Heartland Film Festival 2024 Screening #2: “Micro Budget”

Four young actors looking really helpless

Imagine if Don’t Look Up were made with nearly no money and its only agenda were “make ALL the money!” Now imagine the behind-the-scenes featurettes about that.

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…

Next up on our to-do list is Micro Budget, an uproarious film-about-filmmaking, which of course means it’s legally guaranteed a Best Picture nomination. The uproarious satire’s skewering of indie movie production might seem offensive to other Heartland participants if they, like its witless fictional auteur, lacked any measurable integrity, artistry, or intent to at least watch a few “How to Make a Movie” YouTube tutorials, let alone see some actual movies while they’re at it.

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Heartland Film Festival 2024 Screening #1: “ReEntry”

Tentative movie poster for "ReEntry with Emily Deschanel and Sam Trammell in profile separated by a science fiction suit in an arched doorway.

Yes, our first film up is sci-fi. I gotta be me. But not all of them will be!

It’s that time again! Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: 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.

After a few brief dalliances with the festival in the past, last year I dove in a bit deeper and caught six movies in all. The fates of those films have varied in the months since — The Promised Land went on to make the Oscar shortlist for Best International Feature; Fancy Dance is now on Apple+ and remains a must-see for fans of Reservation Dogs or Dark Winds; the even tinier Avenue of the Giants has yet to find a distributor and was still assiduously touring as of this past spring; and so on. I appreciated the chance to see new features before they’re released to the world-at-large, and without waiting for pro critics to weigh in first.

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. We kick things off with one of this year’s science fiction contestants, which held its official World Premiere right here at Heartland: a small-scale science fiction drama called ReEntry.

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Indiana State Fair 2024 Photos, Part 9: The Rest of Our Day

State fair carnival rides with a big Midway sign and a cutesy blue elephant mascot statue welcoming guests.

We almost never ride rides at the fair, but they’re fun to glance at briefly from a distance.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

…and it all comes down to this: everything else we saw around the fairgrounds that didn’t need their own chapters. The Thursday we attended was also BMV Day, for which our Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles offered discount passes at nearly half-off admission price. Couple that with an advance parking pass that also lopped a few bucks off, and our total entrance bill was nicely reduced so we could blow more cash on food instead.

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Indiana State Fair 2024 Photos, Part 8: The Year in Art

Medusa! Possibly digital painting.

Medusa!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

Our State Fair may have ended last Sunday, but I’m not finished with it yet! Admittedly, attending the fair and Fan Expo Chicago a week apart was perhaps a bit much. Nevertheless, we’re going into (hopefully) a much more relaxing weekend that’ll give me the free time and mental space to tie up some loose ends…starting with two more State Fair photo galleries.

Anne and I are at that age when we’re more interested in visiting the exhibit halls than we are in rattling our bones on the Midway rides. We enjoy seeing what new works of paint, photography, building blocks, and science have been offered up for the various competitions. The State Fair holds its massive celebrations on behalf of our farmers, but Indiana has no shortage of artists, either. Whether adults or kids, the illustrators come from all demographics, work in multiple media, and bring ideas from pop culture as well as from their own influence and home life. They each contribute in their own ways to the Hoosier State hometown legacy.

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Indiana State Fair 2024 Photos, Part 7: The Year in Antiques

Mr. Spock's Music from Outer Space: the album.

Featuring such timeless classics as “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Earth”, “Beyond Antares”, and “Music to Watch Space Girls By”. Yes, really.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

One of the fair’s regular features is the antiques competition, chiefly displayed on the second floor of the Indiana Arts Building. No one’s ever posted the rules, criteria, rankings, or anything expository beyond signage implying, “Here are some antiques not for sale.” Contestants bring in ancient items they unearthed somewhere, a secret council convenes far from inquisitive eyes, prize ribbons are placed next to some of them, yadda yadda yadda, they’re at your Indiana State Fair.

Amid the quilts and ’50s baby dolls and blue-and-white dishware, a few items with historical value and/or pop culture cachet will catch our attention. We congratulate the winners of this year’s Antiques We Looked At for More Than Three Seconds Contest, sponsored by ConHugeCo, Inc.

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Indiana State Fair 2024 Photos, Part 6: The Year in Lego

Lego Pokemon!

Lego Pokemon! Lego Pikachu, Lego Geodude, and Lego Snorlax.**

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

Lego is a frequent sight at our State Fair. 4-H kids and competitors in other art contests routinely turn in works of Lego as their favorite sculpting medium. There’s nothing emphatically Hoosier about them. To my knowledge we have no Lego factory and no Legoland theme park. Indiana was not a beachhead for Danish explorers. The Lego Indiana Jones sets have nothing to do with Indiana per se, much as we might wish to contrive otherwise. But at our state fair there’s always room for Lego.

