Starring: Germain Arroyo, Victor Rivers, Marisa Davila, Brody Wellmaker
Grade: B
This year’s Indy Film Fest has previewed a variety of coming-of-age films. Movies like Last Days of Summerand No Right Waypresent an original take on the familiar genre by shedding light on unfamiliar territory. Clocked is another film in this genre as it shows the struggles of growing up through gender and sports.
Starring: Ava Acres, Chelsea Bo, Eliza Coupe, Sufe Bradshaw
Grade: B
There are plenty of films about the relationship between a young adolescent and older adult figure, with one of my favorites being 2021’s C’mon C’mon. There’s something about this slice-of-life format that’s always such a joy to experience. Seeing two unlikely protagonists bond over their shared issues is constantly heartwarming, no matter how many times it’s portrayed on film. While the structure of No Right Way parallels similar films of the genre, this edition brings a newfound perspective that feels extremely fresh.
Faith in a higher power can manifest itself in unique ways. In Elizabeth Mirzaei’s enlightening documentary Natalia, faith is personified in its titular charismatic subject as she trains for the sisterhood in the Byzantine Catholic church. For most men and women of faith, they’re called into the life because they view it as just that – a calling. But for Natalia, a 29-year old from rural Ohio, the answer is more complicated.
Below is my conversation with Alex Rodgers, the first-time director and writer of Last Days of Summer, a drama shot in and around Indianapolis. We discuss the state of the film industry in Indiana, the inspirations for the film, and learning experiences from making his first film. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Ben Sears: You’re an Indiana native and you’ve been working in and around the film scene for many years. How do you feel about the state of Hoosier filmmaking today?
Alex Rodgers: I would love to highlight the work that my colleagues Kurtis Bowersock, Zac Cooper, Victoria Britton, Zachariah Haske, and Matt McMahon are doing with A Few Friends. What they do is really cool for the narrative space. Zac’s feature It Happened One Weekend was a real inspiration point for our film. I think it really showed what the community can do when it comes together and works within the constraints of a small budget. Our biggest resources and strengths are our collaborations with each other and I think Indy is really good about showing up for its own.
There’s also a lot of really interesting work being done in the documentary space by people like Will Wertz, Kolton Dallas, Hannah and Myers Lindgren. Seeing their work really inspired me to dip my toes into the short doc space going forward. A few other people whose work I admire are Jake Huber who continually raises the bar for music videos and spec pieces in the city. Matt Spear’s short film Love, Grandma was one of the most beautifully shot things I’ve seen come out of Indy and just an incredibly impressive narrative debut. I’ve also had the pleasure of being on set with Joe Frank, an incredible DP, cam-op, 1st AC, you name it. He’s the man. Nick Kartes is a gaffer who I got to be on set with once who is just a treasure trove of knowledge and skill. I could go on. All in all, Indy is filled with massively talented people who are producing work that inspires me on a daily basis. My relationships with the Few Friends crew in particular are what led me to be able to do this film at all. They were there every step of the way and just as responsible as I am for getting another narrative feature in the books for Indy. I hope that our community continues to collaborate, grow, and uplift each other while raising the bar for the level of work we are known for. Indy is a great film city. The rest of world just might not know it yet, but we do.
BS: You filmed most of Last Days of Summer in the Indy neighborhood of Woodruff Place. Was there any creative choice that went behind that, or was it more because of logistics?
AR: I lived in Woodruff Place for 4 out of the 10 years that I’ve lived in Indianapolis. It’s a beautiful neighborhood, it used to be its own town, it’s very historically preserved, so a lot of the houses are incredibly interesting and historical. So from an aesthetic standpoint, we couldn’t have picked a better spot. Kurtis, the cinematographer, has lived there with his family for I don’t know how many years, but he knows everybody in the neighborhood, so it was easy to secure the locations and film on the street. It was like we were filming in our neighborhood, so it never felt like we were trespassing in any way, or co-opting a space.
BS: You didn’t feel like you didn’t belong there.
AR: Yea, it felt like we were just making a movie in the neighborhood, and we got a lot of support from the people in the neighborhood. Everybody that we talked to about the project seemed excited by the idea of it. I think people who know of Woodruff, and live in Woodruff, are pretty passionate about it. It’s a real gem in Indy.
