Wednesday March 18

“Still Bill”

I am embarrassed to say that I would not have recognized Bill Withers by name before I saw this doc. I certainly recognized his songs though, and even more embarrassingly, subsequently realized I always thought of him as having been a commercial flash in the pan and not much more.  Like any good musician doc, you get to know the person a bit better.  In this case, we find out that, though he is a very musical person, his relationship with fame is bitter and complex.  His interviews are filled with philosophical, oblique answers to personal questions, so we aren’t allowed to know what event/s led him to largely drop out of the music biz, but we do get a sense that he is probably better off for it.  This is a pretty interesting point, in that the public’s response to a celebrity that shuns fame is usually selfish, perhaps even near

cannibalistic, and we rarely get to see the issue from the other point of view.  So, he’s a sensitive man, and though his anecdotes are often vague, I think we still develop a sense of respect for his introversion and his choices. Interesting guy really, I’m glad I got to know a bit more, even if the biographical details were a bit light.

“Blood Trail”

I admit I came to this one with a bit of expectation for the sensational.  It’s about war photographer Robert King and the course of his career, from his start in 1991 Sarajevo to Chechnya, Moscow, and eventually OIF.  This film in fact starts out with some sensational material, but I ultimately had some trouble with this one, and I’ve been worried that it’s simply that I don’t much identify with or like the subject.  I hate to criticize a doc for such a trivial reason, but on the other hand, surely part of a competent documentarian’s job is to draw his or her audience in, hook them and get them interested in their subject despite their personality (see: “Winnebago Man”).  On some reflection I think that, I think it’s less a case of my inability to appreciate a somewhat unlikeable character as a subject and more, despite something like 15 years of on and off filming, the director failing to really capture the development of the subject over time.

This film starts out showing King, a poor, callow, young, but hungry photographer showing up in Bosnia to learn the trade, sure of his destiny of being put on earth to deliver an important message.  Fair enough, but the development of the character kind of goes off the rails from there.  We learn that his background is troubled and that his career, and related self abuse through drink and womanizing, is the result.  It is even suggested that he’s out there looking for something among the many current day inter-cuts to him deer hunting with his friends and family in his native Tennessee.  Despite several tense moments with him in action, the film’s narrative drifts, and about all we learn about him is that he semi-settles down, while keeping his job, and that many of his friends report that they never thought he would still be alive.  By the end, we’ve had some pretty grisly visuals, but we still haven’t had all that much insight into either the world of Robert King or the larger world of war photography for that matter. So, I’m left to consider, were the dots the director was connecting through King’s various experiences a narrative so subtle I couldn’t detect it, or was my inability to identify with the subject keeping me from getting it, or was it just not there.  Honestly, I don’t know.  I tend to think of myself as a fairly sophisticated viewer, and am not easily led to believe that I can’t pick out a simple subtext, but I suppose I really can’t be sure unless someone else, whose opinion I respected, had also seen it and was able to challenge me on it.  Such are the evil wages of going SXSW solo.

“The Yes Men Fix the World”

Those familiar with the Yes Men won’t be disappointed by their second film adventure.  For those that aren’t, let me say that the Yes Men , often referred to as culture jammers, are involved in high-profile corporate pranking/hoaxing, something they call “identity correction”, targeting companies or organizations companies whose policies most starkly favor profit at the expense of the environment or poor.  This amounts to public shaming, usually exposing some act the company in question can’t deny, but doesn’t want the world to know about.  In the past, they’ve done the likes of the WTO & McDonald’s, this time they’re on to Dow, Exxon, Halliburton, & HUD.  I don’t want to oversell this, as your enjoyment will likely depend largely on how you feel about the current state of globalization and the rise of corporate power, but if that even remotely sounds up your alley, I suggest you check their now 2 movies out.

Thursday March 19

“Know Your Mushrooms”

The latest from Ron Mann, popular from his past SXSW entries, such as “Grass” and “Tales of the Rat Fink”, now covers, of all things, the humble mushroom.  I fully expected this to be a strictly magic mushroom related affair, but was delighted to see that it in fact focuses instead on some characters that are part of a much larger pro-fungus subculture.  As it turns out, they have a mushroom festival every summer in Telluride, populated largely by eccentric mushroom loving hippies.  We follow one in particular, Larry Evans, a professional mushroom hunting “gypsy”, who guides us through the mushroom hunts, parades, and informal chats that are part of the festival.  The film is also sprinkled with enough mushroom fun-facts that, if you haven’t learned a little bit about mushrooms, you at least come to appreciate a bit how some become so obsessed with them.  From cooking tips to outer-space conspiracies, to mushroom trip stories, this film pretty well appears to cover the mushroom culture gamut.  Like his other works, this piece keeps up a good pace, has a fun narrative, and makes you hungry for mushrooms.  Check it out.

