Movies take a long time to come out. Two movies I enjoyed a fair bit at last year's Tribeca Film Festival are now available for at-home viewing...18 months after I first saw them. The first, Chasing Chasing Amy, a musing on queer representation in film, stayed on my radar all this time as it played a good number of festivals and then had a limited theatrical run. The other, The Line, a feature about fraternity hazing gone wrong, more or less disappeared until it dropped last month.
Seeing indie movies is hard, but here are two you can finally see. I'm rerunning my reviews from last summer, with a few tweaks, to push you toward them.
Chasing Chasing Amy (2023)
For young Sav Rodgers, the Kevin Smith cult classic, CHASING AMY, became a life raft. As Rodgers examines the film and its making as a cornerstone of LGBTQ+ cinema, he finds himself at a complicated crossroads.
Chasing Amy, Kevin Smith's 1997 indie rom-com, is basically impossible to examine in the Year of Our Lord 2024. Some find it to be a foundational text for gay cinema and representative of their own personal and sexual journeys, while others find it to be a Weinstein-produced outlier in the truth of LGBT life.
Chasing Chasing Amy, the documentary from Sav Rodgers about his personal journey with the film, lands squarely in the camp of it's okay for things to be complicated. Especially when, as in Rodgers' case, the movie does more to speak to one person's sexual and gender identity than representing an entire community's politics. When Rodgers first watched his parents' VHS copy of the movie, he didn't know how it would speak to him or that he would watch it over 200 times or that he would set out to make a documentary charting his gay and transgender life in America's heartland through the lens of the film.
The documentary doesn't end up the way he expected, however, as the discovery that it's okay for things to be complicated extends far beyond a Kevin Smith movie. Rodgers learns that while the film was a career launching pad for Smith, it represents a dark time in the life of star Joey Lauren Adams, rehashing her personal struggles, from the difficult conversations with then-boyfriend Smith being rewritten (largely in a revisionist history) to fit the narrative of the film, to her interactions with Weinstein, Miramax, and the 1997 Sundance Festival that Rose McGowan's testimony has made infamous. Chasing Amy represents something different for everyone involved, from those who made it to those who watched it regularly on VHS, and as Adams points out in the difficult and defining interview of the film, it's not fair to push your feelings on another.
What can be beautiful and religious for one person can be sanctimonious and painful for another. No one person is wrong as it's okay for things to be complicated, but that discovery is a necessary one in the filmmaker's life. The documentation of that journey is powerful, contemplative, and nothing less than intriguing.
Available to rent or own on VOD 12/7.
The Line (2023)
Tom, a passionate ‘brother’ of his fraternity, is charmed by the promises of high social status and alumni connections that open doors. But as Annabelle, a classmate outside his social circle, enters his life, his devotion begins to falter. Once the scheduled hazing of new fraternity members comes to a disturbing head, Tom faces the decision of a lifetime.
I rushed a fraternity during my first semester of college. Looking back, it feels very unlike me. But I was far from home and liked some of the guys and appreciated having people to watch Bad Boys II with. However, just a few years earlier at this school, a fraternity pledge had unfortunately died during a hazing ritual. As a result, the school was serious about its zero-hazing policy, which was still in effect when I arrived. Fraternities will do what fraternities will do and we still participated in the "hazing," but it was almost always optional. Brothers would literally scream in your face and say, I kid you not, "Drop and give me twenty!...if you want to! Run this mile blindfolded...if that's alright!" It really made me realize how silly the whole thing was.
Tom (an "I knew this guy was good!" performance from Alex Wolff) doesn't find his fraternity business to be silly at all. In fact, he's more or less obsessed with the idea. The tradition, the brotherhood, the commitment, the money, the social status. But when his roommate Mitch (a bombastic, unbelievably uncanny frat-bro performance from Bo Mitchell) starts to go off his rocker at the same time that Tom meets a girl totally outside his social realm (a "Yes, she can act!" performance from Halle Bailey), Tom starts to question how the fraternity (whose president is played by an excellent Lewis Pullman) may or may not actually be bad for him.
It's a question that few in Greek life ponder, and many more should. But this film, the feature debut of director Ethan Berger, and a highlight of last year’s Tribeca festival, goes to the dark places of the collegiate underbelly. Those places that a certain unnamed documentary from last year only promised to go. The Line not only promises to go there, but delivers sure-handedly.
Now available to rent or own on VOD and physical media.
Credit: Each plot synopsis comes from Letterboxd via TMDb.
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