Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts…

Heartland’s 33rd edition ran October 10-20 — over 100 films, at least seventeen of them with cast/crew Q&As afterward. I took a week’s vacation from my day job and posted for nine consecutive days about the seven films I saw at five theaters in ten days, one virtual screening we’ll get to in a moment, plus a few other overdue, mostly unrelated entries. I doubt anyone out there read every single word, but I’m not even done yet!

For those just joining us, those seven films were, in viewing order:

• ReEntry
• Micro Budget
• Jazzy
• Superboys of Malegaon
• Small Things Like These
• Sheepdog
• We Strangers

Only two of these entrants have distribution deals in place as of this writing. A few may gain higher profiles in the months ahead. Some may continue their nomadic journey on the festival circuit in search of their forever home. Some were more flawed than others. I appreciated the chance to see them all, and I regret the long, long list of my other finalists who didn’t make the cut — some were sold out, some were scheduled opposite each other, and some I missed simply because some responsibilities prevented me from running around town to see three films a day for eleven straight days. As it is, I’m a bit burned out and ready for some homebound rest for a while until the next crappy superhero sequel comes around.

For viewers who wanted to travel less, Heartland also offered a selection of virtual screenings for certain films. My wife Anne and I availed ourselves of one such option last Saturday night: an indie dramedy called Dirty Laundry, made here in Indy. It seemed to garner the most media attention among the Hoosier-born projects on the roster. It also had three theatrical showings throughout the festival, more than most other films got. I was tempted by one novelty screening at the Kan-Kan Cinema that was played on VHS (!!!), but it was held the same night as Superboys.

The VHS edition was apropos of Laundry‘s period-piece nature — apart from a few flashbacks filmed in or in front of people’s houses, it’s a bottle episode set sometime in the mid-’90s at a laundromat with a pay phone and other bygone novelties (shot in an existing establishment a couple miles from the State Fairgrounds). Two young friends named Kyle and Eric meet weekly for that chore and a “business meeting”; each Thursday they try to come up with some company they’ll form together for the rest of their lives and get rich happily ever after. I’m not usually one for Pavlovian responses to nostalgia prompts, but the handfuls of quarters and laundry-cart shenanigans sent me back to my own laundromat days of yore — sometimes with family, sometimes by myself into the wee hours after closing time at my restaurant job…though even at 2 a.m. I never once managed to have the entire place to myself with no other customers or employees around as the guys do here.

Then comes an unexpected meeting with a mysterious, smiling woman (local storyteller Deborah Asante) who represents an extremely familiar trope that predates the ’90s. She offers cryptic words of wisdom and vanishes before her two listeners suffer a magical side effect: they suddenly find they can no longer lie. This helps us narrow down the exact year: sometime between 1995 (one cites The Shawshank Redemption as his favorite movie, which came out in ’94 but took at least a year before millions of video renters declared it Best Movie Ever) and February 1997, which is the best explanation why neither of them notices the resemblance to Liar Liar. (Or for that matter the Twilight Zone episode “The Whole Truth”. The initially super-expensive DVD sets came out in ’98, and it’s possible these guys missed it in reruns.)

Rather than getting Carrey’d away, writer/director Rocky Walls has another idea to pursue. He lets them have a little fun (though at first they mistake the hex for psychic powers, in a sequence that’s more awkward than funny) before their joint frustration escalates into a harsher exchange. As each realizes the other really can’t lie, they figure this night is the perfect chance to learn some cool secrets, over each other’s protests and without thinking ahead to the potential damage. Eventually emotions run their highest when the Biggest Secret is revealed, which Anne guessed about ten minutes into the film, though it curves slightly into less trod-upon grounds by the end.

At 71 minutes it’s the shortest of the eight films I saw in all, but still could’ve used a tighter edit. Conversations leave in a lot of long pauses for thought before lines are recited, as if a minimum runtime had to be reached, like a student padding a 1000-word essay by preceding every adjective with “very, very, very”. Of our two leads and the assorted smaller parts (including one background player who was once an extra in an episode of Cobra Kai), Mitchell Wray clearly has the most stage experience (including the national touring version of Finding Neverland) and stands out as Kyle, the more jokey and free-spirited of the two, whose tear-jerking confession needed the most dynamic range. If he’s on board for any future Heartland films, I’ll keep an eye out for his name in the catalog.

Before we go, here’s a special shout-out to the five places Heartland lured me to for this year’s occasions:

Special thanks to the kind lady I chatted with before Jazzy, who was literally the only person who struck up a conversation with this graying introvert throughout my entire festival experience other than my own wife. I’m glad she enjoyed the Randy Bachman documentary and I hope my attempts to describe ReEntry weren’t too boring. It was nice to talk about movies in person and out loud for once.

If you’re still here: thanks for that. I’m a nobody locally (or on most other measurable scales, really) and consequently saw most of my Heartland entries fly unobserved into the aether shortly after publishing…except I learned Twitter users will totally brake for mentions of Cillian Murphy, only to back away disappointed if you don’t post any hot pictures of him. Sorry, but it wasn’t that kind of film.

Fun ironic trivia in closing: of all the entries I cranked out during this special nine-day posting marathon, the one that drummed up the most traffic was the one about The Wild Robot. It set a new record over the weekend for MCC’s highest single-day traffic spike in its entire 12-year existence, handily beating out the previous record-holder: this one time a pair of mass murderers preempted one of my TV shows. Frankly, I was really sick of that being my all-time blogging pinnacle. Thanks, DreamWorks!

And thank you for reading! Lord willing and time permitting, we’ll be back next year.