New Religion is an eerie addition to the 2023 Slamdance Film Festival.
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The first few minutes of Mad Cats screams torture cult. White-clad women stand watch on a picturesque hillside before we’re taken to a prison cell where one of the captives, who doesn’t know where he is or what the hell is going on, comes face-to-face with one of those women, an executioner.
Then, in sharp contrast, we meet Taka (Shô Mineo), a clumsy drunk struggling to make rent. He is provided with information on the whereabouts of his missing brother, an archeologist who disappeared after returning from his far-off fieldwork, and sets off to save him. He later partners with Takezo (Yuya Matsuura), a cat food connoisseur living on the street, and Ayane (actress is named Ayane as well), a young woman who does the heavy lifting for the team, including supplying guns and training the two amateurs.
Those creepy women on the hillside are actually cats out to get revenge on humanity… If this is where the film loses you, maybe find something else. Still with us? Good! Because it’s self-aware cringe and well-done action sequences from here, as we see how each “cat” the heroes fight has her own speciality weapon and we’re treated to the trio’s clever banter.
Director Reiki Tsuno told us the vengeful cats offer a deeper meaning: “I had always wanted to make a movie about animals taking revenge on humans. I get angry and feel sad whenever I hear news about animals being put down due to the existence of inhumane pet stores and evil breeders. The numbers of them have been decreasing, but not zero yet,” Tsuno said. “This is a very shameful act of humanity. Nobody has a right to force animals to breed and then trash them only because of human ego.”
While he could have made the film about mad dogs, snakes or hedgehogs, Tsuno said he chose cats since he’s a cat lover who has taken in his own abandoned felines.
The animal rights aspects, aside from one clear example, seem lost amid the battle scenes. While it would have been nice to see those points made more clear, Tsuno told us he didn’t want to leave viewers depressed. “It’s also a tale of friendship. It’s also a tale of brothers. It’s also a tale of a cat and her owner. I put them all together in one movie and turned it into a comedy,” he said. “I didn’t want to express it in a depressing way, even though the theme is serious. I want to make movies that make you feel happy.”
The film features songs by Birthday Girl, a new artist for us, who is now on the reviewer’s Spotify. Overall, it’s a fun dose of comedy and action. The film feels like a wild dream. Keep in mind that there’s no need to question their practicality.
Mad Cats is presented in Japanese with English subtitles. It made its world premiere at the Treasure Mountain Inn Ballroom on Jan. 21 and will screen again at 3:15 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 24.
Visit the Slamdance website for more details.
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For years one of our favorite “Friends of the Magazine” (FOM), Stuart Graves, has shared his adventures running around Main Street in Park City searching for celebrities during the Sundance Film Festival and asking them to take, as he says, “an old-school selfie” with his ancient point-and-shoot camera. We call them #stuartselfies. Now in 2023, the Sundance Film Festival has returned. It’s been three years since Stuart has been able to share his antics and portfolio of photos of his face alongside many famous faces. When Sundance called the code in 2022 (at the last minute) and cancelled the in-person festival he announced that he was formally retired from celebrity hunting (although he’s always looking wherever he travels). But like Tom Brady, Stuart just couldn’t stay on the bench and he will be back on Main Street. So here’s his managerie of stars on Main Street Park City from Saturday, Jan. 21, 2023. All photos by Stuart Graves (the smiley guy). See his greatest hits from before the COVID-gap here.
Follow the links to see Stuart’s Day One Sundance 2023 #stuartselfies and take a look at his greatest hits from the Sundance Film Festival.
For years one of our favorite “Friends of the Magazine” (FOM), Stuart Graves has shared his adventures running around Main Street in Park City searching for celebrities during the Sundance Film Festival and asking them to take, as he says, “an old-school selfie” with his ancient point-and-shoot camera. We call them #stuartselfies. Now in 2023, the Sundance Film Festival has returned. It’s been three years since Stuart has been able to share his antics and portfolio of photos of his face alongside many famous faces. When Sundance called the code in 2022 (at the last minute) and cancelled the in-person festival he announced that he was formally retired from celebrity hunting (although he’s always looking wherever he travels). But like Tom Brady, Stuart just couldn’t stay on the bench and he will be back on Main Street. So here’s his managerie of stars from Friday, Jan. 20, 2023. All photos by Stuart Graves (the smiley guy). See his greatest hits from before the COVID-gap here.
