Scuttlebutt on Escape From Tomorrow started brewing during this year’s Sundance Film Festival, so those of you with your ears to the ground have probably been waiting for the most unusual Disney film of 2013 for quite some time. What makes Randy Moore’s picture so unique, though, is that Disney contributed nothing to its production save for location; Moore shot the entirety of his vision firmly within the bounds of both Disneyland and Disney World, and without securing a word of permission from the Mouse House. Is that dangerous? Not really. Is it subversive? Oh yes. And that’s what’s pulling attention to Escape From Tomorrow: that anarchic, guerrilla spirit. In…
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G-S-T Review…Gimme the Loot
Who knew a street-centered narrative could be so sweetly buoyant as Adam Leon’s Gimme the Loot? Modern storytelling tends to look only at one side of a life lived in the hood, wading through the mud to capture and romanticize the difficulties inherent to an existence where simply getting by day to day proves to be a Herculean feat. Gimme the Loot almost feels like a response to those cliches, except that Leon actively chooses not to follow the polar opposite tract by indulging in straight-up fantasy about the world his protagonists, Malcolm (Ty Hickson) and Sofia (Tashiana Washington), inhabit; he instead aims for balance, harmony between exuberance and struggle…
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Off the Netflix Queue…’The Aggression Scale’
Describing Steven C. Miller’s The Aggression Scale as a violent Home Alone riff feels almost too retro-hip for my liking, but it’s almost impossible not to. The similarities between the two films are clear; pit seemingly defenseless children against brutish home invaders, watch the former embarrass and defeat the latter. But Kevin McAllister didn’t know how to work a pump-action shotgun, and possessed a much cuter propensity for violence. Owen (Ryan Hartwig), his analogue here, favors all manner of sharp objects and potent cocktails of ammonia and bleach. (They both admire the efficacy of a nail through the foot.) The clearer difference, though, lies in pathos– Kevin’s just a self-indulgent…