Narrative Shorts 1

There were a number of good shorts in this reel.  Two of those that stood out were titled “Equestrian Sexual Response” and “Girls Named Pinky”.   The former was a story about a nearly pubescent girl living with her father on a horse ranch.  She perceives a sort of romantic relationship between two of their horses and confides her insecurities to the male (Red).  She stumbles upon and is upset by her father’s effort at  breeding the female (Mollie) with a stud brought in for the purpose and senses an resulting aloofness between the Red and Mollie.  This, combined with growing sexual conflicts with her classmates at school and on the bus sets up from what I recall to be a fairly accurate tension and mood of being at that age.  The film was beautifully shot and I thought captured early teen turmoil in a way neither trite or judgmental nor watered down by comedy.  To be fair, judging by the credits, this one had some pretty decent funding and although a thesis film, definitely had a refined production air about it.

“Girls Named Pinky”, so we were told during the Q&A, was a film about how to tell a story with a minimum amount of information given to the audience and then pulling out the rug with a twist.  The film begins with a geek suit, insurance salesman looking guy sitting at the end of a bar drinking Diet Cokes (he’s diabetic).  In walks the red-dressed femme fatale with the Euro accent, alone.  The suit takes a beating rescuing her from am upsetting unwelcome suitor and gets her attention.  They hit it off and spend enough time together for us to learn that she fears for her well being as her husband is the violent jealous type.  She also thinks he’s been sleeping around as she’s heard him whispering on the phone to someone named “Pinky”.   We also learn how lonely the man in the suit is, apparently being a traveling salesman or somesuch thing.  Our suit winds up taking her back to his hotel to chill out, apparently with no ulterior motives.  Just as he’s taking his overdue insulin shot, our drunk femme puts the moves on him.  Cut to the pillow talk, they intimate how nice it was to connect with another person when she’s see’s part of a tattoo on the man’s arm.  As she get’s a closer look, he jabs her in the neck with an insulin syringe and she dies.  We see on close up the man’s tattoo says “Pinky” and he calls her husband to tell her the job is done.  End credits, we see him leave the motel and the suitor from the bar drives up with an array of cleanup equipment.  Overall, a very successful twist execution.  Just when you think this thing was going to be about how these lonely innocents come together, it’s a murder story.  Bam!  I have to admit, I have always been a sucker for pulling one over on the audience.

Other films in this reel, all were really pretty good: Brave Donkey, Bikini Lighters, Pancake Breakfast, The Mess Hall of an Online Warrior, Snapshots, Jean-Paul Luc Sebastien Rene

Dirty Pictures

In a phrase: another slightly lamer stoner doc.

This one had a lot more promise in the schedule blurb than came to pass at screening.  Dirty Pictures was a mixture of bio / history of psychedelic chemistry centering around the man who introduced MDMA to the modern world, Dr. Sasha Shulgin.  The man is revered in the psychedelics community (both chemistry and consumption) as a god.   He is also getting on in years and has apparently spent decades in his own home lab synthesizing many new psychedelic compounds (the diagrams of which are the “dirty pictures”) and then experimenting on himself and his wife with them for the purpose of publishing his extensive findings into an index.  Although he makes some good and surprisingly sober points about the nature of psychedelics (although a devotee of Burning Man, apparently he doesn’t approve much of rave culture or the name “Ecstasy”) most of the movie is spent on a collection of talking heads managing to make almost no coherent point on either his legacy or on the politics of psychedelic drug research.  This one seems to have been an otherwise can’t-lose premise squandered.  And to think I gave up the film about Osama Bin Laden’s driver for this.  Even the silly mushroom festival doc from last year was more coherent than this.

Monday, March 15

Lemmy

In a phrase: Yet another music bio doc, only with Lemmy in it.  Yeah, but it has Lemmy in it.

Lemmy was a pretty standard musician biopic, the likes we have seen many times at SXSW.  Still, somehow, I never get tired of them.  “Smile” and “The Wrecking Crew” at past festivals come to mind.  Whenever I see one on the schedule I am helplessly drawn to it, and this one didn’t disappoint.  I can’t say this one was any great cinematic achievement, but it seems like they did a pretty good job of getting at some of the complexities of Lemmy as a person.  I certainly went into this film aware of Lemmy by reputation but can’t confess to an extensive knowledge of either him or his music.  The film definitely cured me of that.  Sure, there is also a definite agenda solidifying his legacy as a (the?) godfather of metal.  Twisting Ozzy’s arm on camera goes a long way to making that point.

Overall though, I think this angle is subsumed by the human story about what a startlingly simple, regular guy he is despite.  Don’t get me wrong, he is a flamboyant character, and now an L.A. rock scenester.  At the same time, he’s a guy who lives in a crappy two room apartment packed to the gills with Lemmy memorabilia and trash (as well was Nazi war trophies) situated a few blocks from his favorite bar where he can apparently be frequently found abusing the trivia video game.  I guess it’s not exactly news that a rock and roll hero like Lemmy lives his life unapologetically by his own rulebook.  Still, when we see him talk about how he forsook family for his career, or about he was kicked out of Hawkwind, or his diabetes diagnosis a few years ago, you get the impression he is far much more than this indestructible, Nazi-uniform loving, thousands of women bedding noise demon many of us assume are the limitations of his character.  Dave Grohl of all people kind of nailed it in his interview, as showcased in their movie trailer.  Far from the pirate he portrays, he seems incredibly gracious to his fans and much deeper of feeling and thought than I would have initially assumed.   In a boy band / American Idol world, Lemmy really does seem to be one of the few remaining old paragons of Rock.

Wednesday, March 17

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

I actually wandered into this screening by accident. I’d screwed up my schedule and found myself in line in front of the Ritz, known for occasional silent film screenings with live accompaniment (I’ve seen “Metropolis” there with 3 or 4 different scores, “Nosferatu”, “Aelita Queen of Mars”, “The Golem”, always a good time).  People in line were buzzing about how incredible this film was, so I decided to join in.  The score this time would be performed by a British electronic duo “In the Nursery”, who have apparently done a number of such silent film performances.  I have to say, they really nailed it.   As for the film itself, the performances both of the actress playing Joan and the cast playing her twisted ecclesiarch judges were incredibly powerful.   The pacing, the bold composition and mise en scene, all of it completely sucks you in which is saying something for it having no audible dialog.  This film expresses the desperation of an innocent person trapped in a kangaroo court about to be unjustly executed like nothing I’ve seen.   Seriously, anyone serious about film really ought to check this one out.