Click the links for Day Two, Day Three and (an increasingly less-valid) Greatest Hits.
Perhaps destined to become a new classic of the film nerd genre, David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s documentary Kim’s Video is an entertaining, twisty, funny, dreamy, sometimes grumpy quest film, featuring co-director Redmon as its protagonist. He is our narrator and eyes, an ardent cinephile-cum-detective, seeking to locate and secure the Maltese Falcon of video archives: the holdings of the defunct titular video store, 55,000 VHS tapes and DVDs, ranging from canonic cinema classics and highbrow experimental films to bootlegged rarities, porn films and low budget productions depicting an engagingly gritty, dangerous, and long-lost New York.
Redmon introduces himself as a classic loner, a rural Texas kid often left in the care of his grandparents, and drawn, in his loneliness, to the electrostatic magic of the small screen, which was always most animated for him, he says, by films. This personal history provides the foundation for Kim’s Video’s eclectic visual style, in which thought, event, and reflection are all filtered through the lens of “classic” cinema. Redmon’s hometown, he tells us, was close to Paris, Texas, a statement accompanied by a clip from the 1984 Wim Wenders film of the same name, showing a slack mouthed Harry Dean Stanton walking stiff-legged through a desert landscape. This technique of referential substitution recurs frequently, ultimately illustrating the broad range of Redmon’s personal filmic canon, while also backing his rather suspect, or at least narratively providential, claim that his obsession with film has made it difficult for him to tell fiction from fact. I don’t buy the claim on its surface, but I nevertheless accept it as a thesis for how the film wants to approach its ostensibly nonfiction narrative: despite its verité style, some apparently factual turns will be too weird, or convenient, to be believed. Truth is stranger than fiction, that is—or truth so closely mirrors the fictions of Redmon’s keystone films that it’s hard to say which is taking cues from which.
The founder of Kim’s Video, Yongman Kim is, indeed, movie star material. An enigmatic and handsome Korean businessman, who once had his own dreams of making films, Kim’s former employees describe him as both charming and a likely criminal mastermind. Ultimately, he came to support his immigrant family with an East Village dry cleaning store, running his video rental business as a side hustle. But in the high 80s, when VHS was king, Kim realized that his broad aesthetic tastes and innovative, even illegal, methods of procuring rare material could be hugely profitable. For hungry New York aficionados, like Texas-transplant Redmon, Kim’s massive lending library could also be transformatively educational, and it attracted a devoted base of members, none so fierce, it seems, as our protagonist. Kim’s stacks, Redmon tells us, “made me calm…[they] made me feel safe.”
Given this feeling that he’d found his true home (i.e., the embodied history of cinema itself), it makes perfect sense that the store’s sudden closure, in the early 2000s (a predictable victim of new technologies), would produce the deep, existential angst that drives Redmon’s increasingly edgy search for answers in the aftermath. It’s as if Redmon’s closest friends, his chosen family—the ghosts of cinema, he calls them—have been taken from him, kidnaped and absconded to, of all (cinematic) places, the town of Salemi, Sicily, so like (in fact so close to) the fictional Corleone of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films. Around 2009, we learn, Kim struck a strange deal with Salemi, and its then mayor, Vittorio Sgarbi (a Berlusconi crony), transferring his entire archive there on Sgarbi’s promise that the videos would be made permanently available, put on display in a perpetual festival, which, of course, would be free to any of Kim’s former members who came to visit. Enter Redmon, circa 2017, seemingly the only ever taker of the offer, who tells Salemi’s affable chief of police, “I’m going to be here. A lot.” His tone of menace, of course, is comic.
What actually happened with the archive, Redmon finds, is a sad travesty of cynical political maneuvering, emitting a sour whiff of mafia intervention, but the inventive and erstwhile director, inspired by his encyclopedic cinephilia and the ultimately endearing and amenable Kim, is up to the challenge of saving film history. (Some muscle provided by Redmon’s ghosts helps, too.) Kim’s Video may not fully convince us, or even really wish to argue, its deepest metaphysical claims (e.g., “cinema is a record of existence”), but it most certainly entertains as Redmon’s kooky gambits and pressure campaigns become increasingly unhinged and risky. Perhaps the film’s most deeply felt theme, rather, is that for the truly obsessed film otaku absolutely nothing is more valuable, worth risking everything for its preservation, than film knowledge and the physical documentation, however grainy, within which it resides.
