{"id":19310,"date":"2021-06-19T22:27:11","date_gmt":"2021-06-20T02:27:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hunterword.com\/?p=19310"},"modified":"2022-10-27T22:40:02","modified_gmt":"2022-10-28T02:40:02","slug":"shapeless-film-review-tribeca-film-fest-2021-by-greggwmorris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hunterword.com\/index.php\/shapeless-film-review-tribeca-film-fest-2021-by-greggwmorris\/","title":{"rendered":"SHAPELESS Film Review \u2013 2021 Tribeca Film Festival: <span style=\"color: #800000;\"><strong>Don&#8217;t See This Alone!<\/strong><\/span>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-19312\" src=\"https:\/\/hunterword.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/Shapeless1920x1080.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" srcset=\"https:\/\/hunterword.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/Shapeless1920x1080.jpg 1920w, https:\/\/hunterword.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/Shapeless1920x1080-300x169.jpg 300w, https:\/\/hunterword.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/Shapeless1920x1080-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/hunterword.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/Shapeless1920x1080-768x432.jpg 768w, https:\/\/hunterword.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/Shapeless1920x1080-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/hunterword.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/Shapeless1920x1080-560x315.jpg 560w, https:\/\/hunterword.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/Shapeless1920x1080-260x146.jpg 260w, https:\/\/hunterword.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/Shapeless1920x1080-160x90.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>Director:<\/strong> Samantha Aldana<br \/>\n<strong>Writer:<\/strong> Kelly Murtagh<br \/>\n<strong>Stars:<\/strong> Kelly Murtagh, Bobby Gilchrist, Jamie Neumann<\/p>\n<p>A brooding, gut wrenching jewel with the sheen of an exquisitely lensed kaleidoscopic art house film and an otherworldly finish beyond imagination. SHAPELESS may actually be the 2021 Tribeca Festival film that best reflects these COVID-19 times.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s about Ivy, who is paying her dues performing in Bourbon Street dive bars and occasional street gigs and jaunts, singing old times jazz-blues like Cab Calloway\u2019s St. James Infirmary. She is hustling to realize her dreams of singing in upscale night clubs or even famous New Orleans dive bars with better $$$ checkbooks eventually leading to record deals with the concomitant music videos, maybe even being invited to appear on late night shows.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/EcXSbCXxGzw\" width=\"1000\" height=\"650\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>When she isn\u2019t singing for supper (and rent, utilities, Cable TV, the latest iPhone) as well as hustling a lousy paycheck in a dry cleaning laundry, she is retching and heaving after stuffing her face with junk food. Fatalistic bulimia. The light at the end of her tunnel is looking bleak.<\/p>\n<p>SHAPELESS seems shot through an unworldly prism that makes <a href=\"https:\/\/editorial.rottentomatoes.com\/guide\/david-cronenberg-movies-ranked-by-tomatometer\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Director David Cronenberg\u2019s most celebrated artistically grotesque beauts pale in comparison.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Ivy inspires our empathy and sympathy as she tries to get control, even sees a therapist but what is happening to her on screen can catalyze unimaginable dread in an audience. Watching her feign normalcy with her band, her bosses and potential career agents as fatalistic paranoia begins to engulf her raised the hackles of this reviewer\u2019s hair.<\/p>\n<p>Hell of a movie during these Pandemic times of infernal gloom and doom and new threats of variants now surging. Yet, SHAPELESS may also be the movie of the times as so much of what Ivy endures, on all levels of her mind, body and soul, seem to reflect these infernal COVID-19 times with its threats of food shortages, increasing mental illness, break downs in social connectedness, increasing mass murders and suicides. <a href=\"https:\/\/alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/10.1002\/alz.12296\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Paranoia and dementia, too.<\/a><\/p>\n<hr align=\"center\" noshade=\"noshade\" size=\"1\" width=\"60%\" \/>\n<p>Attention <em><strong>WORD<\/strong><\/em> patrons, some definitions below are FYI in the event you become aware of and may want to decipher testy bickering by some film critics about the essence of SHAPELESS, that they were peeved that marketing and publicity information made references that SHAPELESS was a horror movie with a monster but there was no monster in the movie, therefore, SHAPELESS, as they whined, wasn&#8217;t a horror movie; or it was a horror movie that didn&#8217;t live up to its promises.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><em>\u2013 Bulimia (boo-LEE-me-uh) nervosa, AKA bulimia, is a potentially life-threatening eating disorder. Bulimic sufferers are preoccupied with their weight and body shape.