“Soul Power”

This was a single screener at the Paramount (most movies screen 2 or 3 times during the festival) so, given the subject matter, I expected a packed house.  I was dismayed to find it was not, and it really was one of the more unique pieces I’ve caught over the years.  The director of this film was an editor for “When We Were Kings”, and made this concert film entirely from archival footage of the music festival preceeding the famous 1974 fight between Muhammad Ali & George Foreman in Zaire that was not used for “When We Were Kings”.  The film includes some inspired performances from James Brown, B.B. King, Bill Withers, Celia Cruz and Miriam Makeba, among others.  In addition to the performances themselves, a good amount of footage shot during the festival setup with some of the artists and festival producers and crew, is used to put the event in context.  The legacy of the event is debatable, but the director uses a couple of Muhammad Ali rants that in particular help to show the feelings of black empowerment that surround the place and time.  The downside: each artist only gets one song.  The director said he chose them on the basis of the contrast from the other performances, as well we their relative strengths.  A little disappointing, but the film overall holds up as a document of the event, so it’s a reasonable trade-off. There is reportedly enough footage to do a much longer movie, found as it was apparently dumped in boxes and poorly stored, but as the festival was something like 12 hours long, that would be a much larger effort. So, see it as an addendum to “When We Were Kings”, surely, but see it also for the music.

Friday March 20

“Winnebago Man”

This doc took some doing to get into.  I was shut out of it the first screening I tried to get into, and it filled the Paramount the day of its last screening, well after SXSW Music had started, a rare event indeed.  It helps that the filmmaker is local, but it turns out also to have been a pretty interesting piece as well.  “Winnebago Man” is a reference to the film’s subject, one Jack Rebney.   Outtakes from an industrial video Jack shot in 1989 for the Winnebago company have circulated almost as long, first by video tape, but most recently by YouTube.  His performance in these outtakes is legendary largely for his constant swearing and bitter demeanor, which is where another title for the legendary video comes from: “The Angriest Man in the World”.  The filmmaker goes to some trouble to point out how unintentional internet celebrity like this is problematic, citing the psychiatric problems of the “Star Wars Kid” and the hounding and death threats some other “outed” people have received.  So, in an effort to find what ever became of Jack, it is discovered that he has disappeared, only to go live as a cabin caretaker in the wilderness of northern California. From there, the filmmaker develops a strange relationship with the man, first relating to his reaction to his internet fame and then dealing with his conflicting desires to be a hermit, but also to clear his name.   As this is a doc about an eccentric misanthrope, once again we confront the entirely too likely possibility that indie cinema is once again mining for comedy gold in exploiting some poor unsuspecting subject.  I’m not sure that’s the case here though.  For one, Jack is a former CBS news man, and therefore obviously at least a little media savvy.  Also, the desires of the filmmaker to help Jack redeem himself seem genuine and able to transcend what might be produced by clever editing.  There are plenty of scenes where they butt heads in a way that it’s clear Jack can take care of himself.  Still, would Jack have been just fine if he’d been left alone?  Probably.  Although he does come to some peace with his internet fame with the filmmakers help (by getting him to guest star at a found footage screening in San Francisco), there is a lingering question of how the subject was changed through the filmmaker’s and our observation. So, overall, it’s a nice story:  young documentarian helps older hermit come to terms with the circumstances of his life.  It’s a postmodern dilemma though: how much of the benefit derived is the artifice of the work itself?

“The Dungeon Masters”

My last film of the year, I couldn’t let this one get by me.  As I mentioned last year in my writeup for “Second Skin” , I’m drawn to docs about gamers and gamer communities.  Since “Darkon” a few years back, I’ve made it my business to see how the film community treats the gamers.  Being a gamer myself of one kind or another over the past 27 years myself, it’s a subject near and dear.  Like “Second Skin”, this doc follows the extra-game lives of three subjects.  The filmmaker wasn’t available for Q&A,  but I suspect he would say his intent was to study and perhaps humanize his subjects.  Unfortunately, once again we are presented with the most sensational of possible targets, and the film winds up if anything reinforcing the uglier stereotypes about gamers.  Out of our three subjects, we have two friendly but overweight older white guys and one younger white woman who, for much of the movie, we see only dressed as a drow (evil, black-skinned elf in D&D).  One of the men is an aspiring author, otherwise barely employed, living in a dumpy apartment with his wife and young son.  The other, employed, but lives with a wife unsympathetic to his gaming habits.  We also learn that he has killed entire parties of player characters because he disagree with the morality of their choices, had walked out on a previous family and marriage, and is a nudist.  The woman seems like she largely has it together except for her obvious LARP/cosplay habit, though we learn she now lives in a trailer with her gamer boyfriend after coming from a relationship with a abusive husband and digs the drow thing in particular for their matriarchal philosophy.   Through the film, as we rotate though incidental scenes with these characters, the filmmaker effectively presents more and more incidental evidence making the case that these people are all effectively losers.  Honestly, I have known gamers like this, but I don’t believe they are the majority.  It just so happens that any time a film dork points a camera at a group of gamers, they are always going to be the thing that makes the most humorous, most spectacular splash on film.  Though the fad of the gamer doc may be on its way out, my challenge to filmmakers wishing to do this subject is this:  make an informing piece that will dispel people’s fear and disdain, and show the poor gamer geeks as the good, upstanding people they largely are.  Otherwise, leave them alone.

Saturday March 21
I took the day off to hang with friends and see a little music at the SXSW Music festival.  Looking back, I think this is the first year I got away with seeing almost all documentaries, and I enjoyed it.  Once again, I’m contemplating maybe trying out the volunteer side of things for the festival next year.  Having the new baby kind of kept me from committing this year, but maybe I’ll be a little more available next year, we shall see.  I think it would be fun after 13 years to see how thing works on the inside.