Megan McLachlan catches up to Nightbitch, Memoir of a Snail, and more at the 27th SCAD Savannah Film Festival.
Filmmakers Kyle Mooney and Evan Winter Present Y2K, A Horror Comedy that Has Something for Every Age
“Let’s go back to 1999,” said director/writer Kyle Mooney before presenting his new comedy Y2K, co-written with his buddy Evan Winter.
Screening a film sprinkled with obscure ’90s jokes and set in a time before most of the audience was born is a gamble. . .but one that paid off for Mooney and Winter. The response to Y2K was through the roof at the Lucas Theater, even if some references were lost on the Gen Z audience (I found myself the only one laughing when flying toasters appeared on screen). SCAD kids LOVE Mooney and flocked to him and Winter for autographs following the Q&A.
With SCAD being only the third audience to see it, Y2K has the potential to be a big hit when it releases in December. First, it’s got A24 behind it (the theater cheered when the logo came on screen), the ’90s are back “in,” and killer robots and sentient AI technology are in the zeitgeist. The best way to see this film is with a big audience on the big screen.
Morgan Neville’s Piece by Piece Taps Into Audience’s Love of LEGOs and Music of Pharrell Williams
Piece by Piece delivers exactly what it sets out to do, tracking the life of musician Pharrell Williams. . .as depicted through LEGOs. While it’s positioned as a documentary, I see it as more of an animated film because of the blurred “trust” between the filmmaker and the audience. After all, this is what director Morgan Neville saw in live-action “real” form. So often, I wasn’t sure if they were cutting to footage from a music video or imagined “scenes” depicting what he was seeing. “Blurred Lines” indeed, to quote a Pharrell-produced song!
Visually stunning, Piece by Piece is an achievement in animation, especially since Neville reported in the Q&A that it took five years and 1,563 shots to complete.
“There are parts of it that are very one to one of what we actually filmed,” said Neville, “and then there are parts of it that we visually made up. We put together a Frankenstein edit that had archival footage, footage we shot, and movie clips of how I wanted scenes to feel — from Yellow Submarine to Straight Outta Compton to Harold and Maude and The Blues Brothers. A big movie for us was Moonlight. We put together an edit, went into animation, and started storyboarding and did the whole film again. That first process was two years and the animation was about two and a half years.”
Adam Elliot’s Memoir of a Snail Demonstrates Animation Can Be Adult
On the red carpet, Memoir of a Snail director Adam Elliot told me there’s something melancholy about snails.
“They’re very strange creatures, very alien,” said Elliot. “Snails can only move forward, never backward, and that ties in really well to the theme of the film. I love the spiral of the snail’s shell, which is very cyclic and symbolic of life going full circle.”
Memoir of a Snail is wonderfully weird, moving, and handled with great care. It follows snail collector Grace (voiced by Sarah Snook) as she’s separated from her twin brother Gilbert (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee) and the twists and turns in her life as she tells the tale to her favorite snail, Sylvia. It is incredibly adult, featuring masturbating judges, swinging foster parents, and fetishists, while also tender and sweet.
Elliot said it took them more than 30 weeks to complete, filming a few seconds per day — talk about a snail’s pace — but that’s what you do with stop-motion animation.
Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch Offers a Definitive Film on Motherhood with the Most Amy Adams of All Amy Adams Performances
As the credits rolled for Nightbitch, I wondered if I had just watched the end-all of movies about motherhood. Of course, I hope filmmakers never stop making movies on the topic, but Nightbitch feels definitive and iconic, so much more than a housewife-feels-like-a-dog comedy, and the audience at Trustees Theater loved it.
In all of Amy Adams’s Oscar nominations, she competes for time against the likes of Meryl Streep, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Jennifer Lawrence. But Nightbitch hinges on Amy Adams, with her in every frame, her voiceover in your head. As someone who read Rachel Yoder’s book on which the film is based, I love the changes writer/director Marielle Heller made, especially the enhancements to Mother’s backstory.
“There were lots of things I loved about Mari’s script that gave me the opportunity to explore the darker inner monologue that I have with myself,” said Adams in the post-screening Q&A with Gold Derby Editor-in-Chief, Debra Birnbaum. “It was very exposing, which was scary at times, but also very cathartic.”
“I think the movie Amy did before this was Disenchanted,” said Heller in the Q&A,” and thinking she went from that to this and how intimate and vulnerable I was asking her to be in this shows her range. It’s incredible. On screen, you went from princess to bitch.”
Like Heller’s previous film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Nightbitch has a moment of beautiful quiet in a restaurant. Heller has a way with direction that makes you feel like a film is only speaking to you, created for you, and Nightbitch reinforces how underrated she is as an artist. She’s directed Melissa McCarthy and Tom Hanks to acting nominations, and I believe Amy Adams is on track to join them.
