We’re a lucky, lucky bunch to live in a city where we’re at the wellspring of new film and the source of cinematic reconsideration, where grind-house becomes art-house and a dum-dum boy can be made into a bandana-wearing teddy bear genius. See all that and more this week and beyond.
This week, there’s a host of spacey weirdness happening across screens through the city’s cinemas. Maybe it’s the changing of the seasons, maybe the stars are aligned at weird, or perhaps it’s the fact that, as residents of the Northern Hemisphere, we’re statistically overdue for another great comet. While we wait for news of flying fire balls to streak across the sky, we’ll just have to settle for those freaky weirdos turned laser terrorists who’ve been trolling commercial airline pilots for, like, no good reason. Or we can set our sights on these strange galactic, sci-fi, alternate Utopian or Dystopian reality films.
LES Film Festival director Shannon Walker describes The Perfect 46 as “a sci-fi film about this guy who creates a test to see if your genetics are a good match with your partners.” Directed by Brett Bonowicz, the film is a fictional exploration of the burgeoning genome start-up culture represented in the real world by companies like 23andMe. “The trailer has quotes from scientists saying, ‘Hey, this isn’t all that out of the realm of possibility’,” says co-director Tony Castle. Creepy. And, adds Walker, the acting and cinematography are spectacular.