I had to leave Westwood on Saturday before the much-anticipated (well, at least, by me) screening of Heaven Wants Out, the long-gestating film at the center of Mark Mann’s documentary Finishing Heaven. I’ve been eagerly awaiting published reports that would clue me in on what I missed, but saw nothing for days. Finally, Craig Kennedy has weighed in at Living in Cinema. “I’d love to report that Heaven Wants Out is a belated triumph that will change how we perceive cinema,” Craig writes. “But…
…unfortunately life only seems to work that way in the movies. The truth is, Heaven is a bit of a mess, yet it’s perfectly in keeping with a certain avant-garde, low-budget guerilla style not uncommon in the day and pretty typical of more adventurous (if undisciplined) student filmmakers…It’s all pretty pretentious, but the saving grace is a certain skewed sense of absurdist humor that lets you know Feinberg isn’t being overly earnest. In the end, it’s not essential viewing, but it provides a fascinating coda to the documentary and an interesting time capsule of a certain 1970s New York scene that is now mostly a memory to the survivors.
We’ll call that a mixed review. It’s interesting to see Craig use the word “coda”; I had a number of conversations at LAFF as to whether the movie would play as a footnote to the documentary about it, or vice versa. Anyone else manage to see it and have conflicting/additional thoughts?
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