Austin Film Festival 2019: Day 6
What happened to Day 5? I don’t know. I only count for a living. I’m off the clock. Give me a fuckin’ break.
Motherless Brooklyn
Motherless Brooklyn is a classic 1950s New York noir in every sense aside from one glaring exception. While most noirs feature a confident, suave Humphrey Bogart type as the leading man, this film stars Edward Norton doing a fucking Rain Man impression.
I was not expecting to enjoy this movie after seeing the trailer full of Norton’s Rain Man shtick, but I was pleasantly surprised. His weird ticks serve no real purpose to the story, but if you can get past them, Motherless Brooklyn is an absorbing, fast-paced mystery that harkens back to a time when studios invested in movies about people without superpowers. Norton actually gives a solid performance when he’s not freaking the fuck out, and the stacked supporting cast includes Bruce Willis, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Bobby Cannavale, Leslie Mann, Alec Baldwin, and Willem Dafoe.
Norton’s debut screenplay is intricate yet lean, as it creates a fully formed world without ever providing information that isn’t necessary to the outcome. Daniel Pemberton’s jazzy score creates a nostalgic mood that pulls the audience in and adds intrigue to every detail.
The film also looks at racial tensions in New York City in the 1950s and how they affected housing and infrastructure policy that have led to segregated, gentrified communities in America today. It’s not often that a period piece considers the real problems that plagued its actual time and place and their implications on current society.
Motherless Brooklyn is the type of intelligent, entertaining, adult studio film that hardly gets made anymore. It hits theaters this Friday, November 1st.
Apartment 413
Remember when I said that I hoped Peace was the worst movie I saw at this festival? This piece of shit came damn close. Apartment 413 is what would happen if a talentless college dude obsessed with The Shining and A Beautiful Mind decided to make a movie in his one bedroom apartment on a $10 budget. The film follows Marco, an unemployed 20-something living with his pregnant girlfriend. When she leaves for work, he sees odd things in his apartment and begins to question his sanity.
You’re not going to see this movie, so I’m going to spoil the shit out of it. The cold open of the film shows a zombie-like man brutally murdering his girlfriend with a hammer. DRAMATIC CUT TO TWO YEARS LATER. In that same apartment, Marco sees threatening notes on the walls, but he is unable to find them when his girlfriend returns home from work. He becomes frustrated and begins hallucinating people in his apartment that clearly aren’t there. As his anger builds, he becomes violent with his girlfriend, and he threatens to kill people in his life that he thinks have contributed to his problems.
In the only scene filmed outside of the apartment, he goes to the doctor, and she asks him to look for anything in his environment that may be emitting toxins that could be contributing to his mental issues. He determines that it must be his air conditioner, so he throws it out the window in a fit of panic. Miraculously, his hallucinations decrease, he stops beating his pregnant girlfriend, and he gets a job. Then just when things are looking up, his girlfriend vanishes into thin air because she was a fucking hallucination the whole damn time. Desperate to experience something representing human connection, he brings the air conditioner back into his apartment and takes a big huff of bacteria in hopes that his girlfriend will reappear.
Holy shit, this movie is stupid. It never references the cold open again. I guess that A/C unit had been in that apartment for a while? The lesson, kids, is that air conditioning is bad. Just open some windows. Or at least replace the damn filter every once in a while.
Michael Dixon is covering the Austin Film Festival because he has a crippling movie addiction, and he’d like to share it with you. See the rest of his festival coverage at the links below.
Editor’s note: Movie addiction is highly contagious. Symptoms include going to see two movies after getting off work at 7pm, writing about those movies at night, and going into work the next morning without any sleep. If you or a loved one is experiencing any of these symptoms, please consult a therapist immediately.
2019 Austin Film Festival Preview
Austin Film Festival 2019: Day 1
Austin Film Festival 2019: Day 2
Austin Film Festival 2019: Day 3
Austin Film Festival 2019: Day 4
Austin Film Festival 2019: Day 7