Life 2.0

In a phrase: Yet another freaky gamer doc. At least this one is less abusive.

OK, so I’ve made it a point to go see the rash of gamer docs that have come out over the past few years.  Like “Darkon” from years ago, or “Second Skin” , or “The Dungeon Masters” last year, this one takes on the delicate subject of gamers. Online gamers again this time, this one takes on players of Second Life.  This is an MMO unique in that it isn’t in a fanatasy/sci-fi setting, not does it feature any combat.  It’s really just a reality building game, fairly realistic in tone.  From the get go, my feeling about this game was that it’s nearness to real life lent itself to some pretty upsetting scenarios of people dropping out and choosing to live their lives in game. I suppose that’s a stereotype non-gamers have of all gamers really, but as Second Life would apparently appeal to a much different non-geek demographic, it represents a new “threat” I suppose.  I’ve gone after several of these documentaries in the past for being indelicate with their subjects, choosing to put on a freak show for the hipster indie film consumer rather than trying to do any real analysis or reporting.   This one does a little better in its selection and treatment of subjects.  One is a pretty vanilla white couple who have met in game and are in the process of divorcing their real life spouses in order to pursue a life together.  Another is a chain smoking black woman in Detroit who lives in her parents basement, but appears educated and runs a brisk design business in game, netting her a reported six figure salary in out-of-game currency.  The third is a white couple who are struggling with the husband’s game addiction made more complex by the fact that he plays a pre-teen girl in game.

There’s no question there’s a sensational freakshow element to the narrative of this doc.  We watch as the first couple take tentative shots at pursuing their new out of game life and fail.  We follow some of the business trials the second subject encounters in game as someone start to steal her IP and destroy her business, which in real life helps support her family.  This leads to a real-world lawsuit, being a bit of a double take in that the good in question don’t really exist.  In the case of the man playing the girl, we learn that it’s not about what we might quickly presume is some pedophilic motive but about his own identity confusion and eventually beginning to come to terms with some abuse he suffered as a child.  So, though there’s a titillating aspect to this cast, it’s certainly a fairly human story over and over.  As they include interview time with one of the game’s creators, there’s certainly a big idea pretense in the film about nailing down the nature of these games and what it means to society going forward.  It’s certainly a question brought up by all the real world consequences we see happen in these people’s lives.  Still, I think it’s too easy to see these people as being a bit flat and pathetic, sadly, and to end the lesson there.

After all these years, I’ve decided this subject is certainly interesting, but the complexities are almost impossible to portray in film.  I’m not sure that this film would be substantively different if these people were alcoholics or addicts of some other fairly socially acceptable vice, and as such, I’m not sure we learn all that much about the nature of gaming or the gamer at large.

Get Low

In a phrase: Bill Murray and Robert Duvall get their grumpy old men act on.

I decided it was time for some narrative candy at this point in the week. “Get Low” is a nice piece starring Robert Duvall, Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek and the lesser known Lucas Black.  Set in the 1930’s South, Robert Duvall plays a pretty grumpy old hermit, widely hated by the townsfolk who comes into town looking to stage a funeral before he dies.  Bill Murray plays a funeral director who takes up his unusual request.  Overall, it’s a redemption story, but I don’t want to say too much more as there is a bit of dramatic tension in how the plot unfolds.  Suffice it to say, it was a nicely put together slow boiler with some great mood and very decent acting, a good mix of suspense and comedy.  If you get a chance to see this one in the event is is released widely, I’d recommend it.

Saturday Night

In a phrase: Actor hangs out with famous friends while SNL happens.

This one stirred some controversy in line.  It’s an insider doc about the making of one episode of Saturday Night Live, in this case starring John Malkovich.  The controversy surrounded the fact that it was done largely by James Franco, celeb friend of the show, in both a fairly annoying often dark, blurry camera style and a fairly casual conversational approach.  Certainly, by itself, learning how an episode of SNL comes together is pretty compelling premise.   I had no idea just how frantic the weekly struggle is to make this show go.  It’s also quite a bit of fun in that you feel like you’re spying on a very rare, very fleeting secret.   Still, the criticism is valid.  You certainly get the impression that the coverage of the subject could have been more comprehensive and that the visual element could have been better done.  A bit of cotton candy in the SXSW grind doesn’t hurt IMNSHO, but it definitely let some people down.  Unless you’re a super fan of the show or just can’t get enough casual celebrity contact, I’d skip it.  I will say, Malkovich was really game.

Nevertheless, here is the beginning of my annual posting on my SXSW experiences this year.  My friend Steve talked me into doing some SXSW Interactive panels this year, so my film will be weighted more towards the end of the week.  Thanks again to Mindy for holding down the fort as I through myself into the jaws of the festival.  So yes, I got another badge this year.  Volunteering is still very much in the back of my mind but will have to wait for the kiddos to be a bit older I think.

Friday, March 12

Kick-Ass
In a phrase:  “Kill Bill” meets John Hughes. Dash of Apatow potty humor.

This was one of those larger mainstream film screenings.  SXSW tends to land a couple of films every year that are about to open and screens ‘em at the festival.  I don’t usually go in for those, but I thought this one sounded fun.  The premise up front: dorky teenager decides to become a superhero.  Director Matthew Vaughn is known for his films “Stardust” and “Layer Cake” (both of which I very much liked), so that helped suck me in.  The line into the Paramount snaked all the way around the block, and I stood next to a girl who was raving about the film for the hour we waited.  So, I managed to wait it out and got a balcony seat.  I mention all of this as it probably had some impact on my eventual opinion of the film.