Salt Lake is a city built on secrets. Its origin tale is wrapped up with the “Bible 2.0” Exodus of Brigham Young and his followers, the Latter-day Saints, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (officially) or the Mormons (colloquially and historically). The Mormons first arrived here in the Great Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847, after a long and insanely dangerous trek from Nauvoo, Ill. Technically it was Mexican territory, but the Mexican-American War was about to get underway and much bigger dogs than Brigham and his rag-tag band of Mormons were squaring off for a fight. Brigham wanted his followers to be left alone to practice the LDS faith and, yep it gets weird, to establish a short-lived autonomous nation called the Kingdom of Deseret (which got as far as developing its own language and currency, BTW). It is, as we say around here, a heck of a story.
In the late 1800s, federal troops, sent here to put the kibosh on this whole Kingdom thing, discovered rich veins of copper and silver and paved the way for the age of the silver barons and more outside influence. The east-west railroad brought an influx of laborers who would add diversity to the mix, and Utah’s admission to the United States, in 1896, brought even more changes. Still, Utah remained apart with a dominant religion, which often dictated politics and individual conscience. The point is: this whole delicious frontier mix of history made an atmosphere perfect for the cultivation of mushroom-like secrets.
DORTHY MOORMEISTER: UTAH’S ‘BLACK DAHLIA’
- What: The last known whereabouts of Dorothy Moormeister
- Where: The Hotel Utah (Now the Joseph Smith Memorial Building), 15 E. South Temple, SLC
The victim is the young wife of a prominent and wealthy physician. The story has suitors, insinuated affairs, missing jewels and even an Arabian prince. It sounds like an Agatha Christie novel, but it all happened in Salt Lake City. Just after midnight on February 22, 1930, the brutally disfigured body of Dorothy Moormeister, 32, was found on the western edge of Salt Lake City. She had been repeatedly run over with her own car. Dorothy’s husband was Dr. Frank Moormeister, a physician and abortionist for the local brothels. Dr. Moormeister was much older than his wife, who had a wild social life and actively solicited the attention of other men.
One of these men, Charles Peter, was the prime suspect in her death. He had allegedly urged Dorothy to divorce her husband and fleece him in the settlement. Additionally, the doctor had loaned Peter a large sum of money and had, as partial payment, taken from Peter a valuable pendant. The pendant was among the jewelry missing from Dorothy’s body. Another suitor, Prince Farid XI, who had met the Moormeisters during an excursion to Paris, was rumored to have been in Salt Lake City at the time. Afterward, there were letters discovered intimating that Dorothy had designs to run away with him.
On the night of her murder, Dorothy was seen entering the Hotel Utah (now the Joseph Smith Memorial Building) at around 6 p.m. She left a short time later with two men and another woman. Dr. Moormeister claimed to have gone out to see a movie alone during this time period. The autopsy revealed traces of absinthe in Dorothy’s stomach. A search also revealed that she had been hiding money in various safety deposit boxes around town and had drafted some recent changes in her will, but she had not signed them officially.
However, despite all the intrigue and a massive effort by county investigators—they even brought in a private detective who was considered popularly as the “Sherlock Holmes” of his time—the killer was never brought to justice.
ABOUT THE BOOK: Secret Salt Lake opens a window into the weird, the bizarre, and obscure secrets of Salt Lake, that are often hiding in plain sight. The guidebook, written by Salt Lake magazine editors Jeremy Pugh and Mary Brown Malouf is a collection of odd tales, urban myths, legends and historical strangeness here in the Beehive State. Get your copy from Reedy Press today and read more about the secrets and oddities of Utah.
