Tribeca 2022: B.J. Novak's "Vengeance"

by Jason Adams

Weirdly conservative and as profound as a midnight tweet-storm during a Dexedrine binge, I give you (no seriously, take it away from me) actor B.J. Novak’s writer/director debut Vengeance. This feels like a movie that Elon Musk will just absolutely adore... and please never defile my memory by thinking I mean that as a compliment. A wannabe Coens-esque satire of red-state/blue-state warfare and the champagne simps caught in the middle, Vengeance ultimately reads like a love letter to "Both Sides"-ism that ventures nothing so gains a great plains worth of nothing in bold-type return...

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Tribeca 2022: David Lynch is The Man Behind the Curtain in "Lynch / Oz"

by Jason Adams

Like many of you I have deeply embedded childhood memories of watching The Wizard of Oz on television as a child. And probably also like many of you the film was presented to me as a generational hand-off, a passing of the cinematic baton. My mom was a lifelong fan, and now twas my turn to become the latest Friend of Dorothy (if she only knew). That yellow brick road stretches in one ear and out the other across eighty entire years of movie-lovers, mother to son to son to daughter and on to every Auntie Em adjacent, with something in there for everybody. I can trace my love of Horror Movies right to it – how many nightmares have those short-jacketed cater-waiter flying monkeys stormed through? Others, probably you, can trace your love of the Movie Musical from sepia-toned Kansas where Judy first regaled us of rainbows...

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Tribeca 2022: "Land of Dreams" Gives Sheila Vand The Star Turn She Has Been Deserving

by Jason Adams

A splendidly surreal spin on the immigrant experience, Land of Dreams stars the always-great Sheila Vand, best known as the burqa-rocking vampire in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. In the new film she plays Simin, an Iranian-American artist turned census worker in the near-ish future.

She's been tasked with recording the dreams of the people the government’s keeping track of. Not dream as in “The American Dream,” not dream like, “One day I hope I will become a doctor.” But the actual literal dreams that these people dream as they sleep at night...

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Tribeca 2022: "The Lost Weekend: A Love Story"

by Jason Adams

Time is a funny thing, slippery. An elastic band behind our eyes that can stretch as far back as we can remember before snapping us back to here and now -- sometimes gentle, sometimes with centrifugal violence like a start. There's no logic to what lingers longer than it lasted, and to what whooshes by -- the best moments a single glance etched in stone, while the worst nightly nestled beside us. To John Lennon his eighteen month romance with his personal assistant May Pang circa a 1973 split with Yoko Ono he called it "a lost weekend" -- meanwhile for Peng here she is fifty years later recounting the experience for the documentary called The Lost Weekend: A Love Story, premiering this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival.

That slippery sense of time weaves its way through directors Eve Brandstein, Richard Kaufman, and Stuart Samuels' fascinating ninety-seven-minute doc...

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What's a Vamp Gotta Do

by Jason Adams

It's been a lousy couple of weeks for Vampires and the people who love them -- first there was Morbius, full stop. Then there were those pretty iffy-looking photos from the upcoming AMC series adapting Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire. And then this week the bloodsuckers we love to watch suck have taken two more great big hits...

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