So, the thing was lively, no question, and had some truly stunning action scenes.  Well paced overall, and competently composed. The comedy, although it occasionally fell to pretty low humor, was generally pretty well timed and chuckle-worthy.  Still, something nagged at me while I watched it.  There’s no question I identified on some level with the premise; I spent a lot of energy wanting to like what I was seeing.  I didn’t exactly expect going in for the acting to bowl me over or for the plot to be transcendent.  The bottom line is, the premise gets mixed in with some pretty fantastical elements and the audience is asked to buy into these being able to coexist, and it ultimately just doesn’t blend.  The main character (that would be David, A.K.A.  Kick-Ass) in his superheroic misadventures runs into “Big Daddy” and “Hit Girl”, a father/daughter team we find out, via comic book montage, is out for revenge against the city’s apparent main crime lord (played by Mark Strong, recently Lord Blackwood in the Sherlock Holmes film from last year. I love this guy), whom Kick-Ass has mistakenly run afoul.   These two existing superheroes are simultaneously plausible regular folk but also possess superhuman fighting skills. This just never really gelled in my opinion.  I had similar problems with pre-climax climax, when Kick-Ass is caught and to be unmasked on TV.  I don’t think anyone who lived through the Geraldo “Al Capone” thing in the 80’s really buys this kind of media event could happen again.  That note just rang a bit false, even though it led up to the most spectacular little girl kill frenzy in the film.

Also, as the superhero paragons of this universe (espeically Big Daddy, who very purposefully resembles Batman, and has Nicholas Cage doing a thinly veiled Adam West imitation), they kill almost every foe they come across.   It’s corny, I know, but it’s a bit troubling to see figures like this reinterpreted as common vigilantes / murderers.  At the same time, this whole plot is mixed in with a fairly elaborate teen sex farce, mocking the Spiderman/Mary Jane thing a bit as David allows his high school crush to believe he is gay so he can be her gay BFF.   Actually, I almost found this story thread more compelling than the “A” plot.  On this note, the cast of characters is pretty wide, and fairly interesting in conception, including the villain’s family and organization, which is a rare treat these days.  The breadth of them was another glaring weakness though; I never really felt I got to know any of the characters well enough to really buy into what is at base a pretty ridiculous story.  Suspension of disbelief with any superhero move is critical, even if it is an otherwise well crafted and well intentioned parodic twist on the genre.

It’s hard to recommend this one, but it’s not a total waste of time.  Weaknesses aside, the story pulls off without any major non-sequiturs and actually attempts to do some villain development, which always puts it a film a notch up in my book.  Still, I’m wondering if the open ending begging for a sequel is just a stylistic flourish to make it fit the superhero movie genre form or if they’re serious about franchising this thing.  I hope the former; I don’t see how this fairly hybrid premise doesn’t collapse under it’s already considerable weight of absurdity by taking it out any further than they already have.

White Stripes Under the Great White Northern Lights
In a phrase: Jack White keeping it real, solidifying his seat next to Dylan.

So, this is a pretty decent emulation of rock docs that have gone before.  More than one whisper of “Pennebaker” has been uttered about this piece.  Ultimately, it’s a highly stylized “get to know the White Stripes” bit.  We follow them on tour though Canada a couple years ago.  The really interesting part is they decide to hit some really remote places in their quest to do every Province and also do some free day shows for the locals in addition to their normal act.

This has the effect of humanizing Jack and Meg (mostly Jack) as they hang with the hoi polloi, an interesting take considering about how much strange speculation has been made about them over their 10 year career, mostly relating the nature of their personalities and their relationship.  In interview, Jack addresses this head on, freely admitting that the band is a construct, but goes to great pains to point out that the music is still genuine.  The cognitive dissonance on this is a powerful force in the film.  I mean the thing is shot in predominantly white, red, black, and white.  I don’t think it would be a stretch to consider the film equally a construct of the band.  That being the case, it’s a little hard to not take this behind the scene’s look at Jack and Meg as a cynical exercise.  And I’m a fan.

The music sounded good, but this is by no means a concert film. This is much more about putting flesh on the bones of the White Stripes mythology.  As much as I enjoy them musically, I find marketing in the form of art to be a bit objectionable. I guess I’m just not feeling the postmodern groove much this week.  It’s hard for me to like the character Jack White if I feel like I’m being manipulated to do so.  Maybe that’s just naive though, all entertainment is based on this silent contract really.  I guess this just came across to me as working a bit hard to earn my trust, which then produced the opposite effect.  Maybe Jack is the mastermind he is made out to be and this was the intended effect, but I doubt it.

All that said, I suppose this is still a must see for fans.  If for no other reason, you may gain a bit of insight on Meg and her apparently crippling shyness. At least I feel a bit vindicated about the ACL no-show that happened that year.  One lingering question not addressed at Q&A:  what was up with that guy napping on the bed behind them during the interview segments?

“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.

“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.

Friday March 13

“Strongman”

Honestly, I’m not sure what attracted me to this one in the schedule. Perhaps the potential for it to be an entertaining freak-show doc, the kind that so often seem to show up at SXSW, drew me in. It turned out to be a quasi-cinéma vérité style documentary, just following the aging “Stanless Steel”, whose ambition is to continue to be, well, a strongman in the carnival sense, though not literally in carnivals. The

film delves deeply into his relationships with those around him, including his family, his peers, and his girlfriend. It also focuses heavily on his earnest quest for self perfection, mostly of physical strength. As we follow him through his days and his various experiences and tribulations, it’s seems like he’s a bit of a feckless, but lovable dolt. His heart in in the right place, but he is incredibly absorbed by his need to be a better, and more popular and bankable strongman entertainer. After leaving this one, it occurred to me that independent docs are often guilty of victimizing subjects/people like this, taking advantage of their naive natures to exploit them for entertaining material. This piece transcends this a bit, seeing something about his creative impulse and struggle that is identical to that which is presumably at the core of anyone involved in the creative enterprise of independent film. It’s subtle, but the subtext is definitely there. I confess, I usually prefer docs with a strong narrative current, which this one lacked, but I think the treatment of the subject was relatively fair yet unflinching, and if you were paying attention, you might learn something before it was all done.

“Monsters From the ID”

This doc suggests that the 50’s were something of a scientific golden age for America. It points out that, although the conventional understanding now is that the science fiction cinema of the era was largely about fear of Communists and the Bomb, that many of these films: (“Forbidden Planet”, “Them”, and one of my favs: “The Day The Earth Stood Still”) also lionized scientists as heroes, something not often seen since, and this had a knock on effect of inspiring people of that time to pursue science, and thus drive the county on to great scientific achievement. He also goes on to draw the conclusion, mostly though his interviewed experts, that there is something of a connection between the lack of this glorification of scientists these days and the decline of scientific education and ability in this country.

