Alexandre O. Phillippe also made 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene, Memory: The Origins of Alien and The People vs. George Lucas, so he gets how to make a movie obsessed movie. Featuring filmmakers Karyn Kusama, Rodney Ascher, Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, John Waters and critic Amy Nicholson, his latest documentary Lynch/Oz attempts to figure out David Lynch by way of looking at Victor Fleming’s 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.

Winds, narrated by Nicholson, explains the motifs that Lynch has taken from The Wizard of Oz and where they appear within his films, such as the curtains, mysterious wind and red shoes. Membranes follows, as Room 237 and The El Duce Tapes director Rodney Ascher explains that the literal walls — membranes — within Lynch’s films are thinner than the ones in our reality.

John Waters’ segment, Kindred, explains how alike the two directors are and how they came up within the same independent system, as well as their famous Big Boy meeting. Like Lynch, Waters can show moments in all of his movies that come directly from Oz. Waters once described the movie to Today as “Girl leaves drab farm, becomes a fag hag, meets gay lions and men that don’t try to molest her, and meets a witch, kills her. And unfortunately — by a surreal act of shoe fetishism — clicks her shoes together and is back to where she belongs. It has an unhappy ending.” Yet his love for the film runs deep — he has an autographed Margaret Hamilton photo on his wall — and he also added that his favorite moment is “When they throw the water on the witch, she says, “Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?” That line inspired my life. I sometimes say it to myself before I go to sleep, like a prayer.”

Multitudes belongs to Karyn Kusama, who directed Girlfight and Jennifer’s Body, and it truly added to my appreciation of Lynch’s Mulholland Drive as its connections to Dorothy were explored. Similarly, Judy Garland is the subject of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead’s (Spring, The Endless, Something In the Dirt) segment Judy, explaining how Lynch uses names like Judy (Jowday) to be perhaps the final nemeis of Twin Peaks and Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet.

The last segment, Dig, has David Lowry — whose Pete’s Dragon is perhaps the best remake of a child’s movie I’ve seen — discuss his feelings on Lynch.

Some may see this as too scholarly. Others as something like extras on a DVD. As for me, it was perfect, a way of reframing cinema by larning of influence and seeing art in a totally new way.

Of all the Motern Media movies I’ve watched, this one hit me the hardest.

Mitch Owens (Matt Farley, who co-wrote the script with director Charles Roxburgh) is back in town from Nashville, but if any of the small towns that Farley and Roxburgh have had an air of menace, Tritown, the setting for Heard She Got Married is outright dangerous; strange women who could be Tara or Tara are soliciting mailmen with old fashioned nude Polaroids, old bandmates are new enemies and hope is fleeting.

Man, this movie is amazing.

Mitch was making it in Music City, but for some reason he’s back home. His old friend Tom Scalzo (Phil Kelnofer) has married his ex-girlfriend, one of the two women named Tara, and only plays the bass to record jingles for her family’s used car lot. The only collaborator he can find is new guy in town Van Hickman (Chris Peterson), the very same mailman who just got an envelope full of nude photos from one of the Taras, even if he never shows Mitch.

Farley has described this movie as a suburban noir and that’s the best description I have as well. It’s just strange, like small town life is, as the people who stayed behind cast off their high school identities and marry anyone else who stayed, while outsiders come back with pre-conceived notions that they can go back to their old life or use their status to rule the town’s music scene, at which point 18 people come see their show at Proctor Farms.

Despite hanging out with him, Mitch suspects that Van is guilty of something. Anything. Even after he brings in his friend Officer Mayo (Jay Mayo) and Al Trevino (Kevin McGee) to discuss the case — and they don’t suspect a thing — he just knows that something bad is going to happen. He broods overlooking the Cathedral, a utility shed where everyone once partied in high school and made out, realizing that if life hasn’t passed him by, it’s certainly fixing to.

