Sunday March 15

“Reel Shorts 3″

Another nice reel.  The standouts:  “Thick as Thieves”, a comedy where a mugger holds up a guy in an alley and they hit it off.  So much so that they team up, hijinks ensue.  Also, “Wing It”, where two guardian angels guarding two respective parties in a drug deal gone bad try to reason with the other’s angel, but wind up having to stand their man up to fight it out.  Sounds kind of tragic written that way, but the Angels are crude and against typical convention, and the comic timing was perfect.  Last, “A. Effect”.  This one is a bit difficult to describe, but it’s set in a community college and the main characters are a loser playwright wannabe and a human

film-encyclopedia dork.   As our playwright friend musters the courage to make a play for an apparently interested girl in their mutual acting class, things go awry.  She falls for our straight man, the unassuming film encyclopedia dork.  Very subtle tension and delicate black comedy for a short, but all effective.

“Animated Shorts”

Not sure how much I can discuss what I saw here.  Animation is obviously very largely about visual effect.  Like a good animated reel should, these spanned the spectrum from surreal and insane, to ephemeral and dreamy, to just plain funny.  The stand outs, should you be so lucky as to encounter them:  “Luca Brasi Sleeps with the Fishes”, a funny musical piece about Luca Brasi’s experience, well, sleeping with the fishes.  “Sweet Dreams”, perhaps my fav of this bunch, a stop-motion work that features our main character, a cupcake, living in a land of other sweets.  This cupcake is a dreamer though, and sets sail into the unknown in his boat of sugar cubes.  Yes, the boat leaks and our cupcake arrives in the land of veggies.  Long story short, the cupcake goes native and learns some veggie skills that later will prove to save his sweet cohorts from a flood. “‘Here’s the Stapler if You Need It”, is kind of simple, but deals with a copy store that contains a forbidden industrial sized paper cutter with some strange properties and a new clerk who tries to deal with the public getting access to it. Last, “Shaman” was the winner this year, a very dreamy piece, perhaps described best by it’s own blurb: “Waiting for the bus on a rainy day in Copenhagen, the old shaman Utaaq sees a rare bird from his past. This makes him reminisce his youth, and a beautiful tale about the forces of nature begins.”

“RiP: A Remix Manifesto”

Ah, but this one is a thinker.  On the surface, a Morgan Spurlock-esque, fast paced and entertaining political piece about the nature of copyright as it exists today in the US.  The filmmaker gets at this through the framework of the points of his manifesto ( 1. Culture always build on the past. 2. The past always tries to control the future.  3. Our future is becoming less free.  4. To build free societies you must limit control of the past) and an examination of the work of “Girl Talk”, a popular mashup artist who composes his work solely from samples.  He explores a brief history of the concept of copyright and how it has evovled over time in American law.  That is to say, how it seems to be perpetually re-extended by the government at the behest of corporate interests (primarily Disney) and the consequences of this on expression in our culture.  The premise here is that the corporate anti-piracy movement has become so shrill and out of scale (like the RIAA lawsuit campaign) that it comprises an unacceptable level of control over media and expression.  He fleshes this idea out through interviews of the likes of Lawrence Lessig, Giberto Gil, Cory Doctorow, Dan O’Neill (as well as many others) and through examining ideas like copyleft / creative commons, and the nature of our relationship to intellectual property.  The crux of the argument comes down to where the line of “fair use” of previous works lies. More importantly, at what point is crossing that line genuinely piracy if that line is, in fact, a constantly moving target controlled by the increasingly few corporations who own most media?  Is remixing then a legitimate form of expression and cultural commentary?

I could go on all day about this issue.  Fact is, this movie is not even remotely objective, and often appeals to the audience on some fairly shaky logic.  I believe a lot of these ideas are pretty radical in such a stridently Capitalist society, and will take some time to be digested to find out which are worthwhile ideas and which make less sense to adopt.  It troubles me, though, that corporations currently involved in the increase of copyright powers seek to use their influence to squelch this very conversation.  This isn’t what a free society should look like.  Last I checked, that’s called oppression.

Anyway, if you’re curious, the filmmaker has put his money where his mouth is, perhaps literally.  His film is available for both view and remix opportunities by chapter at http://www.opensourcecinema.org/book/rip-remix-manifesto .

