risks ("Tusk") and that is following Carpenter's path, by the numbers: after a disappointing relationship with studios ("Cop Out", which frankly, isn't THAT bad), Kevin has gone full independent, no matter the cost (pun intended), and is having a quite unique career. If he could only downgrade his ego, a bit... Have yet to see Holidays, but Smith's strenght has always been - as Allen's - in his writting, and sometimes can get electric performances by his actors, (Joey Lauren Addams in Chasing Amy, Michael Parks in both Red State and Tusk.. all of them, robbed of Oscar noms), so Smith is one of the not-so-many names in Hollywood (?) that gets my automatic interest on anything he has to say.

So, ready for a likely disappointment, but that doesn't change the fact Smith is one of the few truly independent and unique american autors at work, today.

[Jason]

Jesus -- I always feel bad picking on Kevin Smith for the reasons you state about his independence; he has stuck to his guns and managed to have an impressive career keeping his own voice. In my most forgiving moments I try to take him as his own one-man Troma, or as kind of a bro version of Roger Corman maybe? (That's a nice way of dissing 90% of the acting in his films.)

I just have hated, HATED, nearly everything he's made all the same. I did like Clerks well enough once upon a time but I haven't re-watched it in years, mostly because his output ever since has been so relentlessly off-putting. He's just clearly never going to speak to me.

But yeah, bless him for doing what he does his way. I just need to stay out of it :)