My town had a rock that everyone partied on down in the river, painted with the Italian flag, a place where you’d get one sip and the cops would shine their lights and you’d run. I moved to the city, then a smaller city and still go home but don’t feel any pull to remain. The people I graduated with now drink in the same bars their parents drank in, have the same issues their parents did and drive over that bridge and look down on the rock and think the same wistful past nostalgic thoughts and then remember that a few weeks ago, they found that body on the loading dock at the grocery store across the street. And man, they changed the name of it and a corporation bought it and the sausage doesn’t taste the same any more.

The ending of this film and its bleakness as characters walk away and the camera slides away from them just devastated me. Not as much as Matt playing the song that gives this movie its title. As someone who has written songs about people in my life and tried to keep it as obscure as I could, this moment is incredible, then taken down when Tara asks him to no longer sings songs about her.

Well, one of the Taras, anyway.

You can watch this on Vimeo or buy the Gold Ninja Video blu ray of Metal Detector Maniac which has this as a bonus movie.

This is the fourth Motern Media movie I’ve watched this week and just might be my favorite. There are so many stories in here all working together toward one conclusion, but this is a mixture of lost love, family tragedy, musical comedy, science fiction and just plain good old fashioned weirdness all mixed up and made into something just about perfect.

This time, we’re in Tussleville, a place where Walter Moore (Matt Farley) hosts a singing show that’s always live, never taped, and has an upcoming appearance by the girl who got away, Alyssa Caitlyn Pouliot (Elizabeth M. Peterson). Meanwhile, Walter and his cousin Poopy (Chris Peterson) — a grown man who walks around with a blanket — learn that Uncle Dan (Kevin McGee), the man whose ghost visited them throughout their childhoods and made them learn the rules of the Magic Spot may still be saved from his place outside of time and given a chance at heaven. The secret? You have to use the Magic Spot in winter because your body needs to acclimate to this dimension’s temperature as when they are an observer in the Magic Spot, they grow beyond cold. This is why Uncle Dan somehow died of hyperthermia in the summertime.

Walter wants to also use the Magic Spot to remember what Alyssa wore the last time they went on a date two years ago, a condition she’s given if he ever wants to woo her again. Maybe it’s cheating using the Magic Spot to see her in the past, but maybe we should also forgive someone in love.

Most time travel movies upset me because they set up a logic and then step all over that logic. In Magic Spot, Farley and Charles Roxburgh have created a movie that works on whatever level you want to watch it: as a Motern Media fan, as a lover of indie film, as someone looking for a romantic comedy, as a time travel story and so on. It’s also got some of the best songs I’ve heard in their movies.

I don’t want to spoil the ending, but I have no problem admitting that I cried. I love that this movie could do that to me as well as the fact that it celebrates analog moments. A TV show that only airs live, a place that allows you to silently view the past, a band that plays in the woods only for themselves, all of these things celebrate the moments in life that reward us without being captured for anyone else.

Whatever these guys make, I’m here for it.

Magic Spot is playing as part of the Burnt Ends part of Fantastic Fest. This is part of Molten Media, which has produced independent feature films since the late 1990s. According to Fantastic Fest, “the idiosyncratic cinema of Charles Roxburgh and Matt Farley pay homage to the regional low budget horror films of the late 1970s and early 1980s as they unravel bizarre tales set in and around lightly-fictionalized small New England towns. Akin to the manner in which John Waters and Kevin Smith cultivated their cult universes out of tight-knit communities of vivid personalities, Charlie and Farley’s films imagine a unique portrait of Americana as they recruit an eccentric ensemble of folksy friends and family to endearingly perform the offbeat vernaculars and campy melodrama of their wittily verbose scripts.”

Fantastic Fest Burnt Ends has awarded the filmmakers with the first annual Golden Spatula in recognition of their creative spirit, and a partial retrospective of their inventive catalog which includes Local Legends and Metal Detector Maniac as well as more contemporary works which pursue a distinct, but just as wonderfully eclectic and wry comic sensibility.

