Format
Sometimes Just Sometimes Fest is a multimedia fortnight built around one of my favourite movies, The Crow. The spectre of tragedy looms over that film because of what happened [star Brandon Lee was killed in an accident on set] but it’s still a pretty spectacular landmark in cinema – stylish, harsh, moving, deeply earnest in the best way – and the single best superhero movie.
Venue
Detroit, Michigan, where the film takes place. Either that or we’ll have it in Dark City, which was the movie that the director Alex Proyas made next. It’s the only film more Crow-y than The Crow.
Screenings
The Crow will be screened on repeat but in case you miss any of the dozen screenings per day, you can watch it on your computer. Just not on your phone. There’ll also be the films that influenced The Crow: Metropolis, Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, Batman, Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands. And the ones that were influenced by it: the Underworld movies, the Christian Bale flick Equilibrium and the entirety of the Matrix franchise. I adore Keanu, I truly do, and I’m proud of a Canadian who’s done as well as he has, but I’m also, like: “Fuck, if Brandon Lee is around when The Matrix gets made then that’s probably the guy who does it.” He would’ve been a kick-ass Neo.
Music
The soundtrack is a work of art so you’d have every band. My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult would headline one night. The Cure would be there. Nine Inch Nails do an entire night of Joy Division covers. And you’d have Joy Division doing Nine Inch Nails covers. On that night, the concert is on a rooftop and the audience start out a dozen rooftops away and you spend the whole concert running from that rooftop across the other rooftops towards – and away from – the bands, just like the scene in The Crow where the Nine Inch Nails cover of Joy Division’s Dead Souls starts up and Brandon Lee is running across the rooftops. Don’t worry about health and safety. Gravity has been bested, along with Covid-19. Maybe the eradication of one informed the defeat of the other. We’ve finally found a cure for gravity, mankind’s greatest enemy.
Special guests
The Crow is about bringing a guy back from the dead so it’s only right we bring back Edgar Allan Poe. Come have a bite with Poe and hear him read The Raven! We bring HP Lovecraft back, too, but we keep a really close eye on that racist nerd. Lovecraft can answer for his bigotry. We’ll hold his feet to the fire, force him to listen to his counterparts today, telling him: “This is you, Lovecraft!” We’d also have the whole house from Switzerland that the Shelleys and Lord Byron were hanging out in when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein during the year without a summer. But we don’t actually have the year without a summer. We’re drawing the line at time travel.
Panels
Q&As can be embarrassing. The questions are always accidentally adversarial or politely adversarial. Brandon Lee and Ian Curtis are there but you can’t ask them questions, you can only give them love. I’m there, too, queuing up to get shit signed.
Food
All the food is black and white: olives, pinto beans, rice, chocolate chip ice cream. Oreos are the culinary fulcrum. At a certain point, you hit the ceiling on food that is organically black and white so then we’re dyeing hamburgers and hot dogs and putting extra flour in the buns. There’s yulelog, too. And grapes that look like eyeballs.
Tents
There’s a Scandinavian death metal face-paint tent. At Sometimes Just Sometimes Fest, we want you to find the truest gothic version of yourself.
Random Acts of Violence, directed by and starring Jay Baruchel, is released in Canada on 31 July and streams in the UK on Shudder from 20 August