Every January, Sundance Film Festival offers a platform for filmmakers and artisans to share their stories with the world. Acting as a gatekeeper to Hollywood, the films that premiere at Sundance go on to reach global audiences and skyrocket entire filmmaking teams to the top. Historically, most of the movies embraced by the big shots are centered around a singular American experience—a white experience. To break away from this homogenized tradition, diversity-focused organization The LatinX House is heading up to Park City to hold space for black, brown, and indigenous storytellers at Sundance.
Activist Mònica Ramírez, actor/producer Olga Segura and writer/producer Alexandra Martìnez Kondracke co-founded The LatinX House in 2019 when they noticed the underrepresentation of the Latinx community at Sundance and in film as a whole. “We know there’s a huge problem in the way our community is represented on screen,” says Ramírez. They launched their inaugural house in 2020 during the festival’s first virtual format and have since held in-person activations at SXSW, and their own festival in Aspen called Raizado. Each new festival allows the LatinX team to create an inclusive and welcoming space for meaningful conversations. “It’s important to create a gathering place of filmmakers and creatives alongside activists and other kinds of leaders in our community to be able to share ideas, tackle social issues, get creative and hopefully form really great collaborations,” says Ramírez.
This year, the team at The LatinX House has organized their first in-person activation at Sundance, including a full schedule of panels, private screenings, moderated conversations, and awards ceremonies. Between the packed program, Ramírez and her team included plenty of time for socializing and community building. “We’ve built in these community hours so that people can be in the space and let the conversation marinate, get some creative juices flowing in terms of how they might want to work with other people.” Above all, the Sundance house was built around love. “We build our houses with a lot of love and authenticity,” Ramírez beams. “People walk into that house and take notice of all these little special touches. They understand that we developed this experience with a lot of heart.”
Outside of its own programs, the LatinX House also takes on a larger role in cross-cultural programing throughout the festival. “This year, we’ve been able to do cultural programming and collaborating with the Sunrise House, The Blackhouse Foundation, IllumiNative and a few other partners,” says Ramírez. “There are some really special moments coming throughout the festival that we’ll all be able to come together across the houses.”
After the dust settles on Park City and the sundancers have departed, The LatinX House will continue efforts to uplift diverse experiences in film. Following the success of their 2022 Adelante Directors Fellowship Program and their own 2022 Raizado film festival held in Aspen, the LatinX team is ready to maintain the momentum. And as for our own Salty city, Ramírez says she is proud to see Latinx leadership that are making strides for a broader national agenda, “It’s really wonderful to see communities continuing to grow here, and the leaders on the ground making sure to address specific issues that are important to our community.”
You can find The LatinX House’s full schedule on their website, follow them on socials to stay up to date with all their Sundance happenings.
For more than a decade, Larkin Poe has delivered their electrified, modernized, Southern-fried rockin’ blues to stadiums and festivals all across the globe. On Friday, Jan. 27, 2023 we get a chance to see them up close and personal at The Commonwealth Room.
Sisters Rebecca and Megan Lovell from Georgia, who make up Larkin Poe, are reinvigorating the blues by blending their blood harmonies with super-charged guitar and lap steel riffs. They’re touring in support of their new record Blood Harmony, a great rockin’ blues album that weaves threads of home and family together into a complicated, sometimes painful narrative. In the first chords of the opening track, “Deep Stays Down” Megan Lovell’s haunting swamp blues slide guitar riff takes us somewhere dark and foreboding while sister Rebecca’s soulful voice tells us about the subterranean demons that get buried in the rural South with lyrics like: “The cat’s in the bag, the bag’s in the river and the river runs deep and the deep stays down.”
The title track “Blood Harmony” celebrates growing up in a musical family and singing with a sibling to create powerful blood harmonies. Rebecca sings: “More than flesh, more than bone. When I sing, I don’t sing alone.” The sister’s bittersweet move from Georgia to Nashville is captured in the radio-ready, Bonnie Raitt-styled “Georgia Off My Mind.” One of my favorite tracks on this amazing record is “Bad Spell.” Rebecca Lovell pens a clever response to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ 1950s macabre blues classic “I Put a Spell on You” from the perspective of the spellbound. The sisters offer us a bad-ass, full-throttled rockin’ blues retort. “Boy, you cast a bad spell, a bad spell over me. And when I catch you, you’re gonna catch hell. I’m gonna get ya in the first degree.”