I went along with this premise, mostly out of the sense that we’ve just emerged from 8 years of a government fairly disdainful of things intellectual, and that American science could use some bolstering right about now. Still, I’m troubled by the flag-waving aspect of this. We are a wealthy and powerful nation, and as such, we surely have a responsibility to support and contribute to science. However, since the subject was limited only to a discussion of a history of America’s scientific prowess, one implication there is that science should be used to secure our own advantage in the world. The film does not overtly suggest this, but I think the inevitable conclusion from the notion that America is in danger of being left behind intellectually is that Americans should then pursue science for our own benefit. I frankly find this to be a fairly shallow point of view. Thinking about science in tems of national engagement kind of misses the point. Good science should be about the free exchange of ideas unimpeded by borders and what have you. I understand that some things will be considered to be military secrets or whatever, but what about when we’re talking about clean energy or pharmaceutical research? Surely science at it’s best must include inputs from and benefits to everyone rather than just one country or just the First World. So, I guess I came away feeling like trying to look at 50’s sci fi as being some kind of inspiration for us now to be a bit specious. I understand needing to limit a subject for purposes of discussion, but this one left me feeling like the discussion had unceremoniously been ripped out of context to a point so as to be useless. It doesn’t help that the title kind of points to the aspect of the discussion least developed by the end of the film. Seems like this film might have gotten away from it’s masters when it crawled off the slab.

“Ong Bak 2″

No need to belabor this one, it’s more Thai martial arts from Tony Jaa. If you saw the original, you’ll probably like this one. It has the same film speed-ups and florid slo-mos of the original as well, but it was pretty enjoyable overall if you’re a martial arts film fan.

Saturday March 14

“Reel Shorts 1″

My annual readers might recall that I do loves me some shorts programs. There’s something about the form that makes for a sort of “pure” cinematic experience. There is absolutely no room for dead wood in a short. Either you hit your mark or you don’t. When they do, they seem so satisfying somehow.  Fortunately, many in this reel did.  Strange as it is, if there was a theme to this reel, it would be semi-experimental black comedy. “Winter Lilacs” is about a man living with his aged mother who appears to be near catatonic with dementia.   Oddly, yes, they found a bit of humor in this.  Also true for “Countertransference”, about a milquetoast antique store worker and her relationship with her boss, but also her twisted, abusive therapist helping her with her low self esteem issues and “Cochran”, about a loser who hates his delivery job, bit whose true love of skeet shooting and hunting leads him towards a hunting accident that leaves him unable to deliver, but allowing him to work at the gun range. The stand out from the black comedy take would be “Isis avenue”, about a crime scene cleanup company emptying a house of its contents left behind by it’s dead owner.   I suppose the commonality here was that though the subject was undoubtedly morbid, the interviews with the workers were surprisingly upbeat.  Go figure.

“AMAC @ The Hideout”

This was a shorts program Jordan turned me on to populated only by works from students of the Austin School of Film.   I have to say, it was surprisingly solid.  In particular: “Remains”, a narrative about a woman who is in town to clean out the house of her recently deceased, estranged mother and her interaction with her mother’s neighbor, who had had some kind of relationship with her. It was really well acted and fairly compelling, especially for a narrative short. Also, “Blade Throwers”, a very short doc about a regional knife throwing competition. Nicely polished and put together, your typical “get to know a subculture” doc. Lastly, “Headcheese”, a somewhat longer horror piece where the young worker of a butcher shop starts to lose it and starts taking orders from a pig head, Son-of-Sam style.  Not shy with the fake blood.

“The Last Beekeeper”

Knowing a little bit about this subject, I was curious to see this filmmakers take on the state of the bee industry, if you will, in light of the recent troubles with honeybee populations in decline. This one was really well put together, had a nice little narrative to it as we follow three beekeepers on their annual trek to the almond pollenation in California, and their struggles to keep it together. As it turns out, there’s quite a bit of passion and heartbreak in the bee biz. The only thing that left me unsatisfied were the scientific underpinnings of the film. There are some interviews with apiarists trying to explain Colony Collapse Disorder, often heard about through brief mass media science-scare stories, but as there’s no explanation, no theories are really advanced. We learn that the almonds in particular are instructive as they, unlike many other crops, depend totally on bees for successful pollenation, and to accomplish this takes 75% of the US supply of beehives. There are therefore some stabs made at an explanation implicating the constant, long-distance transport of hives into monoculture areas, such as the vast almond orchards of California , are to blame, combined with the stressed of environmental pesticides and imported bee parasites.   I guess if you assume that we’re in the grips of a national bee holocaust, that beekeepers are having a rough time of it, interesting as their stories might be, isn’t excatly a surprise.

I can’t help but feel they should have let the franchise rest a little longer a-la Doctor Who.  What I don’t want to see is yet another ill advised, half-baked Hollywood fishing expedition through TV shows of yore.  I couldn’t bear watching Star Trek become a parody of itself.  I guess we’ll see next Summer.

http://www.startrekmovie.com/

See especially the AICN review.  If one of the biggest fanboys in the world can say this publicly, Lucasfilm, it’s probably time to wake up and smell the bantha poodoo.  Look, good things are made by people who care, not by sycophants and group-thinkers, and the latest wares you’ve been pushing smell suspiciously of the latter.  Go look at how Nolan rescued Batman from the empty-headed “nipples & neon” era we suffered at the hands of (speak not his name) Joel Schumacher and get a hint.

Let’s face it, the latter SW should serve as a warning to the future that fabulous effects and design doesn’t cover for fundamentally bad storytelling, even if it’s a franchise as classically story-rich as the SW universe once was. The contrast couldn’t be clearer considering the startling (esp. compared to the prequels) magnificence of what Tartakovsky et al. did with their rendition of Clone Wars a couple years back.  Lucasfilm, there really is no excuse.

Sadly, I still feel the need to see this at some point, if for no other reason than to be conversant in what continues to be so frustratingly wrong with Star Wars.  Maybe I can sneak in some how so I don’t help fund this kind of apparent atrocity any more than I’ve already been complicit in.  People depend on me to be informed on the important issues, you see. 

“Humboldt County”

This was one popular movie. Mindy & I saw the lineup for this one at the Alamo Monday night. They twice opened another theater and, at least on Monday, sold that one out also. As for the film itself, think “The Graduate” meets “Harold and Kumar”. Actually, it’s much better than that likening makes it sound. The story follows the adventure of a young, burned out medical student from L.A. who finds himself among the off-the-gridders in northern California and their pot farms and, through various misadventures, finds some kind of personal salvation. Sure, the movie is reminiscent of the naturalistic 60’s/70’s style “drop out of reality, get redemption” story, but the characters feel real, not so ethereal, and the plot is well structured in terms of the main character’s travails.

