On this Off-Topic episode, Nolan is joined by Ben McBride, Emily von Seele, and Paul Farrell to discuss a couple movies seen at Fantastic Fest 2024, catch up on new discoveries and rewatches from this Halloween season, and lament our descent into 4K movie madness.
Bodies move gracefully with intense and immaculate precision. Dance, after all, is a discipline, its craft dictated by strategic maneuver. Terry Gionoffrio is nothing if not a dancer. But accompanying such a contract is the high-risk, high-reward possibilities of success and failure — a dream realized or a future destroyed.
Love is an odyssey, fraught with all manner of earthly obstacles — including chainsaws.
Sander Maran’s Chainsaws Were Singing is a wildly chaotic musical gorefest, harvesting energy from both the gloriously gooey work of a young Peter Jackson and the emotive sensibilities of the Broadway stage. A charming amalgam of a later Texas Chain Saw Massacre sequel and Cannibal! The Musical (1993), the film spends its runtime reveling in the harmonic dissonance created by the many competing tones that flit across the ever-swirling, blood-soaked frame.
AJ operates in a world fueled exclusively by irreverent whimsy and limitless imagination, which is why it is so funny that he spends his days eating toast in his kitchen, soup with his married friends, and, as a treat, frequenting the local dog park. AJ’s undoing is this very commitment to the simplicity of a comforting routine, an affront to the unnamed cosmic forces that govern his odd universe and one that must be rectified through the kind of heroes’ trials that might’ve inspired Odysseus, Luke Skywalker, or even Homer Simpson to run for mayor too.