FREAKY TALES (no distrib): The writer/directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have returned from their profitable but unbeloved sojourn in the land of Captain Marvel to their indie roots with Freaky Tales. While heartfelt and entertaining, the effort is also intensely derivative. Fleck was a child of 1987 Oakland, where Freaky Tales takes place, and it’s a compendium of his youthful obsessions, from hip-hop and punk music to the Golden State Warriors and martial arts movies, and even to specific stores, clubs and theaters. (At times, it feels like Tales would benefit from an Amazon Prime Video “X-Ray” presentation, where a click would provide the background and references for each establishing shot and needle-drop.) The strongest influence on Freaky Tales, though, is someone who came along a bit after 1987: Quentin Tarantino. Like Pulp Fiction, Boden and Fleck’s Tales script is organized as a series of overlapping vignettes, with characters in the background of one story stepping up to become protagonists of another. The overall theme here is the triumph of underdogs, with plotlines including a group of punk rockers defending their street against skinheads, a hip-hop battle pitting a pair of female rappers (Dominique Thorne and Normani) against an established star, the struggle of a weary underworld enforcer (Pedro Pascal) to walk away from the business with his pregnant wife, and the Kill Bill-inflected revenge of real-life NBA star Sleepy Floyd (Jay Ellis) when a fictional tragedy is inflicted on him on the very night that he set a (true) playoffs record. Boden and Fleck keep things varied and fast-paced, with a constant beat of Oakland-based music, and visual styles that include animation, shifting aspect ratios, and stylized lighting. (The photography is by Jac Fitzgerald, and the editor is Robert Komatsu.) Tarantino, of course, also wears his many influences on his sleeve, but he brings a formal wit, brilliant original dialogue and a willingness to take wild narrative swings to his derivatives. For all its passion and fun, Freaky Tales is more like a pastiche of a pastiche. Nevertheless, there’s much to like here, including star turns from Pascal (very much in the mode of Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction) and Ellis, as well as the precision of its citations. It’s easy to imagine Freaky Tales hitting a chord with streaming audiences.
YOUR MONSTER (no distrib): Caroline Lindy’s feature debut (based on her short) is Beauty & the Beast crossed with backstage satire, romcom, and [even naming the genre would be a spoiler]. Aspiring Broadway musical star Laura (Melissa Barerra) faces multiple ordeals when she survives a bout with cancer only to be deserted by her longtime boyfriend Jacob (Edmund Donovan), who not only ends their relationship but dumps her from the leading role she’d been developing with him for his new show. Sunk in depression in her absent mother’s Manhattan townhouse (the one thing she doesn’t have to worry about is money), she’s shocked to discover that she has company: an actual monster (Tommy Dewey), who’s been inhabiting her closet and the space under her bed. Monster would be more accurately called “Beast,” not only because the make-up is strongly reminiscent of Disney’s musical creature, but because under his cranky and occasionally scary exterior, he’s all mush, happiest when digging into take-out Chinese on the couch and watching a classic Hollywood soap. He helps Laura cope when Jacob hires her as understudy to the new star (played by The White Lotus‘s Meghann Fahy) and proves himself to be a jerk of remarkable proportions. The rapport between Laura and Monster makes the trajectory of their relationship obvious, although Lindy tries to upset our expectations with a final twist. Your Monster has charm, and Barerra and Dewey are enjoyable, as are the showbiz jokes sprinkled throughout. It’s all very tame, though, until the closing moments, and even for an empowerment fable taking place in a fantasy genre, Lindy’s screenplay becomes distractingly distant from any notion of practical reality.
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