The Grammy-nominated duo is firmly rooted in the blues and they offer a fresh, new, female perspective that’ll lead the genre into the 21st century. Fun fact: The band is named for the Lovell sister’s great, great, great grandfather, Larkin Husky Poe, who was a cousin of the gothic writer Edgar Allen Poe. That dark literary DNA passed to the Lovell sisters making the blues the perfect vehicle for their artistic expression.
Larkin Poe put a fresh coat of paint on Son House’s 1930s blues standards, “John the Revelator” and “Preachin’ Blues” making them shine for a new generation of listeners. Ninety years ago Lead Belly recorded a 1-minute acapella version of an old, southern field workers’ song “Black Betty” which recounts oppression, injustice and living under the whip. Other artists have recorded versions of the standard, but none captured Lead Belly’s intensity until 2017 when Larkin Poe gave the song a new-age authenticity with their powerful foot-stomping female harmonies.
In 2020, Larkin Poe released Kindred Spirits, a full-length album of contemporary covers. Their version of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” features a slower, more acoustic tempo and the duo’s beautiful harmonies transform the song with a haunting and visceral depth. Their renditions of “Nights in White Satin,” “Bell Bottom Blues” and “Fly Away” are also fabulous reworks.
2020 also brought a full dose of new, original material with Self Made Man, a hard-charging album that reached #1 on Billboard’s blues album chart and featured great new power blues ballads like “Holy Ghost Fire.” Rebecca Lovell sings: “lift our voices with the smoke rising higher. Burn with that holy ghost fire.” While Megan Lovell harmonizes to an uptempo beat, both sisters duel it out with thunderous guitar licks.
In 2018, their album Venom and Faith reached #1 on the Billboard blues album chart and received a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Blues Album. The record produced the single “Bleach Blonde Bottles Blues,” a song that defines the duo’s driving blues guitar and lap steel sound with a thunderclap beat and mesmerizing siren harmonies.
Opening the evening is American roots quintet Goodnight, Texas, a band fronted by two lead singers and songwriters, Avi Vinocur from San Francisco, and Patrick Dyer Wolf from North Carolina (so, they’re not actually from Texas). Goodnight, Texas is named for the small town halfway between the two, representing the “meet in the middle” of their songcraft. Blending folk, rock and blues, Goodnight, Texas creates a musical landscape of scenic vistas and open roads. Their song “Tucumcari” captures images of the windswept New Mexican town with a gritty western musical soundtrack. The band creates an Old Crow Medicine Show vibe with old-timey styled Americana songs like “The Railroad,” “A Bank Robber’s Nursery Rhyme,” and “Moonshiners.” Their rural roots style will pair well with Larkin Poe’s electrified Delta blues.
Fans of southern-styled blues like the Allman Brothers, Black Crowes, Gary Clark Jr, Samantha Fish, Kaleo, or ZZ Ward won’t want to miss seeing Larkin Poe in the intimate confines of the Commonwealth Room on January 27, 2023. They’re sure to get your feet stompin’, your hands clapping and your head bobbing. I will pair the evening’s music with a fine Golden Spike Hefeweizen from Uinta Brewing. Cheers!
- Who: Larkin Poe w/Goodnight, Texas
- What: Blood Harmony Tour
- Where: Commonwealth Room
- When: Jan. 27, 2023
- Tickets and info: thestateroompresents.com
There are few things on the cultural calendar in Utah that are as out of sync with the traditional, quaint Beehive lifestyle as the Sundance Film Festival. Each year, thousands of people in black descend upon Park City like a plague of Mormon crickets: Publicists, industry wonks, filmmakers, photographers, celebrities and their handlers, and a host of hangers-on crowd fresh from L.A., be-scarved, be-turtlenecked, be-satcheled and shod in impractical shoes.
Of course, we Utahns love Sundance. It’s a brush with the larger world that all Utahns secretly crave. (See: The Winter Olympic Games, 2002.) Despite the changing landscape of Utah (especially Park City), we maintain our low self-esteem problem—an underdog, outsider stance that hearkens back to the days of Brigham. On one hand, we’re proud of our weird heritage and, on the other, we seek approval like a middle child. We are the Jan Brady of the United States.