BS: Just from driving through the neighborhood, it seems kind of unique here in Indy. It’s a historic place, with really old, really beautiful homes. But there’s a newer vibe to it, without being gentrified, so there’s that extra juxtaposition that you get within the film, which you’d get if you’re in Indy.
AR: I grew up in a small town, and something about the suburbs of a small town was really interesting as a setting to me. And I feel like Woodruff supplied that. It matched the vision in my head. Plus, I was living in Woodruff when I was writing the film, so I kind of wrote with the idea of filming there.
BS: Your crowdfunding page states that you wanted Last Days of Summer to feel like a “love letter to the Midwest”. How did you envision that coming out in the film?
AR: I think, in the small town feel, and the sensibilities of the characters, especially the young characters. In Summer’s character, and Johnny’s character, there’s a sort of sense of something more being out there. Growing up in a small town, I relied on my imagination a lot, like wanting more from the world than you have on your plate. There’s something about that which was interesting to me, and the beauty and simplicity of a small town life. There’s something really nice about knowing all of your neighbors on a first-name basis, but there can be cons to that as well. I’ve always been interested in exploring that within small communities.
BS: There is that kind of feeling when you grow up so close to family and relatives. One of the biggest takeaways I had with the film was in the generational trauma, passing the mistakes of the adults down to the their kids. That’s something that’s kind of midwestern, but not exclusively so.
AR: Exactly. I think an example of that would be in Summer’s character, and her mom, Kim, has a really bad taste in men, and I think Summer kind of reflects that.
BS: When I was watching the film, it reminded me a lot of some of Sofia Coppola’s films. And you had listed on the crowdfunding page that The Virgin Suicides was an inspiration for the film. Would you say Sofia Coppola has been an influence for you?
AR: Absolutely. I think, especially her earlier work like The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation are some of my top films of all time. The Virgin Suicides was maybe the single biggest influence on this movie, out of any other film that we were influenced by. It influenced a lot of the creative decisions we made, from certain frames to the colors. The tonality of The Virgin Suicides, some of the storytelling techniques, like looking back on an event that had such an impact on some of these characters and this community, those were some things that I took in the writing process pretty early on. Initially, the narration was going to be from Ricky’s point of view, but that changed over the course of production.
BS: What made you want to shift the focus of that?
AR: I don’t remember what we came up against, but there was some limitation from Ricky’s point of view, so it didn’t make sense for him to have all of the information I wanted the narrator to communicate. So making the narrator omniscient, or making it someone from the neighborhood that’s telling it from a future perspective, after they have all the details, that made more sense from an informational standpoint.
BS: Much like The Virgin Suicides, adding the omniscient narrator, and looking back at something which is, in essence a tragedy. But there’s also something kind of beautiful about it all, and there’s that juxtaposition within Last Days of Summer.
AR: I think that film just has so many things I admire. I just rewatched it again recently. It’s so heavy, but it’s so good at communicating these feelings of love and yearning and being young, but feeling trapped. I was really drawn to how it was able to communicate those things. The parents’ relationship to the children in that movie is really fascinating. They love their children, and they’re trying to do right by them, but it leads to the worst outcome. I think there’s something really interesting about trying and failing within those relationships.
BS: Last Days of Summer is your first feature, and you’re working with a lot of newer and first-time actors. Did you learn anything about yourself while making this, or what to do/what not to do on future projects?
AR: The whole process was a lot of learning, and trying and failing on my end. This was my first time working with a team of this size, and being at the head of the ship. We were super blessed with who we got; I’m incredibly proud of the cast and the performances they gave.
