The Projector #73: The Whole World’s a Festival (Patreon)

by Keith Phipps

Hello! I recently got “back" from the 2021 Sundance Film Festival where I saw some really interesting movies. Tasha was “there” too. It was a terrific experience, even though neither of us left Chicago. Sundance held the festival online this year, for pandemic-related reasons, and though it would be unfortunate if that became the norm, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t appreciate the chance to “attend” this year for the first time since 2000. (A good year that included You Can Count on Me and The Virgin Suicides. Also, my girlfriend-later-wife and I saw RuPaul and Tammy Faye Bakker in person. Oh, and Michael Stipe, just hanging out in a lobby after Jim McKay’s terrific Our Song, which Stipe produced. Wild.)

At The A.V. Club, The Dissolve, and Uproxx I was almost always the person who stayed behind to tend the editing fires while others went to festivals. Even as a freelancer it’s hard to get away and risky to try; I had to eat the cost of a trip to Sundance a couple of years ago due to a family emergency. So, for me, this was a nice opportunity. And it made me wonder: would it make sense for festivals to incorporate a digital component even after it becomes safe to hold in-person festivals again? I don’t just mean for people like me, but for the general public, who could get a chance to watch exciting premieres without travel and lodging expenses. Maybe even the curiosity-seekers who show up for one movie, dig the experience, and decide it’s pretty cool to see movies they might not see anywhere else before anyone else can. A couple of glitches here and there aside, Sundance did a great job, not just of beaming movies onto screens far and wide but also making it feel like a festival via intros and Q&A sessions. Sure, some of them were pretty awkward but, thing is, they always are.

Anyway, we’re “back.” And though I’m still decompressing from all those movies, I’m looking forward to delving back into podcasting. I think Tasha and I might try to knock off a Sundance episode for Patreon. In the meantime, we did an episode on WandaVision we hope you enjoy. (Though it sounds like this week features a series-changing twist and we might have recorded too soon. Oh well!) And we hope you’re making it through our admittedly intense pairing of American Psycho and Promising Young Woman, both of which gave us a lot to talk about.

Also, if you’d like some items to read, here are a few you might enjoy.

• Speaking of Sundance, here’s my round-up for GQ.

• Speaking of WandaVision, here’s a Tres Dean Vulture piece about the awesomeness of Kathryn Hahn.

• Speaking of Promising Young Woman, here’s a Jackson McHenry piece on its soundtrack (also for Vulture).

• Speaking of Owen Wilson (Okay, we weren’t but that’s okay), here’s Tasha Robinson’s interview with the Bliss star for Polygon.

• Speaking of interviews, here’s Keith Phipps talking to John Lee Hancock about The Little Things for GQ.

• For Esquire, Dave Holmes wrote about his increasingly conflicted feelings toward a movie he loves, Waiting for Guffman.

• We sometimes laugh about Apple TV+ despite loving some of its programming. But maybe the laugh’s on us, Josef Adalian suggests in Vulture.

• Finally, a listener response to our recent Sideways episode reminded us that we neglected in that episode to acknowledge the existence of the Japanese remake of Sideways, which our friend David Ehrlich wrote about for The Dissolve a few years back.