Tag Archives: Indianapolis

Toy Trains and Xmas Xings: Jingle Rails 2024 at the Eiteljorg Museum

December 17, 2024 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Intricate wood models of downtown Indianapolis buildings including the OneAmerica Tower, Salesforce Tower, and Monument Circle featuring the lit-up Soldiers and Sailors Monument.

A cross-section of tiny downtown Indianapolis, not to scale and with some buildings rearranged or missing.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: sometimes we leave the house for Christmas activities here in Indianapolis! Last year my wife and I attended the Indiana Repertory Theatre’s annual take on A Christmas Carol and had primo seats in the front-row fake-snow splash zone. My coworkers and I have made the Indiana Historical Society’s Festival of Trees a team-building tradition. Anne and I also used to escort her Mamaw to the Christmas Gift and Hobby Show at the Indiana State Fairgrounds until her passing in 2018. We’re Christmas fans in search of more Christmas ’round town, even though our place is loaded with enough Christmas decor for three households. (I’m not complaining.)

Once again we were blessed with an opportunity for another local cultural experience whose advertising we’ve noted and dismissed till now — free tickets courtesy of my employer (one of their organization’s corporate partners) to the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art on the occasion of their annual Jingle Rails exhibit. Whatever’s normally in their Allen Whitehill Clowes Sculpture Court is carted off elsewhere and replaced with enormous dioramas that are festooned with Christmas decorations and toy train tracks. Li’l locomotives run laps nonstop around the hall while visitors gape in childlike wonder. I guess that’s the ritual? As I said, this was our first time.

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The Indiana Historical Society’s Festival of Trees 2024: A Forest of Christmas Highlights

November 21, 2024 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Christmas treetop with peacock, ornaments and tiny TV with Channel 13 test pattern

Proud as a peacock! Decorations by WTHR Channel 13, our NBC affiliate.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: each year the Indiana Historical Society in downtown Indianapolis hosts a special Christmas exhibit called the Festival of Trees, for which dozens of local businesses and charities festoon a tree (or sometimes alternative objects) with decorations befitting their interests, causes, products, and/or colors. For the third year in a row my coworkers and I took a lunchtime field trip to their museum and immersed ourselves in holiday spirit, local pride, and tree-trimming cuteness.

Once again my wife Anne couldn’t be there because she has her own employer and perks, so I took pics to share with her and with You, The Viewers at Home. Trees are identified by their trimmers and/or donors. Links are provided for several — not affiliated links, mind you, because MCC has never been that kind of site. Enjoy!

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Halloween Stats 2024: OF COURSE the Only Day It Rained THIS ENTIRE WEEK.

October 31, 2024 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Halloween skeleton lying on a table surrounded by party snacks -- breadsticks, sausages, cheeses, carrots, and so on.

No, this wasn’t our house, but an office party I ran across a couple weeks ago.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: each year since 2008 I’ve kept statistics on the number of trick-or-treaters brave enough to approach our suburban Indianapolis doorstep during the Halloween celebration of neighborhood unity and no-strings-attached strangers with candy. I began tracking our numbers partly for future candy inventory purposes and partly out of curiosity, so now it’s a tradition for me. Like many bloggers I’m a stats fiend who thrives on taking head counts, even when we’re expecting discouraging results.

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So Many Signs: Indianapolis Redecorates for the 2024 Coming of Taylor Swift

October 29, 2024 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments
Giant Taylor Swift mural on the front of a Marriott whose face is all blue glass. She has a pink guitar.

Attack of the 300-Foot Taylor Swift!

TAYLOR SWIFT IS COMING! TAYLOR SWIFT IS COMING! TAYLOR SWIFT IS COMING!

Here in Indianapolis, our local media are positively ecstatic to have anything to talk about besides politics, homicides, and the city’s increasingly toxic levels of road construction. For those just joining us: Ms. Swift’s Eras Tour will be stopping in Indy this weekend to play three nights at Lucas Oil Stadium. While she and her entourage take over the place, our Indianapolis Colts will be staying with buddies in Minnesota until someone calls and gives them the okay to come back, which will depend on how they do Sunday against the Vikings.

