Thursday, March 18

Documentary Shorts

Back to my shorts reel fix, Doc Shorts didn’t disappoint this year.  There were six films total, spanning quite a wealth of subjects.  Considering how each had me wanting more, I felt almost all of them could easily be expanded into feature-length pieces.

“Seltzer Works”, is a quick insight into a Brooklyn seltzer bottling and delivery operation.  Using vintage machinery, the owner and his one employee keep their old-fashioned family business going.  No twist here, but it was an interesting corner of the “death of handmade quality in the face of inferior mass production” world we occupy today.

“6″ is a doc about small town TX 6-man football. It was nicely shot, but really, football culture, even if it is often all that dying small town TX has left, really doesn’t appeal to me.  I know, I’m a commie.

“Big Birding Day” is a bout a pair of friends and their entourage as they participate in an international competition to see how many bird species they could see in 24 hours.  Believe it or not, for a bird watching film, it was surprisingly gripping.  It helps that the pair are interesting people and fairly articulate on the subject of their hobby.

“Quandrangle”, the doc shorts award winner, is a really interesting piece about what you learn in the end is the filmmakers own parents discussing their experiences in the 70′s having swapped spouses.  Her mother and father are interviewed separately but are brought together simultaneously in wide split screen as focus shift between one or the other, a very ingenious and unusual format.  Seaming the otherwise disparate interviews together into a coherent stream must of been quite a task, but it really was clean, and told with pathos.

“Mr. Hypnotism” is about “Dr.” Ronald Dante, and old hypnotist entertainer and some time con man.  This one was a quick survey of the subject and was kind of unsatisfying on depth, but still interesting.  There’s probably at least another hour of material in anecdotes alone that could be captured from this guy.

“White Lines and The Fever: The Death of DJ Junebug” is set in early 80′s New York covering the nascent Hip Hop scene and one of it’s apparently most talented but lesser known talents, DJ Junebug. They got some really great interviews here, but the story sadly isn’t really all that strange to us these days: talented kid makes good but gets mixed up with thugs, winds up dead.

Richard Garriott:Man on a Mission

In a phrase: A heartwarming story about a rich guy wanting to be an astronaut like his dad, strangely adds a bit of nobility back to being an astronaut.

I’d heard about this one screening in Austin along with a conversation with Lord British himself a few months back and decided I had to check it out.  On it’s surface, it’s a doc about Richard’s purchased flight on a Russian rocket and his stay on the ISS.  The film covers a bit of bio background on Richard and goes through his training in Russia, launch, stay in space and return to Earth.   Honestly, the way it was shot, I felt like I was watching one of the warmer biographical Nova (PBS) episodes.  Who knows, maybe that’s where they’ll sell it.  In between the more straightforward scenes advancing this plot, there’s also a strong undercurrent about Richard’s passion for space tourism and opening private space travel and, though impressive, not a small amount of building on his own personal myth.  You see, his father was an astronaut who was aboard Skylab back in the day and he’s always dreamed about getting to space despite his non-perfect vision.  The phrase “space dynasty” was uttered more than once, and seems more than a bit melodramatic, but I guess they’ll be the ones laughing when we’re buying lunar real estate from his progeny down the road.   Still, the insight into what “the right stuff” really looks like was pretty cool, especially if you’re a space travel buff at all, and Richard seems to be a pretty personable if geeky guy, so it’s a fun ride.  Watching this film, you definitely get absorbed by the arc of his personal adventure and feel a little wistful about the space business, something NASA of late had beaten out of most Americans.  Make sure to stick around for the credits to catch Richard’s cleaned up explanation of toilet physics in space.

Narrative Shorts 3

Sorry reel 2 and animated shorts, I just couldn’t fit you in this year. Still, I had time for just a couple more shorts reels, and reel three often seems to offer some of the stranger content to be had without diving all the way into experimental territory.  The standouts from this reel were  “The Hardest Part”, “Teleglobal Dreamin’”, and the narrative shorts award winner “Cigarette Candy”.