My buddy Arman, who plays Johnny, we went to college together. We’ve been friends for 10 years now, and he’s been in anything I’ve made since then. He’s like the De Niro to my Scorsese, so I always write with him in mind, and his younger brother Refik has been getting into theater, and I was able to see a couple of his performances. So when I wrote the film, I wrote it with them in mind for the brothers. We used Backstage to cast a lot of the talent. That’s how we found Celina, who plays Summer, and Teresa, who plays her mom. We were able to find people who had more experience than what I was used to working with, so that was really cool to work with them and see their ideas and methods. With every actor, and every crew member, everyone’s got their own mode of thinking, and their approach, so a lot of the directing was communication and people management. Trying to figure out what the person needs from you to get to their best place. I don’t know if I have any specific takeaways, but I think it’s a case-by-case basis, and I think for us, the relationships were such a huge part of this movie. It was like a family dynamic; we shot almost every day for 20 days, so everyone got really close really quickly.
I wish we had more time for rehearsals, I think in the future, I’ll do more rehearsals, and a lot of the people I worked with on this liked that idea. So that’s one thing I’d be curious to do, trying to work out some of the kinks in a safer environment. It’s a high-wire act.
Last Days of Summer will premiere as the opening night film at Indy Film Fest on April 24 at 7:30pm at the Living Room Theater in Indianapolis.Buy tickets here.Alex Rodgers’ documentary short film Daniel will also screen at the festival and can be watched virtually and in-person.Buy tickets here.
You could probably count the number of meaningful conversations had throughout the entirety of Bloom, on one hand, and that’s not a criticism. Writer and director Mark Totte structures the film as a kind of Malick-esque journey that places heavy emphasis on its visuals and the overall vibes in any given scene. Bloom tells the story of Kate (Kate Braun), a middle-aged grandmother in Milan, Indiana, and her inescapable desire to be free. On a whim, and without a word of warning to her husband, she sets out in her car with her dog Storm and heads west. When she talks to her son Brent, she lies by saying she’s stopped at his place in St. Louis (he’s out of town), and keeps on driving for a destination unknown. Along the way, we see flashbacks to her early, carefree days, touring the country in a van with her musician boyfriend/husband. Totte manages to effectively showcase the feelings at play in the present and past, but the film could have used a little extra narrative push to explain Kate’s sudden emotional turmoil. Still, Bloom doesn’t go for easy sentimentality in the way some micro-indies often do, and it’s all the better for it. In the few dialogue heavy scenes, the words come out naturally, without underlining the themes at play. This is a confident debut, featuring a solid performance from Braun, which will be well worth the price of admission.
You can never really go home again. That’s the enduring sentiment in Hellcat, the film from first-time writer-director Jack Lugar that explores one man’s long-simmering regrets, and how it’s manifested in those around him. Edward Paul Fry stars as Ricky Heller aka “Hellcat”, a musician who left his small town behind to make it big. When he returns back home, he has to come to grips with the life he left behind, and those he left in his wake. Why he forsook his hometown is best left unspoiled, but it touches on a man’s unspoken grief for lost love. The production quality won’t win any Oscars, but worse movies get made for more money every year, and it comes from a place of genuine emotion, which is what counts most at the end of the day.
When non-Hoosiers think of Indiana, they likely consider first the more notable aspects: the Indianapolis 500, our professional sports teams, and our often problematic politics. But what Liminal: Indiana in the Anthropocene explores are the more under-sung features. Entirely shot with drone footage and without any dialogue or talking points, it’s a documentary that forces you to consider newer perspectives on not just Indiana but our relationship with the land in general. The film is divided into various sections by the featured subject matter – one focuses on oil refineries, one focuses on transportation, one on farming, et cetera, and composer Nate Utesch’s score changes with each vignette. It’s a deceptively simple but effective concept for a documentary, and it shows outsiders and Hoosiers alike an idea of Indiana’s modern landscape.
If you want a little star power in your Heartland experience, look no further than Late Bloomers, which stars the one and only Karen Gillan. She stars as Louise, an aimless 28-year old who breaks her hip after an ill-advised drunken trip to an ex’s house. In the hospital, she makes a connection with Antonina (Malgorzata Zajaczkowska), an elderly Polish woman who speaks no English. Their relationship stars off rocky but due to Louise’s perseverance, they strike up an unlikely bond. Gillan navigates Louise’s shifting tones throughout, from youthful naiveté to righteous indignation, and handling the comedic and dramatic beats. First-time director Lisa Steen, working from a script by Amy Greenfield, doesn’t tread new ground narratively speaking, but there’s a warmth to be felt within the film that carries it through. Music plays a big part in Louise and Antonina’s experiences, and the scenes where the characters simply let the music take over rank among the better of the film. I often found myself smiling during these moments, regardless of how predictable the film around it is.