You can get a virtual badge here.

Based on the Danish young adult novel by Janne Teller, Nothing may be the best movie I saw at Fantastic Fest and was definitely the darkest.

A young boy named Pierre Anthon (Harald Kaiser Hermann) has seen the inherent purposelessness of life and decided to climb a tree and stay up there like Zacchaeus or a prepubescent Simon of the Desert. His friends are concerned about him and try to get him to climb down. Some throw rocks. He stays there.

Led by Agnes (Vivelill Søgaard Holm), the schoolchildren still want to prove him wrong, so they gather a heap of meaning, each offering sacrifices with deep personal meaning. It starts with typical teenage things but soon the sacrifices grow dark and even murderous.

Much like Kids or Peanuts — truly the only time both have been used in a comparison — parents aren’t there. It’s these kids building a monument to something, anything, facing the idea we all must that the world is not safe and no one can protect us.

Directed by Trine Piil Christensen — who also wrote this movie — and Seamus McNally, Nothing makes me wonder how much I really want kids because when they get this old, how will I talk them out of doing something like this? I figure my kid will be the one up in the tree, but let’s be serious. He, she or they will be the one down in the basement watching slashers with us.

Nothing is playing at Fantastic Fest.

You can get a virtual badge here.

In the Trout family kitchen in Redhook, Brooklyn on one day in 1948, father is seeking a new job and Junior returns home after being gone for twelve years. Seems normal, but things spiral out of control. I didn’t expect to watch an Americana play dealing with poverty and family regret at Fantastic Fest but here we are. Director and writer Gavin Field has constructed a story of a family with nothing except debt, guilt, alcoholism and painful memories.

It’s intriguing that this is basically a stage performance being filmed, all set within one hot summer kitchen, a place where all the family can do is look out onto the harbor and just stew, ready to explode in rage or howl with sadness at any second…or just sit there, trapped in ennui and silence. It’s no summer blockbuster but in no way does it intend to be. This is film with a mission of emotion, storytelling and showing how a story can be built within one setting and a singular family.

Brutal Season is playing at Fantastic Fest as part of the Burnt Ends selections.

You can get a virtual badge here. You can learn more on the official site.

Directed by Paolo Strippoli (A Classic Horror Story) and written by Strippoli, Jacopo Del Giudice and Gustavo Hernández, Flowing is about a strange phenomenon in Rome: every time it rains, the manholes unleash a fog of unknown origin and composition. Whoever breathes this gas must deal with their most repressed feelings.

The Morel family are probably the best — or the worst — people to huff in those aromas. Ever since the death of matriarch Cristina in an accident a year ago, Thomas and their son Enrico have stopped speaking, father blaming son and son retreating into violence and an affair with an older woman who reminds him of his lost mother. The youngest, Barbara, is still physically dealing with the ramifications of the accident and reminds Enrico of his failure every time he sees her.

Now, as the fog grows, they must all face whatever is in the past if they hope to make it to tomorrow.

This looked gorgeous and man, it gets dark. Interesting idea and you know, stay out of the sewers.

Flowing is playing at Fantastic Fest.

You can get a virtual badge here.

Tetteh Quarshie was a Ghanaian blacksmith and agriculturalist directly responsible for the introduction of cocoa to Ghana, which today constitute one of the major export crops of the country’s economy. His mother died giving birth to him and he went up against the colonial masters from Spain who had placed a death penalty on anyone who smuggles cocoa seeds off the island of Fernando Po in Guinea. Quarshie did exactly that, bringing the seeds home and going directly against the colonial enslavers.

Director and writer Frank Fiifi Gharbin has transformed the life of this real person into historical fantasy, making a story of the past vibrant and exciting for today’s audiences. The joy of a film festival is the chance to discover new things from countries that I may never learn about. Seek this out and do the same.

Heroes of Africa is playing at Fantastic Fest as part of the Burnt Ends selections.

You can get a virtual badge here.