Hey folks, Harry here with the Cattle King of Arizona and his journey through SXSW... take a look, he's covering alot here...
Harry-
I know you're getting plenty of these, but here's mine, to plunder as you will:
I just got back from the SXSW film fest, which has grown from its early origins (as a minor adjunct to the prestigious SXSW music fest) and has become a major event it its own rite.Typically, some of the best of Sundance makes a showing during the week-long fest, as well as a few notable upcoming indie features, which makes SXSW both a pleasant, accessible reaffirmation of the Sundance buzz, and a solid jumping-off point for the rest of the year. I have no complaints about the program selection, nor about the venues (which were spectacular), nor the presentation (which was pristine). My only real gripes about the fest have to do with organization. The scheduling of films was such that it was almost impossible to see a continuous string of films -- when one got out, the next one had either already started, or was starting in a few minutes (and therefore already sold out), or starting in thirty minutes but across town (and therefore unreachable given traffic and parking problems). Almost every screening I attended started late -- even the first screenings of the day! -- and there was a lot of standing in line for no apparent reason. Minor complaints. Otherwise, I had a great time and saw about a dozen films in four days. This first post will cover the features:
THE WILGUS STORIES --
This is actually a suite of three short films, each adapted from a collection of short stories by Gurney Norman (called *Kinfolks*), about a boy growing up in the hills of Kentucky in the 50s and 60s. I don¹t know if the film will ever get distributed, especially given that its only an hour long, but if it pops up on-line somewhere, don¹t miss it. Austin filmmaker Andrew Garrison keeps the stories plain and spare , full of the interesting incident of everyday life -- eccentric strangers, rogue uncles, tragic neighbors -- with the focus on long, captivating monologues about the love and despair that Wilgus¹s friends and family harbor. The only ³name² actor in the suite is Ned Beatty, who dominates the first, hilarious story ³Fat Melvin.² Otherwise, the actors are talented unknowns, but not the awkward amateurs that typically populate low-budget indies. This is a funny, beautiful, and very artful regional picture.
NORIEGA: GOD²S FAVORITE --
This was made for Showtime, and is interesting inasmuch as the script (by Austinite Lawrence Wright) was at one point going to be directed by Oliver Stone, with Al Pacino in the lead, with a budget of $56 million. Not it¹s $5.6 million, directed by Roger Spottiswoode, and stars Bob Hoskins. Shows what money will buy you. Hoskins is actually quite good as Noriega, and Spottiswoode strikes an interesting tone of bloody political farce, but the smaller scale is unfortunately evident. The supporting actors are mostly weak, and the limited locations are not well-exploited. Still, the film is entertaining and novel -- almost the whole picture is in flashback as Noriega confesses his sins to a priest -- and the theme of divine providence working in favor of the bad guys is richer than it had to be. But not as rich as it could¹ve been.
THE BIG KAHUNA --
Kevin Spacey, Danny DeVito, and Peter Facinelli co-star as salesman for an industrial lubricant company who are working a convention to land a major client. Eventually, Facinelli corners the title character, but spends the evening talking about Jesus. There are repercussions, etc. This is based on a play by screenwriter Roger Rueff, and director John Swanbeck doesn¹t do much to open it up. It feels not just stagy but claustrophobic, and once it passed the hour mark, I was pretty sick of their hospitality suite. The acting is as fine as you¹d expect, although Spacey swings his dick a bit too much, if you know what I mean. (As his reputation grows in the acting business, I think young directors are less willing to tell him to tone it down). The best performance by DeVito, whose exhaustion is quite touching, and whose closing monologue is a winner. The real problem with the film is the source material, which has shades of Mamet and Korda and Rabe and all those former young dramatic turks, but lacks the intuition or flavor.
THE INDEPENDENT --
This may end of being the biggest ³buzz² film to emerge from the features half of the festival. The audience I saw it with loved it, and people were still chuckling over their favorite lines a few days later (myself included). Jerry Stiller stars as an aging exploitation filmmaker (think Russ Meyer) whose daughter, Janeane Garofalo, tries to help him secure financing for his next film, while his assistant, Max Perlich, tries to land him a retrospective at a film festival. The highlights of the film are the snippets of the ³Morty Fineman Filmography,² which includes such winners as the religious courtroom drama *Christ for the Defense*, and the first ever roman-numeraled sequel, *World War III II*. A lot of wit and imagination went into the history of Fineman Films (thanks to director-writer Stephen Kessler and producer-writer Mike Wilkins), but not so much went into the plot, which is pretty soft. The film as a whole lacks a necessary edge, and is not as well thought out as the similar *The Big Picture* or *Living in Oblivion*, but it is often very funny. (Almost as entertaining was the post-film Q&A, which featured Kessler, Garofalo, Stiller, Perlich, and Ginger Lynn Allen, who has a bit part in the film). This could become a cult favorite, but you don¹t really have to see the movie to get the cult started. There¹s a fake Fineman Films website -- FinemanFilms.Com -- which has plenty of goodies, including a complete and side-splitting list of the filmography. Click right now!