Tickets to her sold-out Hoosier trilogy are still available through the usual auction sites and scalpers for four-digit sums, so don’t expect live coverage from me. Downtown hotel rooms are sold out across the board, though some are available around the edges of town and in the suburbs. Tourists are welcome to fill those up as well, but please be aware, when planning how to get from your hotel to the stadium, the first several hundred Google results for “mass transit Indianapolis” are a long list of pipe dreams sprinkled with a few nice tries.

In preparation for the influx of hundreds of thousands of folks into our modest city, they’ve gussied up our downtown! In addition to the amazing colossal Swift temporarily pictured on the giant blast-shield Marriott on West Street, thirty-two new street signs have been posted at various intersections, pretending to rename them after her songs and albums. I work downtown four days a week and own four of her CDs, so I felt I ought to do something resembling participation. Monday afternoon I sent myself on a side quest at lunchtime to take a long walk and see how many of those signs I could spot before my feet were ground into mulch. Please enjoy this gallery of results, a fraction of the total signage out there for the gawking all this week!

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The Heartland International Film Festival 2024 Season Finale

October 21, 2024 By in Conventions & Events, Indiana, Meta, Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Black pin with yellow border and lettering, "Audience Choice Jury Member, Heartland International Film Festival".

Woo-hoo! Free pin!

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!

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Heartland Film Festival 2024 Screening #7: “We Strangers”

October 20, 2024 By in Indiana, Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment
Kirby sitting alone at one end of a fancy table in front of a large, banal still-life fruit painting. She stares at unseen people on the opposite end, an untouched teacup beside her.

This scene near the end should tell you a lot about what she puts up with from the other characters.

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 runs October 10-20, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least eight films in all (Lord willing). Longtime MCC readers know the rule: every film I see in theaters gets its own entry…

…and we come at last to the final theatrical recount in this very special MCC miniseries: We Strangers (not to be confused with last year’s All of Us Strangers), a dramedy that premiered at South by Southwest back in March and caught my eye in Heartland’s listings on the strength of its star Kirby Howell-Baptiste (whose recent roles, including this one, have been billed mononymously as just “Kirby”). Best known to geeks as Dream’s big sister Death in Netflix’s Sandman, I’ve also seen her in Veronica Mars season 4 (as a bartender who doesn’t appreciate being a murder suspect), the Apple TV+ series Sugar (as Colin Farrell’s handler), the Cruella prequel (as young Anita Darling), HBO’s Barry (blink and miss her as a recurring student in Gene Cousineau’s acting class), and so on and so on. Okay, I’ll stop now.

Suffice it to say she’s no stranger to me in that sense, though “stranger” can mean different things, and switch context at any moment without notice, even when you’re finally on the call sheet.

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Heartland Film Festival 2024 Screening #6: “Sheepdog”

October 19, 2024 By in Indiana, Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
A young white veteran and an old Black veteran, both in autumn outerwear, sitting and feeling chummy on a movie poster.

It’s extremely tough finding screen shots of films that don’t yet have a distributor, an official site with a gallery, or a trailer available for Fair Use purposes…

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 runs October 10-20, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least eight films in all (Lord willing). Longtime MCC readers know the rule: every film I see in theaters gets its own entry…

Nowadays films about veterans poorly adjusting to post-deployment civilian life (apart from five whole minutes of The Hurt Locker) tend to get made only if the afflicted veteran becomes a bad guy for the heroes to defeat or an antihero to put down like a rabid dog — twisted by their combat traumas into a serial killer, a terrorist, a super-villain, or a politician scheming himself an evil long game. We used to have a smattering of modestly budgeted adult dramas back in the day when Americans first began feeling ashamed of how Vietnam veterans were treated. (Anyone else remember Unnatural Causes, a 1986 TV-movie starring John Ritter and Alfre Woodard, about vets stricken by side effects of Agent Orange?) It’s not like society actually solved that problem and all our veterans feel great now — filmmakers just stopped attempting any serious explorations.

Sheepdog is the sort of movie the major studios believe isn’t worth their time or effort anymore. Its writer/director/producer/star Steven Grayhm (from a Canadian SF series called Between) spent over a decade putting it together anyway. It premiered at the Boston Film Festival last month (the event nearest to where it was filmed) and is currently traveling the circuit, including two showings at Heartland. (We missed its first showing last Friday, which concluded with a post-screening Q&A with Grayhm and two other producers, but that was the same night as ReEntry‘s World Premiere and Q&A.) I have aesthetic quibbles, which tend to be my thing, but Grayhm’s heart is absolutely in the right place.