7000 Miles feels similar to Late Bloomers, in that it’s another story of generational understanding, but the former is less successful in execution than the latter. The film follows a young pilot named Jo (Alixzandra Dove) as she returns to her native Hawaii after the death of her grandfather. When her grandmother Meli (Wendie Malick), who essentially raised her, begins having memory issues, Jo begins to discover parts of Meli’s hidden past. Jo also begins reconnecting with a childhood crush who makes her realize she should fight harder to make her dreams a reality. It’s a film that shares a bit with Sweet Home Alabama but also includes a goofily sincere line like “She was the greatest hero of all time!” when referencing Amelia Earhart. Characters are broadly written without ever really investigating them below the surface, and the plot moves in predictable directions from the get-go. Malick and Dove perform amicably together and separately, but there’s a more introspective film to be made about regrets and grief than what’s on display in 7000 Miles. I’ve seen worse films from major film festivals, and that’s about the nicest thing I can muster to say.
Don’t go into New Life expecting a straight-up horror film. Rather, it plays more like an outbreak thriller for most of its runtime. Sure, there are some solid horror moments to be found, but first-time writer and director John Rosman prioritizes the story over the scares. The film follows a game of cat and mouse as Jessica (Hayley Erin) goes on the run through northern America, while Elsa (Sonya Walger), a government fixer, is tasked with bringing her in. What causes the chase is best left unsaid, but Rosman doesn’t overstuff the narrative with unnecessary details. And he throws in some neat visual tricks to liven up the spy chatter when Elsa is on the road. New Life doesn’t necessarily break the mold in the genre, but it shows that Rosman is a voice to look out for.
Below is my conversation with Brooke Berman, writer and director of Ramona at Midlife, ahead of its world premiere at the Heartland International Film Festival. We talk about female friendships, avoiding tropes of the genre, and the evolution of the film from Brooke’s mind to the screen. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Ben Sears: Before you made the film, you had written a number of plays. What was it about this story that you felt would be suitable for a movie?
Brooke Berman: That’s a great question. I had started writing movies earlier when I moved to LA in 2008. I went out there, and I had sold a play to a movie star, and I was getting these writer-for-hire jobs and really learning the form of screenwriting. I’ve always been in love with movie making, but what I realized as a screenwriter in LA is that the part of the process that really lights me up is watching the story move from the page to the actor’s bodies. As a playwright, the writer is involved in that process – we sit in the theater next to the director, and we’re included in all the decision making and all the conversations, and we get to watch the magic happen. And as a screenwriter, that isn’t true. When a screenwriter finishes a draft and they turn it in to their agent, or the studio, or whoever paid for the movie, the screenwriter’s work is then done. And the director takes over and makes the story happen, and I realized that I needed to be in on that. So I made a short while I was living in LA, to see if I had the chops to direct. When we had moved back to New York, I adapted one of my plays, Out of the Water, to film, thinking I was gonna make that for half a million dollars with my friends. I was in development with that movie, and the budget grew to just over a million, and I was in development for six years when the pandemic hit.
So at that point, I had already transferred my imagination from what can happen on the stage to what can happen on camera, and I was training myself to be the person that can direct that, and I had realized I had to do a different story. This story had been living in me for a while – I wrote it for Yvonne Woods, who plays Ramona. She was my classmate at Juilliard, and we were both living in LA at the same time. We had a bunch of conversations about life and love and success, and what it all means. So that character is someone I had been almost nourishing in the dark while I wrote this other story. I sat down and took a writing workshop as a student, and started on day one, and the character showed up. It was different than the story I had planned to write about her, but I wrote the first draft during those first few months between March and August of 2020. And then I just knew I had to make it. Because I had been in development with this other film, doing all the sort of conventional indie things, like attaching an executive producer and a star, and raising tons of money, I was like ‘well, we’re not going to do it that way. Let’s just do it small and simple with what we’ve got.’