“The Hardest Part” is about an aging British actor on his way to a rehearsal.  His career hasn’t been doing much since his turn as a butler on a TV show years before and he’s clearly excited to be auditioning for a hot young Guy Ritchie-esque director.   Unfortunately the audition turns into a demeaning exercise in futility and disrespect as the role he’d prepared for, a hard-hitting gangster boss, has already been taken.  The director asks him to put on a butler costume and recite lines from his TV show days, then leaves.  Crestfallen, the actor returns home and on the way is mugged.  He appears defeated and thoroughly humiliated, but then starts to audition the role he’d prepared for again and scares the mugger off.  My synopsis doesn’t do the piece justice.  The acting and sense of restraint in this short kept it really tight and interesting throughout.

“Teleglobal Dreamin’” was about an American actor sent to the Philippines to work as a motivator in a company call center.  He’s obviously weary and bedraggled, but also a bit smarmy.  One of the female call workers takes a shine to him and offers to help him around the city as a sort of guide and companion, but clearly hopes to impress him romantically.   So they hit the bar, do some karaoke, hang out with her friends.  Along the way, our Filipina has led people to believe this actor is actually Brendan Fraser and they’ve managed to attract some unwanted attention.  As a result, on the way back to his hotel they get “busjacked”.  In the confusion, the actor makes a break for it and apparently gets shot by one of the robbers.  This recounting isn’t very funny I suppose, but the effect was this sort of Office-like mildly black comedy.   The character development was mysterious but still compelling to watch unfold.

Lastly, “Cigarette Candy” was about a marine fresh home from the Middle East and attending a backyard picnic in his honor.   You can tell he’s uncomfortable with all the family members sidling up to him, predominantly his dad, and telling him what a hero he is and how much folks would like to hear some war stories.   He runs into a young woman at the party who looks like trouble and they start flirting with each other from across the yard.  They eventually wind up in the basement going at it when the soldier’s dad walks in on them.  He insists that his son rejoin the party and commence with the hero act.  The marine then goes out and regales the assembled crowd with a truly horrific encounter of a firefight that he’d been in where he was temporarily blinded and feels he accidentally shot a fellow superior marine, paralyzing him.  Said victim then orders our marine to finish him off, but the medics arrive first.  Obviously, this is a bit upsetting for all involved and the soldier retreats back into his room in the house where his is joined by the girl he met earlier, now somber, sitting on the edge of his bed sharing a cigarette with him.  Although this was the first year in many at SXSW I had seen no Iraq docs out, this short narrative might have nailed it’s subject better than any other.  It manages to simultaneously rise above the political rhetoric of the war’s circumstances, belting out a very powerful story about the human toll and criticize the rationalizations, pervasive in our culture, that we all tell ourselves to make that all OK.  Well done.

The People vs. George Lucas

In a phrase:  Organizing fans’ grudges with GL’s screwing the proverbial Wookie.

Anyone who knows me knows I couldn’t resist this one. The subject, clearly, is the case against Lucas and his careless handling of the Star Wars franchise from the special editions through the prequels.  Evidence to this effect, as it turns out, is not hard to come by.  From midichlorians to “Han shot first”, it truly mounts against him.   Much time is devoted to the ranting of Gen Xers lamenting the damage, some going so far as to accuse him of raping their childhoods.  Many of the interviewees fall short of this radical a take though and are a bit more level headed than that, suggesting that they were bad, and damage was done, but it was “no Rwanda”.  Some interesting discussion of Lucas’ right to alter his work after the fact of it’s release and the artist’s contract with his fans takes place, and by the end of the piece, the filmmaker has led us to a resting place of some relative equanimity. Their ultimate take is that all evidence against him aside, what is often not appreciated is that Lucas is just a person, to some degree a victim of his personal circumstance, has been historically fairly generous with letting people fan-fic and parody his work and that in the end we should be grateful there is a Star Wars at all.  That said, if this “Squishies” rumor turns out to be true, someone needs to stop the man.  LUUUCAASSSS!  Anyhow, anyone in on this debate won’t likely learn too much from this film, but it does put a level-headed and relatively coherent voice to summarizing the discussion.