So, the story wasn’t really a revelation, but the acting was at least top notch. In terms of recognizable names, Peter Bogdanovich plays the main character’s sullen but imposing father, and Brad Dourif very competently plays the eccentric old man father/leader of the pot farming family in the woods. Overall though, the performances all of the lead and supporting cast falls into place and their various relationships really work. I think I’ve just seen the rebirth/redemption story so many times I’ve gotten jaded; I didn’t really get to that place one hopes to by the end of the film where you vicariously own a bit of the redemption for yourself. I nevertheless enjoyed it, I guess a well done film can sometimes be its own reward.

“Body of War”

This doc, releasing nationwide at Landmark Theaters, was just downright excruciating, but in a good way, trust me. It follows the early recovery of Tomas Young, an Iraq war vet paralyzed by a gunshot and his subsequent entry into the war protest community. Directed by Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro, the former you know, the latter did the doc 2 years ago “Troop 1500″ about the girl scouts with imprisoned parents, Ellen is clearly no stranger with how to handle emotionally charged material. Watching Tomas and his family deal with his circumstances is hard enough, but when complicated by his feelings of betrayal by the Bush administration, it goes to a whole ‘nuther level. Tomas signed up two days after 9/11 thinking he would be able to go to Afghanistan to help “smoke out the bad guys” like the president had said they would but was instead sent to Iraq and caught in an open-backed truck turkey shoot 5 days into his deployment. Feeling slighted by this, as you might imagine, Tomas subsequently decided to join up with Iraq Veterans Against the War and has apparently been doing speaking tours ever since.

Yes, this film has a pretty clear political agenda. There’s a less than subtle progress through most the movie involving listing the results of the 2002 Senate vote authorizing the war and then a moment towards the end spent between Tomas and Senator Byrd reading the 23 names who voted ‘no’ ( I’m happy to say both Michigan senators voted against the war, sad to say both of Texas’ voted for it, of course). During the film time committed to tracking this, CSPAN footage of the so-called debate is included. It’s appalling to watch how much the pro-war elements relied on such obviously pre-digested talking points to make their case, including John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. More appalling that most people appear to have bought it. By contrast, they also played footage of Senator Byrd’s quoting of Herman Goering from the “Nuremburg Diary”.

Perhaps the strongest point of the film is that it’s fairly clear Tomas suffers greatly from his affliction, but it’s hard to conclude that his motivation is about collecting pity for himself. I think what we witness in terms of how hard it is for this guy to just get by much less travel and speak as an activist makes it clear, it’d be way easier for him to just stay home in bed and feel sorry for himself. So, the most difficult philosophical hurdle this film throws at you is the difference between Tomas’ experience and the pro-war faction’s fierce belief that that the casualties we sustain don’t suffer/die in vain. It’s clear that Tomas certainly thinks he does, and that if the cause had been worthy he would not. Frankly, I’m surprised that Dick Cheney’s (and Wolfowitz’s and Rummy’s…) commandos from the New American Century bunch hasn’t swooped down to finish these IVAW guys off. Sheesh.

Well, enough pontificating. So, if you’re in range of a theater running this one and are in the mood to be freshly enraged about this idiotic war, check it out.

Friday March 14

Reel Shorts 3

Finally got the last regular shorts reel fit in, still missed the Texas and Animated shorts though. This reel had some much longer pieces, and they were all quite good. “The Second Line”, a post-Katrina N.O. story about a couple of black friends living in a FEMA trailer park who take on work gutting a white guy’s house. The main character starts out with some hard luck, and stress of being mistreated on the job sends him over the edge. “Kid”, looks to have shot locally in Austin about a Hispanic boy at his 13th birthday. His estranged father takes him out, and he’s none too thrilled. They barely communicate, and when they do, it’s the father giving him his own father’s buck knife telling the boy me has to kill a young goat for purposes of cabrito on the occasion of his 13th bday. Again, he’s not too thrilled. Though the father is proud, the boy is silent, and in the car on the way back to his mother’s, you see him quietly slip the knife into the gap in the car set as if to lose it. Very nicely done. “A Catalog of Anticipations” was a very quirky piece, almost totally done in stills except for a bit of stop motion. A young girl wanders in a meadow behind her house, collecting object from nature: bones, bugs, insect nests, etc. Eventually she happens upon an increasing number of dead fairies. Violently killed fairies. Tiny little winged people, yes, mutilated. She starts boxing them up until one night, she find out one wasn’t quite dead. In the middle of the night, it gets out of it’s box and just kind of stares at her. The next day, she takes her whole collection out and buries it n the meadow. Heh heh, damned fairies. Lastly, “Glory at Sea”, an almost expressionistic piece, a retelling of the Orpheus myth. This time, the underworld is an underwater grave, and when one escapes back to land, the rest of the living fashion a weird boat and try to get them back. Seriously, I have no idea how to explain beyond that. This is one of those films where the dialog itself is moody and incidental, so you have to pay attention to what’s happening and fashion your own sense of plot. Ic ould never make a movie like this, it would drive me mad. But I will say this was fairly well done. And ambitious being shot mostly on or in the water. In the Q&A they said their art director made the ocean grave in a disused swimming pool; I seriously couldn’t tell. Well done.

“Shine a Light”

This is Martin Scorsese’s concert doc of a recent Rolling Stones show in NYC at the Beacon theater apparently tied to Bill Clinton’s charity or birthday or something like that. This one will be all over shortly, but as I hadn’t yet been to our hometown IMAX, I decided to try and get in. There’s also some weird symmetry here in that I caught their 1989 tour both live in Detroit and on IMAX in San Antonio a couple of years thereafter. I’m not a rabid Stones fan or anything, but classic rock, as worn out as it is, amounts to being almost a folk music for many of the working class folks of the Midwest (from whence I came) and beyond. That and heavy metal, of course. Film-wise, there isn’t anything too surprising to report here. It’s big, it’s flash, it’s a nicely done concert film. There’s a bit of fun with Martin himself being neurotic before and after the concert, there’s some archival footage moments, there are some musical guests, and the remainder of the Stones themselves on a surprisingly small stage overall. The bit of background reading I did on the website afterwards suggests that this was one of the earliest bottlenecks in the production: that Mick wanted it bigger, that Scorsese wanted it more intimate.

