The Wolfpack, the lost tribe of the Lower East Side

The Wolfpack is a documentary that follows the six Angulo brothers, whose father kept them sequestered (along with their sister and mother) inside a four-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for fourteen years because he thought the city unsafe, allowing only annual or semi-annual trips outside. The boys’ only access to the outside world was through movies, which they recreated in their tiny apartment. The trailer:

With no friends and living on welfare, they feed their curiosity, creativity, and imagination with film, which allows them to escape from their feelings of isolation and loneliness. Everything changes when one of the brothers escapes, and the power dynamics in the house are transformed. The Wolfpack must learn how to integrate into society without disbanding the brotherhood.

They did not mess around when it came to their filmmaking…this is a surprisingly realistic Batman costume made out of cereal boxes and yoga mats:

The Wolfpack won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year, and the brothers made a few videos to thank the festival for their prize. Here are the Clerks and The Usual Suspects thank yous:

They also filmed a scene from one of their favorite movies of 2014, The Grand Budapest Hotel:

The Wolfpack was out in US theaters earlier this summer and is now on Amazon Instant…I think I’m going to watch this tonight. (via @quinto_quarto)

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What actually happened in The Usual Suspects?

Brian Singer directed and Christopher McQuarrie wrote the screenplay for The Usual Suspects. [Spoilers to follow…¹] After they finished the film, they realized that the two of them disagreed significantly on what exactly happened in the movie. Did Kint/Soze tell the truth or was his whole story a lie?

McQuarrie says only after finishing the film and preparing to do press interviews about it did he and Singer realize they both had completely different conceptions about the plot.

“I pulled Bryan aside the night before press began and I said, ‘We need to get our stories straight because people are starting to ask what happened and what didn’t,’ ” recalls McQuarrie. “And we got into the biggest argument we’ve ever had in our lives.”

He continues: “One of us believed that the story was all lies, peppered with little bits of the truth. And the other one believed it was all true, peppered with tiny, little lies. … We each thought we were making a movie that was completely different from what the other one thought.”

I always assumed that Verbal was telling the truth the whole time, in the cavalier the-truth-can’t-hurt-me manner of the movie master criminal. (thx, dave)

[1] What’s the statute of limitations on spoiler warnings? The Usual Suspects is fourteen years old; surely everyone who wanted to see it has seen it by now. ↩

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