IGN is at the Sundance Film Festival, checking out all the biggest movies from here in Park City, Utah. We'll be giving you some updates here and there, and I, Senior News Editor Alex Stedman, will kick off our first dispatch:
There are a number of buzzy movies on the lineup for the Sundance Film Festival – some of them, including Steven Soderbergh’s Presence and the Steven Yeun/Kristen Stewart-starring Love Me, we’ve already reviewed here at IGN – but few boast the starpower that Freaky Tales does.
Still, you’d be forgiven if you haven’t heard of Freaky Tales, given that, like most of the other movies at Sundance, it’s there looking for distribution. So to give you the rundown: it’s directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who are best known to mainstream audiences as the directing duo behind Captain Marvel, but they’ve got quite the reputation at Sundance. Their 2004 short film, Gowanus, Brooklyn, earned the Grand Jury Prize at the Utah fest, and they'd go on to direct It’s Kind of a Funny Story and Mississippi Grind.
The cast features Pedro Pascal, Ben Mendelsohn, Insecure star Jay Ellis, Dominique Thorne, singer Normani in her acting debut, the late Angus Cloud in his final role, and one fantastic cameo that I won’t spoil for you. My colleague Clint Gage, who’s at the festival with myself and Director of Video Programming Michael Calabro, will have a review on IGN soon enough, so I’ll let him tell you more about it.
For a quick summary, though, it depicts four wild interconnected stories in 1987, Oakland, Calif., loosely based on Fleck’s own memories of growing up there. It becomes clear extremely quickly that anyone looking for perfect historical accuracy should look elsewhere, as it’s very much told through a wacky, sci-fi-infused, heavily stylized lens. It’s got everything from fights against Nazis to a version of Warriors legend Sleepy Floyd that’s, well… again, not necessarily historically accurate.
One of the other lovely things about Sundance, in addition to getting able to see these movies that may or may not get picked up for distribution, is getting to hear about them from the filmmakers themselves. Fleck and Boden showed up at our screening on Tuesday night, with Fleck joking before the film that “if you don’t like the movie, what’s wrong with you?”
Returning for a Q&A after a rowdy screening, he caveated, "If you didn't like the movie, there's nothing wrong with you, unless you didn't like it because you're a racist Nazi scumbag." Fair enough.
The two went on to offer their insight about their work on the film, which Fleck had bouncing around in his head for two decades, especially with his cherished memories of ‘80s Oakland.
“It's a special place if you grew up there, especially in the ‘80s when I was there,” he said. “The music, the sports scene, the culture – it stuck with me. And I moved to New York for 20 years and it always just was like, Oakland was there with me.”
And Freaky Tales, based on the Too Short song of the same name (Too Short is portrayed in the movie, and serves as narrator), also stayed in his mind.
“The title is right there,” Fleck said. “[I said], 'Anna, there's a movie we're gunna make one day called 'Freaky Tales.' This was like 20 years ago. She was like, 'okay, what is it about?' And I was like, 'I don't know, but it's gunna be Freaky Tales.’ And so I pictured, over the years, different versions of the movie, and she was like, 'I'm not really into that version.' And to be fair, they were not good. They were bad versions.”
They, of course, eventually got to their four-chapter version that was shown to audiences at Sundance, which is steeped in that ‘80s Oakland culture. The Warriors play a significant role in the film, although Fleck and Boden admitted that they didn’t get permission from the NBA to use the name.
“We were told not to seek it out,” Boden said to laughs, given some of the more violent content in Freaky Tales. “So we changed the logo enough and if you notice, there's no ‘S’ at the end of Warriors [on the uniforms]."
“If they read it on the page, they'd be like 'oh, I don't know why we would allow this,” Fleck said. “I think when you see the movie, you see how fun it is, and I think that they're going to appreciate it. I hope."
Sundance has started to wind down a bit, but Clint, Michael, and myself are still making our way through all the movies, interviews, and panels that we can, and we’ll continue giving you updates. I also got the chance to catch the horror-comedy Krazy House (which I would describe as “what happens when you try to turn Too Many Cooks into a feature-length film, and you can take that however you want), the documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, and the Margot Robbie-produced My Old Ass, which I’ll be reviewing within the next few days.
I’ll let Clint and Calabro give you their own impressions on what they’ve seen so far:
From Clint Gage:
Building my week here in Sundance gave me very real flashbacks to building my course schedule in college. By that I mean that 9am screenings are a mistake. The upside, though, is that the homework is a lot more fun and this trip – my third to Park City – has reignited my love for tracking down movies that are only possible because of film festivals. These are movies that take big bizarre swings or from filmmakers that don’t carry any weight with the more established outlets yet.
Sundance is always full of them, but one that’s struck me here at the halfway point of our stay in Utah is Ghostlight. It’s the story of a blue collar family working through a tragedy by getting involved in a community production of Romeo and Juliet. It’s fantastically sweet, completely earnest and genuine, well crafted and starring an actual husband-wife-daughter trio as the leads. It’s the type of film that only gets a shot thanks to Sundance, and one of the reasons why I love being here.
From Michael Calabro:
To echo Clint, one of the great joys of film festivals is bringing you movies you might not otherwise have seen, and it's that "When in Rome" attitude that brought me to Scott Cummings' delightful Realm of Satan. This documentary, which features almost no dialogue or talking, is like a living painting that's an odd and often funny look at the day-to-day lives of those living by the teachings of the Church of Satan. There's Satanists hanging their Star Wars laundry out to dry, there's a woman making a cool witches broom, and there's even a sick one-shot of a BDSM porno shoot that apparently took 18 takes to get right.
What's great about Sundance is that I can be watching a Satanism documentary one hour and the next, checking out a coming-of-age teenage dramedy about a Taiwanese-American kid trying to navigate his last year of middle-school the next while shooting skating videos and talking to girls on Myspace and AOL Instant messenger. The latter, DiDi, may be a more traditional narrative feature compared to Realm of Satan, but watching a huge variety of films is what the festival is all about.
This year, I've felt that Hollywood kind of let me down. While there were some gems, overall 2023 was not a great year for movies. But being here at Sundance has reminded me that cinema is alive and well, with a spectrum of films on display here that has renewed my faith in the medium I love so dear.
We'll keep giving you updates here and there, so stayed tuned on IGN. For more, check out IGN's review of another Sundance film, I Saw the TV Glow.