So, Mick can certainly still strut, but his vocal range is certainly decreased. Keith looks just as undead as he has for decades. It being an IMAX, you could literally see Mick’s dental work, the time on Ron’s watch, the timeless depths of the wrinkles on Keith’s face. Being that the boys are pushing near 70, that might be a bit too much visual detail overall, but I will say that the sound was exquisite in our IMAX, which is good considering how much “Texas: The Big Picture” probably gets played there. One weird thing I noticed was the level of an intstrument in focus of a given shot was occasionally boosted to the fore. I’ve heard/seen this technique before, but I found it kind of jarring here in terms of enjoying the musical performance itself. Then again, when is a Stones show solely about the music?

Saturday March 15

“Bananaz”

Alright, I’ll admit, this one was a guilty pleasure. It’s basically a doc on the behind the scenes action of those behind the album creation, live performance, and promotion of the animated band Gorillaz. Mindy got me hooked on them a couple years ago, so I thought this one might be fun for us to go see. Overall, it had a perhaps unintentional “This is Spinal Tap” kind of feel, owing largely to the casual “hanging out with the band” way of putting scenes together, and the fact that the central two Gorillaz creators are really just incredibly juvenile and prone to the pranks and hijinks that follow.

To be fair, Gorillaz are kind of a unique phenomenon in that, having an animated presentation with a constructed little universe they occupy, are a virtual band. I’m not so excited about that in and of itself, but it does then suggest that there’s a fairly unique creative process that goes into making what they do. Sadly, I can’t say I’m all that more informed than by what I could infer from the action I was watching; there wasn’t much by way of interviewed explanations happening in this film. It was fun though, and you got to see a bit of the magic, but having to listen to that long a movie full of a bunch of un-miked biritish accents, there should be a bit more payoff in terms of take away.

“Crawford”

This is a doc about the eponymous town in TX adopted by our loving President (I’ve always wanted to use the word “eponymous” in writing, itmakes me feel like a rock critic ). I was sure this was going to turn out to be yet another lefty W-bashfest, but it turned out surprisingly even handed. The filmmakers managed to get pretty good interviews from all 3 sides of the issue: the blindsided natives, the anti-war protesters, and the pro-war counter protesters. I don’t think we get a whole lot of insight about any particular angle, but that doesn’t appear to be the main purpose of the doc. By profiling both some of the residents of the town and then cataloging the changes the town and it’s natives go through as a result of the President and his retinue’s presence, it manages to capture a slice of place and time, from which you can draw what conclusions you will. That, and it had a talking W. statue that spouted some of his more delightful Presidential wisdom. I probably won’t sleep well for a week after seeing that. Anyhow, it’s one of those films that kind of takes the lid off a subject that suffers horribly from the shallow media soundbite approach and dares to look a little closer.

“The Night James Brown Saved Boston”

This one will be on VH-1 here on April 5, perhaps not accidentally to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the assassination of MLK. This film does a modest amount on separate backgrounds of both the civil rights movement and JB himself. It keeps a good, quick pace through the history lesson there for good reason: it sets up the story of how JB was set to do a concert in Boston that night after rioting had already broken out in Roxbury for several days prior. In short, city leaders had to decide first whether or not his presence would cause more or less trouble for them, and therefore whether or not to cancel his show. Convinced that the show would actually be a boon, they decided to go on with the show, but to have WGBH televise it, costing JB some $50,000. So, two crucial dramatic moments come to pass: whether or not he’ll go on with the show and, once he was convinced by the city to go on, how he would handle a near riot that threatens to break out in Boston Garden. The end result, at least as this doc would suggest, was that he became a more solid proponent of MLK’s philosophy (he was not previously a believer in non-violence) as well as one of the most important public black figures of his day. All this well before I first knew him as of Rocky IV. Also, you should know that when this comes out on DVD, it will include the original concert as well.

“The Wrecking Crew”

Ah, the saddest moment of any festival, the bitter, final screening. I thought it would be cool to go out with a nice music doc. This one is about a group of studio musicians in L.A. who worked primarily in the 50’s & 60’s who were at some point nicknamed “the Wrecking Crew”. Out of all the docs I saw this year, this one actually shocked me the most. As it turns out, a good number of rock albums made in L.A. during those years were cut by these guys and not by the respective bands. Sure, I knew plenty of singers of the era were backed up by session musicians, and even some of the novelty acts like the Monkees, but I had no idea that the same went for groups like the Beach Boys. Indeed, this bunch was apparently responsible for a hefty number of 50’s & 60’s rock hits, not to mention jingles, TV themes, and various other side projects. Check out the song list just from the movie here.

The film was made over a period of 12 years by Tommy Tedesco’s (a guitar player with the Wrecking Crew) son, and he managed to interview a good number of the surviving members. The most heartbreaking aspect of their whole story was that, though they were well payed by the studios for their work, and they were extremely flexible and capable musicians, well respected in their field, they went uncredited for most of their work. Work so good that when bands had to learn the songs to reproduce live often could not.

Movies I Missed

Other films that I either had on my schedule and couldn’t fit in and/or heard a lot of good comments about while standing in line. Look ‘em up on the SXSW website, they may have websites of their own.

Woodpecker
Heavy Load
Heavy Metal in Baghdad
Secrecy
The Wild Horse Redemption
Young@Heart
Stop-Loss
Flying on One Engine

Well, another successful year in the bag. I can’t say I saw anything too stinkerific this year, but I hate to say, in some ways, this is becoming kind of routine, and definitely expensive. It’s *really* nice with the badge not to have to worry so much about timing which queues to jump into, but I still did. Too many years of training to just let go I guess. At least I still talk to people in the pass and ticket queues, unlike many of the industry snobs I was lining up with. So, I got to talking to one lady in line about maybe volunteering next year, see a different side of the festival. I’ll think it about it again when the time comes back around later this/early next year. Hope y’all enjoyed the write ups this year.

-D.

As you can see from the photos, we are in the midst of the kitchen remodel, and due to the film festival we have not been eating at home too much (not too bad when your kitchen is a 6-foot table). Its a good thing that all of the Alamo venues serve food or we would be starving our way through SXSW. Dave has dedicated the most time to movies (see reviews below), but I have not done too badly this year. There have been years past when I had to opt out almost entirely, but I have managed to squeeze in a few at nights this past week. Maybe someday I can take a week off too.

