'Alice' Doesn't Live Here Anymore
'Alice' is a genre trifecta: one part revenge drama, one part historical account, one part throwback to Blaxploitation—kinda 'Django' meets 'Roots' meets 'Foxy Brown.'

FIG TREES is a documentary opera about AIDS activists Tim McCaskell of Toronto and Zackie Achmat of Capetown as they fight for access to treatment drugs. Documentary interviews, speeches, press conferences and demonstrations are sampled, taken apart, and set to music, replayed this time as operatic scenes. A surreal fictional narrative is intercut with the stories of their struggles against government and the pharmaceutical industry. In this fictional world, Gertrude Stein decides to write a tragic opera about Tim and Zackie and their saint-like heroism. She kidnaps them, transports them to Niagara Falls, and forces them to sing a series of complicated avant-garde vocal compositions. However, when Zackie ends his treatment strike and starts taking his pills, Gertrude realizes that there will be no more tragedy, and thus, no more opera.
'Alice' is a genre trifecta: one part revenge drama, one part historical account, one part throwback to Blaxploitation—kinda 'Django' meets 'Roots' meets 'Foxy Brown.'
It's good for your film viewing needs, but isn’t going to shake your world. Demonic is trippy sci-fi fun, and that’s about it. And that's pretty cool.
These confines won’t really encourage you to read the film as a metaphor for the nerve-inducing experience we’ve all been through over the last year, however — and in the interest of maintaining your dignity, you probably shouldn’t. While the sociopolitical commentary may have worked for the similarly-themed Buried (2010), in which we find Ryan Reynolds on his own buried alive in the Middle East, but this futuristic take on the premise is best left as a piece of distracting entertainment. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is no less suffocating, literally and dramatically.
Hulu continues its Summer releases with The Princess. This film follows the princess (yes, she is unnamed) as she attempts to escape her tower, refusing to be wed to a cruel man vying for the throne. Action-packed and snarky, this is a decently fun film if you need a fighting fix.
The short documentary and second place winner of the Incluvie Short Film Festival, Gender Outlaw: A Bodysurfing Story, challenges any simplistic understanding of trans people.