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><em>\u2013\u00a0 Oneiroid syndrome (OS), according to a medical journal, is a condition involving dream-like disturbances of one&#8217;s consciousness by vivid scenic hallucinations, accompanied by catatonic symptoms (catatonic stupor or excitement), delusions, or psychopathological experiences of a kaleidoscopic nature. The dream-like experiences are vivid enough to seem real to a patient.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Director Samantha Aldana has been into telling stories containing magic, lore, and <u>otherworldliness<\/u> since she started putting her stories on screen when she was 12 years old. {Please notice that <u>otherworldliness<\/u> is underlined.} Her work is influenced by the storytelling traditions of her multicultural upbringing in the American South and the Caribbean. Because of SHAPELESS, she was selected as a 2020 fellow of the IFP Narrative Lab to premiere at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival.<\/p>\n<p>Aldana is an alum of the NBC\/Universal Diversity TV Director Program where she shadowed director Salli Richardson-Whitfield on SYFY&#8217;s The Magicians and Marvel&#8217;s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Samantha is the recipient of the Belize Film Commissioner\u2019s Emerging Storyteller Feature Film Award for her in-development feature LITTLE LYING LOUD. This film was also selected to participate in the Tribeca Film Institute Network and the Emerging Voices Program at the New Orleans Film Fest<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Matt Barone for Tribeca Film Fest<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Horror, Drama \u2013 Tribeca\u2019s Midnight Section \u2013 The best in horror, sci-fi, and cult cinema for the late-night crowd].<\/span><\/strong><br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-19488\" src=\"https:\/\/hunterword.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/mattb-300x241.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"241\" srcset=\"https:\/\/hunterword.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/mattb-300x241.jpg 300w, https:\/\/hunterword.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/mattb-260x209.jpg 260w, https:\/\/hunterword.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/mattb-160x128.jpg 160w, https:\/\/hunterword.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/mattb.jpg 495w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><br \/>\nThe world\u2019s a stage for Ivy. There just aren\u2019t many people seated in front of it. Struggling to establish herself as a singer, she collects humble checks while bouncing around various New Orleans lounges and bars and crooning with her silky-smooth voice for minimal amounts of liquor-sipping patrons. But those meager paydays aren\u2019t Ivy\u2019s toughest battle. That\u2019s reserved for when she\u2019s home alone, which is when her physical insecurities overwhelm her and she succumbs to a debilitating eating disorder. Keeping her battles a secret. Ivy is now transforming into something nightmarish. And it may be too late to reverse course.<\/p>\n<p>SHAPELESS, a remarkably confident and unique genre work, marks the head-turning arrival of first-time feature filmmaker Samantha Aldana, as well as her close collaborator Kelly Murtagh, who wrote the script, produced and stars in the film. Pulling from deeply personal places, they\u2019ve delivered an achingly intimate character study that doubles as a haunting, body-horror-minded examination of women\u2019s body issues unlike anything the horror genre has seen before. \u2014 Matt Barone of Tribeca.<\/p>\n<p><em>[Yo, Matt, from Gregg W. Morris, it&#8217;s otherworldly, not horror. And what is plumbing from personal places?]<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/7S-v-MdPESA\" width=\"1000\" height=\"560\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><span style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em>Gregg W. Morris can be reached at gregghc@comcast.net, profgreggwmorris@gmail.com<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>SHAPELESS is a brooding and gut wrenching gem with the sheen of an exquisitely lensed kaleidoscopic art house film, otherworldly beyond imagination. \u2013 Gregg W. Morris<\/p>\n<p class=\"more-link-p\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/hunterword.com\/index.php\/shapeless-film-review-tribeca-film-fest-2021-by-greggwmorris\/\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19312,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunterword.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunterword.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunterword.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunterword.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunterword.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19310"}],"version-history":[{"count":57,"href":"https:\/\/hunterword.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19506,"href":"https:\/\/hunterword.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19310\/revisions\/19506"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunterword.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunterword.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunterword.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunterword.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}