My greatest responsibility at this point is to get the cabinetry done in time to be installed in the kitchen. The uppers are done and ready for a final coat of paint, but the base cabinets need a little more work. Slowly, we will get there. The most complicated thing with the kitchen remodel at the moment is the fact that the house is out of square in some places, as it is with most older homes, so making sure the cabinets will line up and the flooring is level is the biggest obstacle.

However, one fortunate side effect of all this is that we had to get off our buts and get rid of some furniture. Both Dave and I had our respective rocker/recliners that were purchased by our parents the year of our birth (1971 for those who don’t know) and after 35+ years they were getting a little rough around the edges. It has been long past time we finally got rid of them, but laziness and the expense of new furniture have prevented us so far. But, we needed room in the living room to store all the boxes of stuff and the appliances we are keeping, so they finally had to go. Goodbye old companions! – we will probably never see your like again.

More Panels

The one of interest to report was the panel titled “Behind the scenes at Troublemaker post”. I’ve heard a lot of things about how Troublemaker, Robert Rodriguez and Elizabeth Avellan’s Austin film studio, has been revolutionizing how movies are made. For one, they do so largely outside the Hollywood system, which is about all I knew going in. The panelists, all members of the post production team, were able to fill in some of the blanks.

The gist: they work in much smaller teams, but work more cooperatively between departments to find novel solutions to the various problems they face. Apparently, the methods Rodriguez in particular uses in filmmaking has forced the team surrounding him to kind of adapt to supporting his approach and vision. So, it sounds like they culturally shoot for a staff of passionate, hard-working types rather than for one with more of a “work for a paycheck” mentality. Sounds like this means they get some pretty aggressive deadlines, but the panelists didn’t think it was a problem, in that it helped them focus on be being creative and efficient with their innovations. That said, one panelist did mention that some of his department were wearing heart monitors during one recent crunch time, kinda scary.

“Where In the World is Osama Bin Laden?”

No SXSW review list would be complete without a Morgan Spurlock mention, and this year we have his latest effort where he goes a looking for Osama. Morgan’s style is decidedly informed by Michael Moore. Very flashy, quick paced, humorous and personal, but a bit less comparatively confrontational than Moore. With this comes the burden of occasionally looking like you’re full of crap. It doesn’t help when the title and premise is largely a dramatic contrivance to go on a tour of several Middle Eastern countries and do several “man on the street” and a few “expert” interviews. So, the whole “Where is Osama” bit kind of turns into a continuity (and occasionally a humor ) device, but the interviews he does really are challenging. He managed to capture a few of the more coherent haters on film, but he made sure to add quite a few respondents whose attitude amounted to a fairly rational “we hate your policy, but we don’t hate Americans at large” approach, which is a stark contrast to what gets portrayed in our daily media.

This is the big take-away, and despite the occasional carnival atmosphere of the film, it at least doesn’t come off as mean-spirited as Moore’s works can and often do. I guess you have to sweeten it up pretty good if you expect anyone to see it. So, I have some (once again) mixed feelings about that. During Q & A, he answered a question where said that documentaries should be fun, and not “spinach”. There’s fun aplenty to be had with this one, but I can certainly see why he also made the AV Club’s tolerability index last month.

That, and as a guy I sat next to at the Alamo said when the power went out part way into the screening and it took 30 minutes to get the projector back online, prompting Spurlock to order a round for the entire sold-out theater (thanks for the beer Morgan/Harvey), “It doesn’t hurt to work for the Weinsteins.” Makes me wish I hadn’t accidentally sat next to him a few years back when “Super Size Me” played at the Dobie and bad-mouthed and groaned my way through the film (not that I didn’t like it , mind you), only to watch him walk up front for the Q&A afterwards. Such are my brushes with proto-fame.

“Battle in Seattle”

Well, this one was Mindy’s pick, and thanks to the fact the “Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden” ran over and that Mindy couldn’t get in thanks to it being the hot ticket that night, we split up and I arrived a little late. This is a high-minded feature trying to capture the events of the 1999 Seattle WTO protest though the stories of several characters, ranging from the protest leadership to cops working riot duty, to the media and innocent bystanders, and even WTO attendees. Make no mistake, this film has a very deliberate anti-globalism slant, and as it features some high profile actors, Charlize Theron and Woody Harrelson, might even get seen.

Although much of the drama is kind of predictable, and has a very similar plot structure to, say, one of your better zombie movies for example, I think it does a fair job of giving all those involved a human face instead of reducing them to their strict stereotypes as anarchist/commie bomb-throwers or faceless bureaucrats as so often happens. I don’t often say this, but I think it leans perhaps a bit too hard in the direction of developing its large array of characters and at times intercuts madly to keep up with all their threads, but it winds up working overall. It ends up a bit sappy, but then makes up for it all with a quick rundown of the key moments in protest history since 1999. Meh, you might learn something, but mostly you’ll be bouncing between some genuinely nice dramatic moments living in the chaos of the protest and a few contrived but competently acted/directed dramatic tropes.

Tuesday March 11

“We Are Wizards”

OK, I admit it, I’m attracted to nerd documentaries, so sue me. I’m not a particularly big Harry Potter nut, but I am married to one, and I figured that qualified me to go see this film. The blurb on this was that it was primarily about “Wizard Rock” or “Dragon Rock”, a genre of music I previously knew nothing about (see “Harry & The Potters, Draco and the Malfoy’s). I’ll say this, I’ve seen some pretty hair-curling displays of geekdom in my day, but this one really takes the cake. The nice surprise about this film was that it kind of transcended just that and became a look a various other forms of Harry Potter fandom, such as fan sites and fan fiction. The fan sites story takes a really interesting turn when Warner Bros. starts issuing cease and desists and a woman rises up to organize an apparently effective boycott against them, getting WB to rethink their strategy. They also picked the king, IMHO, of Harry Potter fan fiction, Brad Neely’s “Wizard People, Dear Reader”, which is an alternate soundtrack & dialog he created to be played along with the first HP movie. I got to see him perform this live at the old Alamo a few years back, and it is both amazing to see and, by his own admission, amazing he was never sued over it. I highly recommend checking that out if you can find it.

