Five From Tribeca 2019

by Jason Adams

The 2019 edition of the Tribeca Film Festival, which runs from April 24th to May 5th, announced their Feature Film line-up this week -- you can check out the entire thing right here. Once again yours truly, along with a couple of familiar TFE faces, will be covering, and glancing through what I've got coming to me I can already feel the tips of my toes and fingers tingling with expectation. There are a ton of goodies again! So many, many goodies, actually... there are 103 movies already announced... oh my god it's a lot. So much. Okay okay before I start hyperventilating let's narrow this down. Here are the 5 films I'm most looking forward to right off the bat...

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Beauty vs Beast: Lesbian Love Song

Jason Adams from MNPP here -- at the Tribeca Film Fest last year I weirdly reviewed two movies involving Alessandro Nivola and Orthodox Judaism. The first one is called To Dust and Nivola (along with his wife actress Emily Mortimer) produced it -- it stars Son of Saul's Géza Röhrig and Matthew Broderick as an extremely odd couple grappling with the afterlife. Here is my review, and you can watch the trailer over here. To Dust is finally hitting some theaters this weekend, and I highly recommend seeking it out. I really dig it.

The other movie I reviewed at Tribeca 2018 was Sebastian Lelio's Disobedience, which came out last year and which in a just world we'd be celebrating its several Oscar nominations just about now. Hey I did my part -- Disobedience got mentions in both end-of-year polls I have a say in, The Team Experience Awards here on this site as well as the Dorian Awards for the GALECA guild of LGBT critics. But being a great film is its own reward, and Disobedience will be remembered for a very long time as such. Now let's face off its Rachels -- McAdams is Esti, the one who stayed, and Weisz is Ronit, the one who went away...

survey tools

PREVIOUSLY Last week's Can You Ever Forgive Me poll was as close as two friends sweeping up cat turds could be, but Melissa McCarthy got the best of Richard E Grant in the end with 53% of the vote. Said /3rtful:

"Unprepared for how emotionally affected I would be by this movie. I think the casting of McCarthy and those initial cut trailers gave no clue of the emotional wallop this movie carries."

Review: Mary Shelley

by Jason Adams

In the summer of 1816 one of the most legendary of literary happenings occurred - the poet Percy Shelley and his wife Mary went to stay at the poet Lord Byron's house near Lake Geneva for the summer. Mary's step-sister Claire wrangled them an invite (or so she said) since she was having an affair with the spitefully torrid Lord himself. Also joining them at the house was the Lord's physician John Polidori, who also fancied himself somewhat of a writer. And birthed from those weeks of most gothic merrymaking was basically the entirety of the horror genre to come: Mary Shelley would come up with her lovely little monster Frankenstein, while Polidori would write "The Vampyre," the inspiration for a certain Bram Stoker a swift generation later.

The story of that time and place has been well-trod by fiction before...

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Review: "The Seagull"

by Jason Adams

Nina (Saoirse Ronan) is sweetly exasperated by Konstantin (Billy Howle), whose avant-garde play she has just acted (and flopped) in for a small crowd of friends and relations. "Nothing happens in your play," she says. "It's all people talking. You ought to add a love story."

Anton Chekov, who wrote the maybe-you've-heard-of-it 1895 play The Seagull upon which this movie is based, was of course making a joke at his own expense --The Seagull is really nothing but talk and love stories. Half a dozen love stories are all twisted up, a gordian knot of romantic entanglements...

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Tribeca: Mary Kay Place leads "Diane"

Tribeca has ended but we have a few more movies to talk about. Here's by Jason Adams with a movie to keep your eye out for...

Why is it so hard to describe why Kent Jones' Diane works so well? Twice just after seeing it I stumbled trying to do so. Just laying down the plot is insufficienct. It's about an older woman in a small town whose son is a drug addict and whose cousin is sick with cancer. But that makes it sound like something Lifetime coughed up. So you've gotta start with Diane herself. Veteran character actress Mary Kay Place plays her, and already you can feel it. The no-nonsense lived-in vibe of it. The wood grain. Just keep going from there...

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