FLY, do you need me on to talk about why frat boys are the CINECAST!ing worst?
Only if you agree to participate in the 30 Rack and/or 40 Challenge game segments*. Though I would agree, fratboys mostly suck, but that doesn't mean all #FBC is bad.
Looks like Fourteen got picked up by Grasshopper, which probably means I won't see it here, though Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin was shown at FilmBar. No Black Mother or Asako last year, so...
Just in brief, what'd you like so much about it? Of the two I haven't seen on your list, that's the one I know basically nothing about, but sounds intriguing from what I do know.
Definitely the two performances, in hindsight I should have thrown them on my ballot, but I also am aware that this thing isn't going to be seen much, even in 2020. What I responded to most was how authentic it felt, in a similar way that something like
Marriage Story examines the end of a romantic relationship
(along with the eventual understanding/reconciliation/however you want to label the end of it), this film focuses more on a platonic friendship, and how those grow and change over time based on living situation, job, life in general. It's incredibly well written, it feels very human, and captures that mid 20's to mid 30s sense of nowness in the same way something like
Girls did in its strongest seasons. It also isn't afraid to avoid conventional drama, and the sequence at the train station is magnificent in how okay it is with just observing. I probably need to see it again, as it was the first thing I saw on Day 2 of PFF (admittedly, I'm still relatively fresh at this point), but also was coming off, I believe, a 5 film day that went relatively late the night before. And even Day 2 followed by two more films and then the Charli XCX concert, so it was an eventful day, but without consulting my notes those are the broad strokes of why I liked it so much. Do hope people get a chance to watch it when it gets its streaming/Blu Ray release. I also went in knowing nothing about it, just had roujin's input on the preliminary fest interest list, but skipped out on The Lodge Friday night for The Twentieth Century so that I could do Fourteen on its only showing the next morning. Fortunate enough to have a Q&A with Sallitt afterward too, which was cool, though at that point I'd already been fully won over by the movie, so the most interesting parts of that was his actual filming process and how he squeezed it in with his vacation time he had saved up. Had I known more about his background at the time I'd have been interested to hear more, since I'm having trouble finding reference points about it while looking now, and knowing that he came from criticism and still seems to write, along with the film work.
*Coors Lite and/or Steel Reserve not required.