The subjects picked for the movie are diverse and interesting, their stories well told. There’s a bit a a wandering sense to the narrative structure of the film, especially later on, but since the threads are all fairly interesting, the lack of a clearly progressional narrative development isn’t so irritating as it can be when the rest of what’s going on doesn’t stand out.

“Frontrunners”

To be honest, I kind of caught this one by accident. It was a right place, right time with time to kill kind of scenario. Trust me, it happens. I’ve learned over the years that navigating the film schedule is a Greek tragedy all in itself; it’s best not to get too caught up in trying to make it work out perfectly.

Anyhoo, “Frontrunners” is about the campaign for student union president at Stuyvesant HS in NYC. Stuyvesant is populated with NYC’s best and brightest public school kids, and so the novelty is seeing how these ruling class larvae compete for power. That said, I’m simultaneously relieved and horrified to find out that the students were, at least on the surface, more or less like any other relatively well off public school. Again, the subjects were interesting, the built-in narrative of the campaign and the election presents a tidy structure. Although high school was far from the happiest time of my life, I was able to more or less recall identifying what the students were going through. Not a bad little doc really.

“Nerdcore Rising”

Did I say I was amazed at how geeky wizard rock was? Forget it. In only one day, I was taken to a whole ‘nother level. Nerdcore, for those not in the know, is hip hop done in the nerd fashion. Typically geeky white dudes up there busting nerdy-ass rhymes. In this case, the film makers profiled MC Frontalot, who I was peripherally aware of through Penny Arcade, but hadn’t actually researched all that much. They follow him and his band on his first US tour, winding up at Penny Arcade’s PAX event. The typical roadtrip sillyness ensues, but interviews with other nerdcore and hiphop artists keep it moving along. Gabe over at PA pretty much says it all: “On the outside, we run shit”. Nerd power! One thing though, docs about something currently going on, as opposed to something in the past, often have a sort of fan/promotional quality to them; this was no exception. Mike Henry’s “Slam Planet” comes to mind. Not that there’s anything wrong with that necessarily, but if one watches them, you won’t get a more objective sense of a topic’s legacy, For that, really, subjects do need some time to ferment. Whether contemporary “human interest” docs and their subjects will endure or turn into the roller skating or break dancing of their own periods, only time will tell.

Wednesday March 12

“Living with the Tudors”

I didn’t schedule this one, but I’d been seeing this lady in period costume handing out flyers all week. Though I usually blow off the pushers (it’s kind of a sport for me I get to enjoy one week a year, clearly I am a monster), but her accompanying pitch was among the most compelling, so it was pretty hard to resist. “Living With the Tudors” is about a place in Suffolk, UK called Kentwell, where reenactors try to faithfully live in Tudor-era, and occasionally WWII era England, while the public may buy tickets to come observe and interact. As you might know by now, I’m a fan of a doc with a strong narrative, which this one doesn’t have, so it was a bit of a challenge for me to digest. My first reaction was not to like it very much, as it’s shot in a fairly naturalistic time and pace and has a somewhat dreamy atmosphere (editorial structure and soundtrack) with the occasional rare interjection of our embedded film makers, who themselves have participated as limners in the reenactment for three years prior to the one filmed.

Later that day, it kind of occurred to me that, at least in this case, the effect of the film wasn’t born of editorial incompetence or just lack of a decent narrative arising, but was actually intended. Many of the Tudors in the film report a certain therapeutic disconnect from reality spending the summer at Kentwell. Although during the film I was chafing a bit against the lack of conclusions being drawn about some of the tensions the fimmakers uncover, such as the interactions between the Tudors and the public, or those between the “house” Tudors and those on the grounds of the manor, or even between the men and women, I finally got that they were going for a more delicate, experiential style of representation in their film. Since most of the characters aren’t developed all that far, and there’s not real plot structure to speak of other than the unmarked passing by of the summer, I think the trick here was to try and kind of sink into the world the film makers were trying to present. Gah, I wish I’d gotten that a lot sooner, I’d have liked to speak with the film makers about their decision to go this way. I think this style of film is fairly unpopular here, but perhaps is more so in the UK. I’d have to see more British docs to verify that suspicion, but you can have my wild speculation for free.

“Lou Reed’s Berlin”

This here is a straight up concert video of Lou Reed performing his otherwise overlooked since release “Berlin” album, with a somewhat expanded supporting band, including a youth choir, a star backing vocalist, a horn section, keyboard, Bob Ezrin conducting, a bass and two guitars, which Lou called “two guitars, bass, drums on steroids”. The look of the movie itself was nice. A richly decorated set (including a couch hanging from the ceiling?) with back projected film corresponding to the story told in the music helped give it an “Evening with Lou” kind of feel. Competently shot and edited with good angles and coverage, this too was a slam dunk. I’ve never heard “Berlin” before, but this was the whole experience. Not having heard the original, it still felt pretty familiar. I don’t know how much to attribute that to it being Lou post-”New York” performing it, or if that was emblematic of his sound back in 1973, but it was classic Reed nevertheless. The man is not afraid to cover some seedy, ugly, (one thinks urban with Reed, but not necessarily) subjects.

Lou came on with Hal Willner afterwards and discussed the film a bit. As it turns out, Lou is every bit as cranky as I’d learned to expect. Maybe he’s not too thrilled to still be promoting a film that’s been running worldwide now for several months, maybe not all that crazy about reliving the commercial failure of something that 30-odd years later is just now being realized. Maybe he’s just a cranky old man, he’s got the right. It’ll be interesting to see if he perks up for his SXSW music keynote or not. The poor music industry really must not know how to deal with this guy. Heh heh. More power to you Lou.

“Hori Smoku Sailor Jerry”

A ground level Ken Burns-style doc about a seminal American tattoo artist known as Sailor Jerry. The film maker got some great interviews from Jerry’s protégés and did a good deal of archival research to put this film together. Not a topic of any great importance really, but it was entertaining to see the torn expressions of old timers who inside must be happy that tattooing has lost much of its former stigma as a criminal enterprise and yet outwardly chastise the popularity among newer generations. The film maker did an excellent job of putting the subject in context with a brief but effective history of tattoing in the US, and an equally good job getting fun anecdotes about, quotes from, and photos of his subject. As it turns out, Sailor Jerry was not only a legendary if surly tatto artist, he was also hard core right-wing libertarian racist, and yet was a forerunner of incorporating Japanese styles in his work. Go figure.

More reviews to come.

-D.