Coda’s ongoing coverage of the 2024 Phoenix Film Festival & International Horror Sci-Fi Film Festival. I'll be using these posts to recap the films I've experienced as part of these festivals.
THE HERRICANES – Directed by Olivia Kuan
This is a documentary telling the story of the Houston Herricanes, a women’s professional
football team in the 1970’s.
One of my favorite
things to happen at festival time is when I see a documentary about a subject
that I don’t feel particularly interested in or connected to, and then it turns
out to be entirely engaging and engrossing and hooks me in. It begins with the fact
that director, Olivia Kuan’s mother was on the team and that’s where the
inspiration to tell the story comes from. Quickly though, Kuan understands the
importance of interweaving the story of The Herricanes with the history of the
struggle for equal access for women in sports. These two stories run parallel to
each other, making it clear that it’s the same fight and brilliantly illustrating
the importance of the barriers smashed by this football team’s work, over forty
years ago.
The doc also does a
great job at including interviews from people in this struggle in present day
as well. It’s striking actually, to consider how far we’ve come in the past half
of a century for so many other efforts for equality compared to this one. We
see how women today still hear the same tired diatribe that this team faces all
those years ago.
A CHRISTMAS IN OCHOPEE –
Directed by Montana Cypress
Sometimes a film has ideas
that turn out to be a little too big for itself. It’s those times that the film
could have likely benefited from a more experienced hand, taking a second look
at it. It can be an immense help to have eyes, unfamiliar with the project giving
honest advice. Unfortunately, this is one of those times. This is a shame because
the end product is certainly not without its moments. There are some
performances that elevated the film and even a few gags that, should have
landed better. The problem however, is that every one of the moments or
cinematic aspects, that I should have responded to, was undercut by a lot of
long and unnecessary build up. I understand that this is the feature length
version of a short film that’s been playing well at festivals. But this feature
clocks in at 110 minutes and I can’t help but feel that this would have benefited
immensely from a nice trim.
A CHRISTMAS IN OCHOPEE plays again on Sunday, April 7th at 9:00 AM
Follow us on
Twitter @CodaReviews
No comments:
Post a Comment