MIFF: Approximating the MIFF "matinee"

One of my favorite MIFF traditions is the days, usually two or three times per festival, when I go
straight from work to my first movie. No going home and having to wrangle the kids or their dinner. I only need to worry about my own dinner as I stay in the city after work and eat something yummy before the 6:40 start.

Just because I'm doing MIFF from home this year doesn't mean I couldn't do something sort of like that.

And so it was that yesterday afternoon I watched Emma Seligman's Shiva Baby in the late afternoon, even starting my stream before I had technically finished work. (As Shiva Baby has not had proper releases anywhere and does not yet have a poster that I could find, I'm including the poster for the 2018 short.)

The 71-minute film would have been easy to sneak in before dinner even without starting at 4:30 rather than 5, but starting a little early also allowed me to take an impromptu snooze in the beanbags in the garage, where I have been afternoon-napping throughout quarantine. That's where I moved my computer once I was officially clocked off for the day.

The reason I needed to see it then was that I was overdue for my next MIFF review on ReelGood, having posted my review of Marona's Fantastic Tale on Monday. I needed to get another one up by Thursday, no doubt, and watching it in the afternoon on Wednesday was my only hope of doing that. (If not for the sake of the site, then to make good on my implicit promise to cover the festival for those who have given me my free passes.)

That's because the second MIFF movie I was watching on Wednesday -- the second half of a true MIFF double feature, unlike Saturday's partial double feature that I billed as a true double feature on this blog -- would prevent me from watching Shiva Baby in the evening. Lawrence Michael Levine's Black Bear, starring Aubrey Plaza, is a so-called "spotlight film," meaning it could only be watched between the hours of 7 p.m. and 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday night, unlike most of the rest of the films, which can be streamed throughout the festival.

As that's the higher profile film, for sure, I might have reviewed that instead of Shiva Baby. However, there's limited utility to reviewing a film that my readers are not actually going to be able to see. So, Shiva it was.

I liked both films a fair bit. The first is certainly more traditional than the second, though I won't go into any detail about what makes Black Bear unusual, because it's best not to know. I will say that Black Bear reminded me a bit of the other movie that was part of my first MIFF/not-MIFF double feature on Saturday, The Rental, in terms of its core dynamics. Until it doesn't.

And Shiva Baby is just a nice little independent cringe movie, but with heart. The logline tells it all: A confused college senior is stuck at a shiva while trying to avoid both her ex-girlfriend and her sugar daddy. It's an expansion of Seligman's eight-minute short from 2018, also starring Rachel Sennott, and it's really enjoyable. You can read my full review to the right.

Okay, another two days off and then more MIFF on Saturday.