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Tribeca Festival: ‘Mars’ Provides Refuge for its Writers
The comedy group The Whitest Kids U’ Know completed the project dealing with the loss of one of its founding members, Trevor Moore, who died in 2021.The animated film “Mars” — about a ragtag group of civilians visiting the red planet on a trip financed by a billionaire with an asteroid-sized ego — will premiere Thursday at the Tribeca Festival. It will mark the end to a bittersweet journey for the film’s writers that began more than a decade ago.“Mars” was written as a live-action film in 2012 by Trevor Moore, Zach Cregger and Sam Brown, the founders of the comedy group The Whitest Kids U’ Know. They met thanks to living in the same dormitory at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where they performed lots of gigs. From there came tours of the city’s comedy clubs and a television show that ran from 2007 to 2011.During the Covid-19 pandemic, they decided animation was the best way forward for the feature and opted to crowdfund the film. But in August 2021, tragedy struck when Moore died in an accident.“It did seem kind of unfathomable to complete this movie without him,” Cregger said during a recent video interview with Brown and Timmy Williams, who is also in the comedy group. They, Darren Trumeter (the fifth member of the group), and Moore, who completed his recordings before the accident, provide the voices for all the characters in “Mars.”“Trevor’s death changed everything,” Cregger said. Before Moore died, the group was having regular interactions with fans on Twitch and other social media platforms, which helped fuel interest in “Mars.” Continuing that was difficult. “When he died, it kind of became like, this hurts every time,” Cregger said. But they felt a responsibility to their fans, who helped fund the film, to complete the project.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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‘Barbarian’ Review: This Rental is Hell
Two strangers explore the basement of their Detroit rental home in this gleefully twisty horror movie by Zach Cregger.“Barbarian,” a gleefully twisty horror movie by the writer-director Zach Cregger, is both a product of modern times and something of a throwback.Tess (Georgina Campbell) and Keith (Bill Skarsgard) meet-cute when they turn out to be the victims of a double booking scam, deciding, against the smitten Tess’s better instincts, to share the rental. The house, decked out in furniture straight out of West Elm, would seem innocuous enough, but it’s also located in the middle of an abandoned, post-apocalyptic-looking Detroit neighborhood whose only apparent inhabitant is an unhinged homeless man who terrorizes the streets.As expected from this kind of haunted-house thriller, the doors seem to open and close on their own, leading Tess to the one place any horror buff will know means trouble: the basement, where hidden passageways multiply and abominable crimes make themselves known.Cregger sets up dozens of clichés and pulls them in genuinely surprising directions, brandishing his touchstones: American horror films of the 80s and 90s in the vein of Wes Craven. The scares are tempered by a comic punching bag courtesy of Justin Long as a sleazy Hollywood director who pays a visit to his Detroit property after sexual assault charges drain his bank account.Cregger isn’t as concerned with making bold political points as he is with orchestrating a snappy spectacle that goes a mile a minute. #MeToo, gentrification, the brutal underbelly of the Reagan era — all these elements fit like puzzle pieces into a broader nightmare that lets the context speak for itself. “Barbarian” is all the more creepy — and fun — because of it.BarbarianRated R for nudity, bloodshed and sexual assault. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More
