Let's go to Fantastic Fest part I

five days in Austin

Thank you to everyone who shared their airplane movie stories; I cackled multiple times upon reading and will be sharing my findings soon. If you still want to contribute, the form is here.

I spent the last week in Austin, Texas at the Alamo Drafthouse’s Fantastic Fest, a movie festival that I screened submissions for this past year. Screening is the long and arduous project of viewing every submission and evaluating its merit, and I was basically doing the slush pile. I started doing festival screening during Covid, and so this is the first time I’m actually attending a festival in person. Fantastic Fest is a genre fest, and while there are a couple of goofy SyFy-adjacent features, it has also hosted premieres of Bong Joon-Ho and Paul Thomas Anderson movies. Basically, this is not the place for boring, melodrama awards fodder but for boundary-pushing filmmaking.

I watched 24 movies, not including around fifteen shorts. This will just be part one of my nine-day experience, you’ll just have to come back to find out what happened after (spoiler: I watched more movies).

Day 1

When my boarding time comes and there is neither staff nor an airplane in sight, I start to wonder if this is a real airline. I wish I could say I handled this with grace, and until a TikTok goes viral of a woman sobbing in JFK, I will. I get a flight nine hours later and arrive at my AirBNB at 2am, missing my first movie and the opening party.

Zoe Stein and Nacho Sánchez in Manticore, Hong Chau in The Menu

Day 2

My first actual day at the festival. It’s by far male-dominated; I haven’t seen such a disparity in restroom lines since I saw boxing at Madison Square Garden. Fittingly, I note some remarkably bad outfits. In Tevas and a chipped pedicure, I am in no position to judge but the battered David S. Pumpkins blazer and naval-print shorts are a little much for 11am. 

Movies of Note

Manticore, a thorny, difficult, and compelling movie about a man with monstrous impulses. I have not seen Spanish director Carlos Vermut’s other work but this convinces me I should.

The Menu, Mark Mylod of Succession makes a feature-length episode. A cute satire of fine dining, the exact type of movie you will watch on Hulu one night and say, “That was fun!” Nicholas Hoult gives Harry Styles a run for his bad accent money and Hong Chau (Driveways, Inherent Vice), as always, delivers.

Day 3

I discover the acute joy of riding electric scooters around Austin. This is the most fun I’ve ever had.

Movies of Note

The Banshees of Inisherin, Let Three Billboards be a distant, albeit painful, memory. This is a remarkable movie about a friend break-up on a small Irish island in 1923. Beautiful acting, some slightly grating “playwright humor,” and a delicious, earned resolution.

The miniscooter, Colin Farrell and Barry Keeoghan in The Banshees of Inisherin

Day 4

My electric scooter dies on the way to the theater and I coast through red lights before giving up. The secret screening tonight turns out to be Marvel’s latest, Werewolf By Night. Despite starring Gael García Bernal, it is complete and utter dogshit. I have not watched an entire Marvel movie in years but sometimes I’ll stumble on clips of them next to a director explaining how they were inspired by Casablanca or 2001: A Space Odyssey and be completely baffled. It’s like they only saw the Wishbone interpretation. Multiple people leave as soon as the movie was announced but I keep an open mind and stick it out for the 52 minute runtime. The leavers were right. No one in my theater claps. There’s a simulcast of the virtual Q&A with the director and I wish I was in the main theater so that I could boo him to his digital face. Dreck.

Movies of Note

Bones and All, so much more than just “Timmy’s cannibal movie.” A Badlands style road trip: very romantic, at points genuinely terrifying, and exceptionally well acted. There’s a really nice, soft quality in Taylor Russell’s lead performance of a teenager who has only ever been lonely; she speaks like someone who has learned about the world through reading. She also proves it is possible for someone to pull off teenage innocence despite being a decade older than the age she’s playing (Ben Platt wishes).

One and Four, rightfully will earn comparisons to all-star of gelid paranoia thrillers, The Thing but I think this is its own entity. A distraught forest ranger in the Tibetan Himalayas has to figure out which of three intruders is the forest police and which are the poachers. Really well-executed and under 90 minutes.

Day 5

There’s been all this excitement during the festival about how there is finally a good shark movie (it’s been all downhill since Jaws, according to the shark movie afficionados) and I’m excited to see it today. It’s horrible from top to bottom and also extremely inaccurate about sharks.

Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet in Bones and All, shark hype

Movies of Note

Something in the Dirt, the latest from indie duo Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson. They’ve never felt 100% for me but I liked how frustrating and intense this one is. Two neighbors experience a bizarre, semi-alien phenomenon in their apartment: is it real, or a collective delusion by two men who are masking their isolation and depression with delusions of grandeur?

Solomon King, a lost film discovered and restored after nearly forty years. Not technically a good movie. Sal Watts was a successful Oakland businessman, a capital-E eccentric who made a foray into filmmaking by writing, directing, and starring in this movie that features many of his own businesses. The movie is an elastic, funkadelic odyssey, the plot fading in and out of importance as the titular Solomon King strikes back against an oil baron who killed his lover. It’s a novelty piece, a vanity project from a time when an endeavor of this scope was nigh impossible. 

It’s odd to watch this the day after the bad Marvel movie; watching Solomon King I think about how our ability to record the world around us is a bizarre, unheralded privilege. Nobody made money off of Solomon King, and now that it’s been painstakingly restored, it's still not going to make anyone money. But I will take the poorly crafted, strangely Orientalist, and giddily misogynistic goofball—especially if it has an electrifying dance club moment, which this does—over some focus-tested, lack-witted Disney project every time.

Solomon King poster/cast of One and Four

Rarely do I get to write cliffhangers so I’m going to savor this opportunity. Tune in October 20 to see what else I saw! Did I crash a miniscooter? Did the final secret screening end up being terrible again? All this and more in two Thursdays’ time!