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Indiana State Fair 2024 Photos, Part 5: Food for Displaying, Not Devouring

Bluey made of cans, next to the letters NDY also made of cans.

Canned Bluey! Standing next to an Indianapolis “N-D-Y” photo-op setup.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

Our favorite part is the new food, but some of their most ingenious uses of food are available neither for purchase nor consumption. Exhibit A: the annual Canstruction contest! The charitable organization holds eponymous events nationwide in which engineers and other clever planners compete against each other to build the best sculpture made entirely from canned goods, preferably in recognizable shapes and not ordinary stacks with boring titles like “We Bought an Aldi”. After the judging and the public displaying are over, all those meticulously planned figures are torn down and the components are donated to local hunger relief charities, who in turn forward them to needy families. Thus these temporary installations live on only if everyone takes pictures of them.

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Indiana State Fair 2024 Photos, Part 4: Land of the Glowing Giants

Side view of a T-Rex lying down with its mouth open and its tail sticking straight out horizontally.

Flee from the mighty T-Rex that gapes to all comers with its muscular jaws! Or relax at the table and chairs under its butt.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

As if Artscape and the chainsaw sculptures weren’t enough art: on the north end of the fairgrounds, the relatively new space known as The Backyard — which in 2023 was covered in basketball courts and dubbed Hoopfest — hosted an exhibit called Illuminate, comprising a collection of giant-sized organisms that look impressive in daylight but are actually huge lanterns activated at night. Online sources allege this is its second annual occurrence, except the previous works were Asian-themed and those same sources swear they were stationed in Expo Hall. Considering our 2023 visit to Expo Hall turned up only caged critters, I’d be curious to know the building’s exhibition timeline. It sucks to discover just now that we missed something cool.

Not this year, though. Behold: Illuminate! In daylight! I haven’t been to the State Fair at night in 23 years, and there’s no way we’d’ve had enough energy to stay awake and mobile from opening to closing time, so please enjoy some giant unlit lanterns in sunshine! With neon paint that’s, like, a kind of glowing!

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Indiana State Fair 2024 Photos, Part 3: Where the Art Museum Meets the Chainsaw

Blue cube suspended in midair with a light in the middle of it. Each metallic cube side is intricately patterned to project shadows on the surfaces surrounding it.

What if the Cosmic Cube were bigger so it’s harder to steal, prettier than a 6-sided die, and held a more enlightening kind of power?

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

Every MCC miniseries devoted to the fair has at least one chapter devoted to the works of art we encounter in the various exhibit halls. Art took center stage this year courtesy of Newfields (f/k/a the Indianapolis Museum of Art), who stepped into the role of “presenting sponsor” and brought new flourishes to old spaces.

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Indiana State Fair 2024 Photos, Part 2: Let’s Pretend We’re Influencers

Anne and I doing jazz hands on a fake Olympics pedestal. The wall behind us is an ad for WTHR's local Olympics coverage with a photo of the Eiffel Tower filling the empty space where a bronze medalist should be standing.

Thanks to Indianapolis’ NBC affiliate WTHR, we can pretend we’re Olympians! Everyone loves the Olympics, we’re told!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

Our photo galleries typically showcase the places we’ve been, the things we’ve seen, or the events we experienced — i.e., the memories I want to retain that are also hopefully interesting and/or useful to anyone else in the universe besides just Anne. Sometimes we forget to take pics of each other, or I simply skip posting them because I already know what we look like. That’s the exact opposite of 99% of the entire internet; hence our perennially low traffic stats, apparently. I don’t get the whole “me me me” thing that constitutes a viable career for some folks, but I’m told that’s totally a thing and that an entire Insta-feed of selfies is in fact a form of psychologically responsible behavior and they have the tax forms to prove it.

For once, let’s give in to peer pressure from internetters half our age and compile an entire gallery of us and only us. As it happens, during our fairground day-date we wound up taking more photos of each other than usual (or having strangers snap the two of us), so here’s what it looks like when we’re enjoying each other’s company without worrying what anyone else thinks of us. Please enjoy! Smash those buttons! Share with your 50,000 nearest friends! If you don’t, you’re a judgmental, ageist hypocrite who enables body-shaming and you’re on the same side as the shallow, dump-worthy exes in every rom-com ever! It’d sure be a real shame if your S.O. ever found out! Cheers!

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