Impolex | Dir. Alex Ross Perry | Starring: Riley O'Bryan, Kate Lyn Sheil, Ben Shapiro, Bruno Meyrick Jones, Boy Berkeley, Brandon Prince and Eugene Mirman as the voice of the talking octopus | 35mm | 73min | USA | 2009 | English
Impolex tells the story of Tyrone S., a United States soldier in Operation Paperclip, the mission to locate and retrieve German rockets and rocket science after the end of World War II. Tyrone is tasked with finding what he believes are the last V-2’s. Lost in the woods of an undefined European country, people from Tyrone’s past begin to appear in unusual ways, bearing strange tidings. A loved one he abandoned for the war is especially prominent in Tyrone’s journey, as is a fellow soldier and a mysterious man with tidings of the present and the future that are not yet known to Tyrone.
Impolex is an unjustifiable blend of the bare bones realism of John Ford’s WWII documentaries and the glorious stupidity of Abbot and Costello.
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The Zone | Dir. Joe Swanberg | Starring: Lawrence Michael Levine, Sophia Takal, Kate Lyn Sheil, Kentucker Audley, Joe Swanberg | Blu-Ray | 71min | 2011 | USA | English
With this sexually explicit meta-movie, the prolific and influential Midwest-based filmmaker Joe Swanberg concludes his trilogy of self-reflexive films that began with Silver Bullets and continued in Art History. Another look at the inter-personal relationships that develop among cast and crew during the filmmaking process, The Zone's first half is an ultra low-budget reworking of Pasolini's classic Teorema: an outsider (Kentucker Audley) visits the home of a young couple and their friend (Green cast members Lawrence Michael Levine, Sophia Takal, and Kate Lyn Sheil) and proceeds to seduce all of them. The fourth wall recedes in the second half, revealing a filmmaker-in-crisis (played by Swanberg, naturally) as he attempts to navigate the treacherous terrain of directing sex scenes featuring actors who are his personal friends. Swanberg's disarmingly loose and improvisational style is the stamp of an artist who is genuinely curious about how and why some movies are made. His work continually invites the audience to join in on the artistic process and go beyond just watching.
Q&A after the film with Alex Ross Perry, Kate Lyn Sheil, Sophia Takal and Lawrence Michael Levine