Each year, the crowd that arrives from the coast and the local crowd that arrives from the Salt Lake Valley mingle on Main Street to babble in two separate languages. (Park City residents usually bug out during the January invasion—ironically, the perfect time of year to visit Southern California.) The first language is the disdainful speech of the aloof artist, wherein to actually like something is decidedly uncool. The local language is one of unbridled enthusiasm and charming goofiness. We like things here. We really do. I love us for that.
The Sundancers, however, come with their lists, a hierarchy of A through Z listers. There are clipboards waiting outside of all the private parties, celebrity lounges and concerts. Out there in party land, there are lists upon lists upon lists and rope lines and waiting in the cold to get into someplace only to find that there’s another level of VIP-ness beyond the first gate. There always seems to be another level of even more exclusive and elusive exclusivity beyond—each layered inside the next like a matryoshka doll. I imagine that eventually, you get to one super cool room, containing one super cool VIP. Who could, if there were anyone else there to hear, be heard to exclaim, “I think I won!”
Welcome back to town, Hollywood. Don’t slip on the ice.
Comfort, it turns out, is not relative, at least with food. No matter the cuisine or the culture that any given dish springs from, it will contain one neurological common denominator, buried in the primal place in our brains: Nostalgia
In search of Salt Lake’s best comfort food, we asked six restaurateurs and chefs what comfort food means to them. In our final edition, we spoke to the minds behind Red Iguana about their nuanced comfort meals that stem from family legacy.
The People: Lucy Cardenas and Bill Coker
The Restaurant: Red Iguana and Red Iguana 2
Lucy Cardenas grew up in her family’s restaurants, eating some of the same dishes she still serves today at Red Iguana and Red Iguana 2. “Comfort food always reminds me of something in your childhood. My father’s chile verde was the best,” she says. “My family has been serving my father’s chile verde since 1965 along with my mother’s rice.” Still, her take on the potential of comfort food is nuanced, “Comfort food isn’t any one thing. I think it’s very individual. Some people grow up having beans all of the time, and now they never want to eat beans. I could eat a plate of beans every day.” If you’ve had their beans, you probably would too.
When it came to putting together the perfect comfort meal, Cardenas and her partner Bill Coker were hard-pressed not to name their entire menu. “We have as many as nine moles,” says Coker. Mole is a thick, spicy sauce that can stand on its own or top enchiladas and other dishes, typically made from fruits, nuts and chili peppers. “We also make pozole a few times a week.” Pozole is a warm bowl of fragrant goodness—a stew made from pork, hominy and chili peppers. Coker also finds comfort in their hongos al ajillo, “It’s mushrooms sauteed in garlic and butter and a good-looking side dish.” And for dessert? “Sopapillas…or our flan,” he says.
Cardenas’ comfort food focus is more dialed in. “Huevos,” she says. “Anything with an egg.” Her description of their Sunrise Burrito is enough to put most people in a pleasant food coma: pork chile verde burritos that are also smothered in chile verde and melted jack cheese and topped with two eggs. Of course, it comes back to that chile verde, the recipe perfected by her father. “The chile verde is one of our most popular dishes. We have chef friends who have tried to emulate it and haven’t been successful.”
The chile verde, a family legacy, has been on the menu since Cardenas’ parents Ramon and Maria opened their first restaurant in the Salt Lake Valley, Casa Grande, and the tradition continued when Red Iguana opened in 1985 with the motto “killer Mexican food.” Red Iguana 2 is the sequel to Red Iguana, just a few blocks away from its predecessor with the exact same menu. Cardenas and Coker, ignoring conventional wisdom, opened up the second location to help meet the staggering demand for the first, where people line up down the street to get a table. The second location offers diners a just-as-good-if-not-better alternative, when the wait at Red Iguana gets long, to get a comfortable seat rather than queuing up outside. Now, more than ten years later, the gamble seems to have paid off, and the Cardenas’ legacy killer comfort food lives on. “We’re excited to still be going after 37 years,” she says. “We’re just happy to be here.”
If You Go…
Red Iguana 2
Sunday–Thursday open 11 a.m.-9 p.m.
Friday–Saturday open 11 a.m.-10 p.m.
866 W. South Temple, SLC,
(801) 214-6050