Monday March 16

“Mine”

I honestly have no idea why I chose to see this doc.  I guess I’m kind of a sucker for “current events” pieces, even when the events aren’t so current.  This one is at heart a hurricane Katrina story, though one about the rescue of pets made homeless by the storm.  I really thought this would turn out to be an animal nut piece pitched to a fairly narrow set of potential viewers, but I confess, this story really grabbed me.  The film follows the plights of several pet owners separated from their dogs by circumstances around Katrina and the eventual reunion (or not) with them.  This narrative is nicely sprinkled with background on how the purely volunteer rescue operation took place and how the pets were then distributed to shelters all over the US to help manage the immense load of the undertaking.  This resulted in many pets being both lost to their owners but also frequently adopted by families in their new locale.   You might then imagine the built in tension of the situation when an original owner wants their dog back and the new adoptive family had grown attached and doesn’t want to relinquish them.  We are taken through the strange process, which apparently involves no small amount of luck,  of the various owners attempts at being reunited with their pets.  Every profiled case seem to resolve differently, based solely on the temperaments of those people involved.  This gives the filmmaker a chance to really do an objective job of capturing all the different sides of a surprisingly complex issue.  We get to watch as one man beats his head against the proverbial brick wall trying to track his family dog down, going so far as to hire a P.I..  We even get a chance to see one of the adoptive owners experience change of heart over the course of the film about returning their dog.   I definitely recommend this one if you can find it.

“Severe Clear”

This was the only Iraq doc I saw this year, I guess the wave of these has finally begun to subside.  This one is a diary-style piece combined from the personal footage of Marines involved in the initial assault and the effort to take and hold Baghdad.  The narrative is strong, and strange enough to hear me say it, maybe a little too strong.  It’s hard to combine what is effectively home movie footage and put a coherent structure to it with voice-overs and not make it sound a little stilted.  Some of this may be based on the fact that our main character does his own voice-overs.   Still, that’s a pretty small complaint.  The subject states that his goal is to capture a more realistic side of the war than the media can likely do, including the tedium and the terror, the personalities of his peers and impact of their experiences on their humanity.  Not a bad piece, but I can’t say I had any real epiphanies watching this one.  I might just be jaded from all the Iraq docs I’ve absorbed at SXSW over the past few years.

Tuesday March 17

“Letters to the President”

This was another vérité style doc set around President Ahmadinejad of Iran.  I hesitate to say that this doc was at all sympathetic, but I do think it was a fairly realistic view compared to the one-dimensional representation of the man in the American media.  I think we don’t get any sense of the populism he enjoys in Iran, and why.   Following him during his travels around the Iran and listening in on some of both his ardent supporters and doubters certainly provides a little more window on why is not such an apparently simple country.  The title refers to a custom that seems to have sprung up around him that he and his staff will take people’s pleas for help (usually economic) in letters and put them through the Iranian bureaucracy to try and guide relief efforts.  It’s clear that this is more propaganda tool than effective governance, but for the filmmaker, it does allow a glimpse at the concerns of the somewhat more diverse than commonly believed Iranian people.   If there was a take-away from this film, I would say that, if what the news in the U.S. tells us about Iran is the extent of our understanding, then we have a lot of work yet to do.  As they are quickly becoming a nuclear conundrum, it might be best to pay attention.

“Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo”

I hadn’t originally scheduled this, but heard good things in line, so I thought I’d check it out.  It’s a new doc from Bradley Beesley (of “Okie Noodling” fame) about the now 69 year old prison rodeo in Oklahoma (there is only one other still existing in the US  at Angola, LA) shortly after the inclusion of female prisoners.  The narrative is kind of a given: prisoners, both male and female train up for the annual rodeo while enduring personal setbacks and triumphs.  Still, the characters are intriguing; the filmmaker did manage to capture an impressive depth from these people.  They don’t seem so much “other” as we typically think of them in our everyday lives, and yet some of them are murderers.  We also get some interesting information on the state of female incarcerations in OK.  They apparently jail women at a much higher rate than the national average, mostly for drug-related crimes.  I think I recall hearing that they also have the highest rate of battery, hard to say if that’s related, but it sounds like a pretty crap time to be a woman in OK.  Nevertheless, it’s an admittedly feel-good kind of film.  We get to see how the rodeo represents redemption for some of the main characters and a taste of freedom for others.  Still, I don’t think the dismissal of this as a quasi-gladiatorial event by some of the prisoners is lost on the public audience of either this film or the rodeo itself.