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Heartland Film Festival 2024 Screening #5: “Small Things Like These”

October 18, 2024 By in Indiana, Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Cillian Murphy glowering from within the darkness of a coal shed.

What evil lurks within the coal shed?

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 runs October 10-20, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least eight films in all (Lord willing). Longtime MCC readers know the rule: every film I see in theaters gets its own entry…

Academy Award Winner Cillian Murphy is back! The Irish historical drama Small Things Like These, his first film since Oppenheimer, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival back in February and will be rolled out to U.S. theaters in November. Its special exhibition as a Heartland “Centerpiece Screening” (read: highly promoted and tickets cost a tad more) represented its second-ever showing here in the States. Though it boasts a couple bigger names than some of the other festival films I’ve seen so far, its minimalist aesthetic and hushed ambiance make it feel smaller and more intimate than the rest — in many ways the opposite of Murphy’s last gig. It’s also a Christmas movie!

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Heartland Film Festival 2024 Screening #4: “Superboys of Malegaon”

October 17, 2024 By in Comics/Lit, Indiana, Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Young filmmaker holding a digital camera, watching forlornly as the woman he loves is driven away offscreen.

Movies will break your heart, kid.

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 runs October 10-20, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least eight films in all (Lord willing). Longtime MCC readers know the rule: every film I see in theaters gets its own entry…

Full disclosure: Superboys of Malegaon was a last-minute addition to my festival itinerary, made possibly by one of my patented “six degrees” rabbit-hole investigations of the seeming interconnectedness of all cinema. Follow:

After loving Andrew Garfield’s back-to-back performances in The Social Network and the first Amazing Spider-Man (disregarding this judge’s low score for the second), I followed him to his next project, 99 Homes, which was the first film I ever saw by director Ramin Bahrani, whose most recent feature film was Netflix’s The White Tiger, which shined thanks in large part to its young leading man, one Adarsh Gourav. Fast-forward to this past September, when I spent a good hour or more reviewing the descriptions and cast/crew listings for every single Narrative Feature on Heartland’s site to check for familiar connections. Eventually I got to Superboys, which also stars Gourav.

Between his name and its capsule summary’s strong resemblance to the warm-hearted Be Kind Rewind…well, here we are. It’s funny how many roads lead to and from superheroes. Little did I know the Rewind similarities would end after a time, while the final twenty minutes would reveal strong ties to another, much larger pop-cultural touchstone — one of the all-time greatest, at least according to my generation of geeks.

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Heartland Film Festival 2024 Screening #3: “Jazzy”

October 16, 2024 By in Indiana, Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Two Lakota girls looking at the camera.

THEY FIGHT CRIME! THEY SOLVE MYSTERIES! THEY…wait, no, this isn’t that kind of film.

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 runs October 10-20, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least eight films in all (Lord willing). Longtime MCC readers know the rule: every film I see in theaters gets its own entry…

Last year one of my favorite Heartland entries was Fancy Dance, a Native-focused drama co-written and directed by Erica Tremblay, who’d worked on the most excellent TV series Reservation Dogs (11/10, among the best ever) and Dark Winds (whither season 3?). Its star Lily Gladstone had appeared in a few Rez Dogs episodes, but commanded wider attention as the Oscar-nominated costar of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, where she had to put up with being surrounded by powerfully attention-grabbing white men, and so did her character.

Once an artist emerges from such overshadowing as an independent force on their own terms, it’s absolutely cool seeing them use their newfound fame to encourage and enable other storytellers to come forward and take a shot at reaching a wider audience. Just as Taika Waititi “co-created” Rez Dogs and directed its pilot, thereby launching it with an extra little push (though the show was obviously, lovingly Sterlin Harjo’s baby), I braked while reading Heartland’s Narrative Feature roster when I spotted the listing for Executive Producer Lily Gladstone affixed to Jazzy, an adorable coming-of-age drama that premiered at Tribeca Festival last June and might’ve gotten overlooked among Heartland’s voluminous offerings if not for her name standing out to me.

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