Wrap up summer with a slate of independent movies
Willem Dafoe in "Late Fame." (Image courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)
As August comes to a close, Maine’s indie film destinations include a groundbreaking documentary, some classic film noir (projected on glorious black and white film), a killer vehicle for one of our most underappreciated actors, and a brilliant new horror film that turns the genre inside out.
A still from “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.” (Image courtesy of MUBI)
‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’
Playing Everywhere
Jane Schoenbrun is the most exciting director at work right now. Their previous films, “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” and “I Saw the TV Glow,” took horror cinema to places we didn’t even know we were afraid to go. And their new one delves deep into 1980s slasher films to both celebrate and deconstruct the genre that spawned countless horror fans and imitators. “Hacks”’ Hannah Einbinder stars as an up-and-coming filmmaker with pretensions of reclaiming the glory days of the “Friday the 13th”-esque “Camp Miasma” franchise, all while spinning the original’s problematic elements (the killer was a secret evil trans person) in a more palatable direction.
Recruiting the reclusive “final girl” star of the original film seems like a good idea (especially since she’s played by the ever-fascinating Gillian Anderson), but things… don’t go as she (or we) expect. Expressionistic sets, layered commentary on a genre Schoenbrun clearly adores, dark comedy, genuine slasher film scares — “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” is horror cinema transformed, even as it channels the genre’s best and most entertaining elements with mesmerizing style, smarts and gore. No horror movie since “Get Out” has been this deservedly buzzy.
‘Out of the Past’
Wednesday and Saturday, Kinonik, 121 Cassidy Point Drive, Portland, kinonik.org
Out of the past indeed comes projected-on-film archivist/angels Kinonik’s presentation of this peerless 1947 slice of classic film noir melodrama. Nobody was ever more laconically doomed than Robert Mitchum, here playing a former private dick whose checkered history reasserts itself in the equally alluring forms of hard-nosed gangster Kirk Douglas and requisite femme fatale Jane Greer. There’s a love triangle, double-crosses, the moodiest of atmospheres from ever-unsung director Jacques Tourneur (“Cat People,” “I Walked With a Zombie”), and, as Roger Ebert once stated appreciatively, “the greatest cigarette smoking movie of all time.” Hey, it was the ’40s — smoking wasn’t a killer, but mysterious dames with legs all the way down to the floor certainly were.
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‘Late Fame’
Starts Friday PMA Films, 7 Congress Square, Portland, portlandmuseum.org
Nobody deserves a late-career Oscar more than Willem Dafoe, and he’s all but guaranteed at least another nomination as the hero of this touching, slyly insightful look at how our old dreams can be rekindled, even if maybe they shouldn’t be. A minor former poet who’s been working in the post office for 40 years since his only book received moderate fame in the ’70s, Dafoe’s Ed Saxberger is stunned when a group of young would-be writers emerge to shower him with long-overdue praise. Suddenly heralded as an overlooked genius, the unassuming Ed warily rises to meet his new fans’ expectation for new work, all while falling for the troubled torch singer (Greta Lee) lurking on the fringes of his newfound reemergence. Dafoe can go delightfully broad in his big-screen roles, but that only makes his gentler ones (like “The Florida Project” and here) ring with an aching tenderness, as he plays a man who thought acclaim had passed him by, and who may not be prepared for it to return.
‘Sherman’s March’
Saturday and Thursday, PMA Films, 7 Congress Square, Portland, portlandmuseum.org
In 1985, documentarian Ross McElwee received a $9,000 grant to make a film about the lingering effects of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s fiery march through the South during the Civil War. Instead, the recently dumped filmmaker took his own Southern tour meeting and unsuccessfully romancing various eccentric women. Subtitled “A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love In the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation,” McElwee’s documentary is one of the progenitors of everything from cinema vérité to reality TV, a strange, gently ironic portrait of a hapless but hopeful romantic and the invariably uninterested women he encounters as he shepherds his wobbly project through fascinatingly odd debates on everything from Burt Reynolds to possible Cold War nuclear annihilation to the effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction he was supposedly out to examine. A singular, enduringly entertaining and endlessly influential film, “Sherman’s March” defies all this description on its way to its enshrinement in the National Film Registry. (And look to Portland’s SPACE for a Sept. 9 screening of McElwee’s 2025 film “Remake,” which serves as a heartbreaking continuation and ending of the filmmaker’s deeply personal story.)
‘The Misconceived’
Tuesday, Sept. 1, SPACE, 538 Congress St., Portland, space538.org.
Experimental indie filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins combines stock footage, motion capture, video game animations, live action and more into a seemingly simple story about two old friends’ troublesome reunion. Hired to renovate the vacation home of his successful college buddy, a failed filmmaker turned carpenter inserts himself into the outwardly placid lives of his wealthy pal and his wife, with dizzying stylistic flourishes overloading the typical independent drama narrative. As ever, SPACE is the place when you’re looking for something new and exciting, and the director will be in attendance to answer your questions. Which will be many.
Dennis Perkins is a freelance writer who lives in Auburn with his wife and his cat.
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