BS: How was the story different from what you had planned out?
BB: In Los Angeles, the way that divorce laws work, if you’re a writer and you get divorced, your spouse is entitled to – I’m going to get this wrong, but I used to know it – it has to do with what your spouse is entitled to in compensation for royalties for the work you made during the marriage. It’s meant to protect the wife of the guy who wrote the big movie that made jillions of dollars, but I had a good friend of mine get divorced while I was there, and I was fascinated to learn that little quirk of California divorce law. So that went into the DNA of Ramona, and the first two scenes that came to my mind – one of which is in the movie, and one of which is not – is the scene with the three friends where she says “is this an intervention?” That scene came first. I knew that Ramona had this incredibly successful cohort that she used to be in charge of, and was now hiding from. In my original idea of the story, she was going to ask her friends for help and they didn’t know what to do with her. Also was the idea that she had stopped writing when she got divorced, and would do it out of spite because she was waiting for the time when her ex would no longer be entitled to royalties. Neither of those things really made it into the story; instead what happened when I started writing was that this Ramona was not divorced yet, she was yearning to get back together with her ex who she was still in love with, but she was really stubborn. But those were really the pieces that came first.
BS: You mentioned that you had written this specifically for Yvonne. What was it about her that made her the ideal fit for this part?
BB: Oh, I’m so inspired by Yvonne. Her and Rob Beitzel, who’s the actor that plays Mansbach, were in my final project at Juilliard. I’ve done so many plays with them both, and I always hear their voices in my head. I just love working with them so much, I work with the same actors again and again and again. Yvonne’s real-life husband Brian, who plays the hot dad on the playground, everybody says ‘why isn’t she with him? They have so much chemistry!’ And I say well, they’re married in real life, so actually she really is with him. Everyone in the cast is a friend, so it was really easy to hear those voices in my head. I love actors, and I also really particularly love the way that Yvonne – I know that a lot of the issues in the movie are very close to her heart and mine. So we had a lot of conversations during the development of the film about life and love and marriage and success and Patti Smith. My actors put so much of themselves into the movie, and into the roles.
BS: It feels like there aren’t many movies these days about women in their 30s or 40s, or that period of life, unless it’s something like 80 for Brady. How do you feel about the state of movies for that particular audience these days?
BB: I think we have these really pre-determined ideas about what happens at every decade of a person’s life. And I think that’s true across the genders, but it’s particularly true about women. We’re in a culture where young women start “anti-aging practices” at 28. When I lived in LA, I was shocked to learn they’re Botox-ing in their 20s preemptively, so there’s a terror around getting older, and I think it’s particularly tied to a fear of being obsolete, and a fear of no longer being beautiful, and a fear of no longer having power in the culture. Subsequently, you have a whole bunch of actresses who are terrified for anyone to find out how old they are. So we have no idea how old anybody actually is because you have movies about 40 year old’s being played by 60 year old’s, and the movies about 60 year old’s are being played by 80 year old’s, and everybody just wants to work, which is great – everybody should work. In my own life, I had a baby at 41, and I had two new mom friends was my age, and the other was 26, and we were going through the same thing. I spent my 40s sitting on the playground, like Ramona does, with the moms on the playground benches, just looking for common ground. It totally existed, but it blew my mind how every movie about women in their 40s were about empty-nest syndrome or 80 for Brady, or the movie where the rich ladies go to Sonoma and drink wine. None of that was my life! My life was, I had a job and I had a toddler, and I was at the playground and public school pickup. But I don’t look my age, whatever that means. My husband and I are both writers, we’re both self-employed. There weren’t movies that spoke to me. But I love Nicole Holofcener’s films, I think she really does a good job of addressing middle age for both genders. But most of our friends had our kids later, so I know a lot of people like me, but I don’t see us in the media.
BS: The movies that are in this genre, there’s a number of tropes and plot beats that you almost expect going into it. Ramona at Midlife mostly avoids those – were you cognizant of that when you were going into it, or were you just trying to make something honest without worrying about those plot beats?
BB: Number one, I was definitely trying to make something honest. But number two, which plot beats specifically?
