It’s been an interesting year and we’ve manage to cover a few of the usual film festivals and found some favorites along the way. We were thankfully able to compensate for last year by really digging our heels in to the indie movies and festivals, and we’ve combed over some really talented directors, and writers.
These are five of the best indie feature films that we saw in 2023.
It’s been an interesting year and we’ve manage to cover a few of the usual film festivals and found some favorites along the way. We were thankfully able to compensate for last year by really digging our heels in to the indie movies and festivals, and we’ve combed over some really talented directors, and writers.
These are five of the best short films we saw in 2023.
Lisa Quijano Wolfinger’s “The War on Disco” is a great documentary—if you have minimal to zero knowledge about disco music. For an hour long documentary it does very little to take advantage and explore the lesser known corners of the Disco boom of the 1970’s. It’s all pretty much a superficial and speedily paced buffer about the entire craze called Disco Music. Known for a long time as an enemy to rock music, Disco was a sub-genre of dance music that allowed for a lot more diversity, which prompted a lot more people to hate it.
The Rolling Stones “Rock and Roll Circus” is quite the rock and roll bonanza that was been hindered by egos. The idea of an all star Rock and Roll show is great, and the idea for the concert involved a circus aesthetic and a mix of other artists that would culminate into an extended set by the Stones, who’d not only open the show but close it. The show, conceived by Mick Jagger as a way to promote the Stones’ album Beggars Banquet, was shot on December 11th, 1968 – and into the morning of December 12th but never hit the airwaves, oddly. It was shelved for decades by the Stones, only to appear on VHS and Laserdisc, remaining the obscure gem for such a long time that we didn’t get to see it until 1996.
I can appreciate what Dave Grohl and BJ McDonnell were going for with “Studio 666.” In spite of me being a big Foo Fighters fan, I respected what they were trying to do. “Studio 666” is a horror comedy musical with shades of “Evil Dead,” “The Exorcist,” and “We Are Still Here.” It’s also kind of a commentary on the compromises you make in order to acquire artistic success, but those more dire themes are passive at best. “Studio 666” looks like one of those movies that was more fun to make than anything else, and that’s both a caveat and advantage.
If you were alive during the early nineties, you remember the infamous rise and shocking fall of the pop band Milli Vanilli. For many, many years they were synonymous with really bad pop music. Their crash and burn on stage with a malfunctioning machine that revealed their lip synching to a massive crowd also amounted to their ultimate downfall. Although what many didn’t know over the last twenty five years is that while Milli Vanilli were perceived as con artists, they were sadly pawns in a massive scheme to artificially build pop super stars.
“And do you believe in rock and roll? Can music save your mortal soul?”
Director Mark Moormann’s documentary is probably one of the more interesting stories about one of the most important, if not the most important rock and roll song ever made. Don McLean’s epic ode to “The Day the Music Died” is a compelling rock epic that bemoans the end of a more innocent time in rock music. This is not only a time where three titans of rock and roll perished in a tragic crash, but it also seemingly ushered in a wave of events that began to change America and society.