With Love and a Major Organ and A Disturbance in the Force are screening as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 20 to August 9.

---

With Love and A Major Organ

Annabelle (Anna Maguire) is an aspiring painter working at a customer service call center who avoids bad news stories and doesn’t want the new life management app dictating her existence. George (Hamza Haq) is a neat and tidy man of routine who reads yesterday’s news so to feel comforted in knowing the bad news of the day did not kill him.

Annabelle falls for George instantly upon meeting him in the park. So much so that maybe she is starting to forget that incident where she watched a man tear his own heart out and toss it off the side of a cliff.

Kim Albright’s feature debut, loosely based on screenwriter Julia Lederer’s play of the same name, adds this quirk, in which every character has a removable heart shaped like an inorganic object, to a lightly satirical romantic drama. Most characters around Annabelle are emotionally blunted by technological shortcuts; in particular, one all-encompassing phone app makes most life-altering decisions for a person so as to alleviate the stress of living. Even though she lives spontaneously, monotony and repetition are commonly visible around Annabelle. As one character puts it, “Consistency is exciting…consistently.”

This world-building points to the cleverness of the film. The script innocently mocks wellness culture and technology dependence. In the film’s most wild sequence, for instance, Annabelle is dragged by her co-worker friend to a day spa, in which Annabelle experiments with various inane self-care methods in a facility whose set design resembles that of a Saw film.

I suppose one could pick apart the inconsistent intricacies of this world of fantastical realism. A midpoint reversal, in particular, drastically changes two characters’ personalities more severely than is fully explainable by the logic the film establishes. But the baseline message reads the same either way. Connection is difficult. People become numb or make themselves numb trying to navigate such a difficult endeavor. The human condition is made up of fragile objects—paper hearts—but it is resilient in spite of that.

With Love and a Major Organ: B

A Disturbance in the Force

The subtitle for A Disturbance in the Force: How the Star Wars Holiday Special Happened (mouthful though the entire thing is) adequately describes the goal of Jeremy Coon and Steve Kozak’s documentary. The film is an oral history of the production of the ill-fated and notorious Star Wars Holiday Special, which aired one time on CBS in 1978 before being buried into relative obscurity for many years.

Many docs about the film industry, particularly those about nerd culture nostalgia, are rose-colored and superficial endeavors which, in their reverence for their own subject matter, fail to even answer the question as to why a documentary should be made about the topic in the first place.

A Disturbance in the Force, on the other hand, provides meaningful context for the special. This includes why people are fascinated by the program and why the special has endured for as long as it has. But, importantly, it also includes broader industrial conditions for both Star Wars and 1970s audiovisual media in general that help to explain what environment the special was borne out of. It is not an exhaustive account, of course, but lesser docs have eschewed such historical considerations in favor of pure, uncritical nostalgia.

A Disturbance in the Force has something compelling for those who have never heard of the Holiday Special and for those who have seen it. The quality of the talking head interviews (many of which are with people who were on set for the disastrous production) is apparent, and they shed plenty of light on the production of the disgraced special. All the while, the doc maintains a light humor that goes (thankfully) beyond merely pointing at the special and laughing.

A Disturbance in the Force: B

---

As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Twitter, Letterboxd, Facebook)