BS: Usually the husband and wife are estranged, and there are whacky shenanigans that they’re involved, and whether they will or will not end up back together by the end of the film.
BB: It’s interesting, that part of the movie, I wish I had more time. We shot the movie in very few days, and I just didn’t have a lot of time with them. But I love that storyline so much because when I realized, when making it, the will-they-won’t-they isn’t really the biggest part of the story. It’s really about her reconciling with who she used to be and who she’s gonna be next. I think it’s so easy in midlife and in a committed relationship, to blame the other person for all of the choices you’ve made or all the things you have or have not become, and both of those spouses have to let the other one off the hook. And he really does it, so then we have to see her do it too. With a bigger budget and a big Hollywood studio behind it, it would’ve turned into a revenge comedy, where the point of the movie was to make that filmmaker eat his words and pay. And that was the least interesting part, for me, because I don’t think he’s the problem. For Ramona, the problem is the way she feels about herself, and if middle-aged women feel invisible, then my god, we have to see ourselves. And that’s what I wanted to explore. I wanted to explore her genuinely seeing herself and being ok with who she is. And that was my goal in the movie, so yes, I wanted to make something honest.
BS: The ending is purposefully ambiguous. Do you have any thoughts about what happens to Ramona after the movie ends?
BB: It’s so funny, my twelve year old son says, mom I don’t think there‘s a sequel. He said ‘I really like it, and I think there’s more to the story, but I don’t think there’s a sequel.’ You know, Ramona is able to make room for herself, so she does not go back to work at the animal shelter, she finds a job that uses her skills as a writer. She does reconcile with her spouse – he’s not going to move back in tomorrow, but they’re gonna patch up their marriage and be together. She does publish – Imani says to her in their scene, that she could write an essay exposing the whole thing. So she does do that, she says ‘in my next essay, where I thoroughly unpack showing up in some guy’s movie.’ She does write that essay, and she does start to put herself – I hate this phrase – but she puts herself out there as a writer, and she’s willing to take life on life’s terms.
BS: That’s all that you can ask for.
BB: I mean, right, what else is there?
BS: Whacky shenanigans abroad?
BB: [laughs] That’s right, she could marry Mr. Big in Paris. And who doesn’t want that? That was a really good episode! But you know what was really important to me, and I didn’t actually realize it until I wrote this movie, is I’m obsessed with female friendship. The more I worked on the movie, during production, and the edit, I could see how much the movie, for me, is about reconciling with old friends. I think the fact that Ramona goes back and says to those friends, sorry if I was a dick. That was really important.
BS: That’s another trope that this movie mostly avoids. Their whole friendship dynamic in other films would be much more heightened, especially the younger mom character.
BB: I love that character. I’ve never actually seen backstabbing in the way that Hollywood tells me to look out for. I’ve seen women who genuinely want the best for each other and struggle with their own shortcomings in the process. But I’ve never had a friend who was like, I really want you to fail.
Starring: Koji Yakusho, Tokio Emoto, Aoi Yamada, Arisa Nakano
Grade: B+
Hirayama can’t help but look up. When he steps out of his apartment, when he’s on his lunch break in the park, and at any other random moment throughout the day when something catches his fancy, he’s noticeably looking up. But why is he so compelled to look up? After all, he literally cleans toilets all day. The answer lies at the heart of Wim Wenders’s newest film Perfect Days, set in Japan despite the director’s German heritage.
Hear me out: The Taste of Things is a film that deserves to be seen in a crowded theater. Not because it’s a hysterical comedy like Bottoms – though it certainly has plenty of witty comedic moments – and not because it’s a film about finding community like Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. Actually, it is a communal experience in the way it elicits the rawest emotions from those that are drawn into its spell.
I was reminded early on in The Promised Land of There Will Be Blood, a similar film not only in sensibilities but in themes – a film that, in this reviewer’s opinion, ranks as one of the greatest ever made. Both films take place in the distant past. Both films concern rugged, dauntless men who seek to tame the wild country. Both films feature exquisite technical elements and impeccable acting across the board. But The Promised Land manages to differentiate itself to become its own statement before long.
The Movie State 