COCKFIGHTER
Not much to say about this. It screened as part of a Monte Hellman retrospective and was the only one of Hellman¹s films that I got to see. I¹m not sure if it¹s available on video, but if it is (and if you can stomach actual cockfighting), then it¹s a must-see -- especially if you like those early 70s regional films like *Payday* or Hellman¹s *Two-Lane Blacktop*.
The second half of my SXSW report deals with the much more rewarding documentary program:
LEGACY --
Documentarian Tod S. Lending follows four years in the life of an inner-city Chicago family, as they recover from the shooting death of a bright young cousin and silently resolve to pull themselves out of the cycle of welfare, drugs and poverty. I have a theory that our national interest in social issues goes in cycles, wherein we learn more about, say, racism or gang violence, and we get interested, and then as the real-life drama gets appropriated by TV and movies and becomes a cliche, we begin to see the problems themselves as cliches, and therefore not very real. (How many times can the staff of the *ER* save the life of a gangbanger before we begin to roll our eyes at the dramatic device?) All of which is to say that I appreciated this film¹s refreshing return to ground trod most successfully recently by *Hoop Dreams* -- seeing real, three-dimensional people dealing with age-old problems makes the problems more real. *Legacy* is often deeply moving. That said, I had some problems with the style of this doc, which relies too much on a saccharine music score, and on a voice-over narration from the family¹s oldest daughter, whose script features a lot of heavy-handed explanation of emotions that are clear from the visuals alone. I missed the more hands-off approach of *Hoop Dreams*, or Frederic Wiseman¹s oft-riveting, oft-excruciating *Public Housing*. Still, if *Legacy* pops up on PBS somewhere, check it out. It¹s definitely an emotional experience.
GRASS --
This was another big success, as far as the SXSW audience was concerned. I and my colleague Jim Ridley were somewhat less that impressed. Ron Mann -- who made the overrated, incomplete documentary *Comic Book Confidential* a few years ago -- here attempts to cover the history of recreational marijuana use in America. As cultural history, the film is interesting. Mann covers the highlights of prohibition legislation and the images of the marijuana user in the popular media, with the help of clever animations designed by Paul Mavrides. But as cultural analysis, *Grass* is mostly horseshit. There¹s a smugness, laziness, and presumption to the selection of clips -- and the lack of new interviews -- which demonstrates that Mann wanted nothing that would shake his theory that that majority of Americans are for the legalization of marijuana. I happen to favor legalization, but by the end of the film, I was so aggravated at the mocking way in which marijuana opponents were presented as misguided fools that I almost wanted to become a Republican. The audience ate it up -- Mann was preaching to the converted, judging by the resin smell in the theater -- but I don¹t understand how images of deranged smokers from anti-marijuana propaganda drew derisive hoots, while similar images from Cheech & Chong and The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers drew approving cheers. I could go on with the contradictions and deception inherent in both the film and its reception at the festival, but I¹ll just wrap it up by saying that the film has its moments, but hits new lows in its own kind of propaganda. Mann seemed like a decent fellow, though, in his Q&A.
THE TARGET SHOOTS FIRST --
A real winner. Christopher Wilcha documents his own year-long journey through the halls of Columbia House Record & Tape club, where Wilcha worked as a marketing manager. The portrait of the drudgery, pointless meetings, class conflict, and unsteady friendships of corporate America will be less than a revelation to anyone who¹s worked in an office (or who¹s read *Dilbert*) -- and frankly, Wilcha lacks the footage he needs to add a visual to what his narration describes about his co-workers, probably because he was too shy to interview them on-camera -- but the film is not really about corporation-bashing. Instead, Wilcha deals with his own conflicted attitudes about selling the alternative music he loves to his peers, and the cynical sales tactics that he has to employ to reach his own cynical generation. The film really takes off when Wilcha assembles a staff to design a new Columbia House magazine for subscribers who checked ³Alternative² as their category of choice. They sneak some subversion past their square superiors by putting their own opinions about the music they love and/or hate (and the company they work for) into the catalog, and the response from consumers is overwhelming. Then Kurt Cobain kills himself, and Wilcha gets disillusioned about his own success. *The Target Shoots First* is wonderfully honest about the clash of idealism and materialism, and it doesn¹t overtly choose sides. Wilcha probably won¹t ever make another film, but this document -- so direct, and so skillfully edited -- will abide. Seek it out.
RATED X: A JOURNEY THROUGH PORN --
Another winner, and another honest film from a young filmmaker with an interesting, multi-faceted topic. Skateboard filmmaker Dag Yngvesson begins his journey by seeking out an actor he remembers from the first porn film he ever saw, and when he meets the guy, his questions about the workings of the industry leads him through a series of porn sets, starlets, struggling directors, and sleazy casting agents. Eventually, Yngvesson himself becomes a cameraman for a week on a Jeanna Fine movie, and he learns as much about the tragic life of Fine herself (despite how ³together² she seems) as he does about becoming a pornographer. My only real complaint about *Rated X* (not to be confused with the recent Estevez brothers film of the same name) is that Yngvesson more or less buys into the idea that porn films are cute, harmless ways for mainstream America to get off. Most porn is just that, but aside from a depressing sidebar about the category of Pregnant Porn, Yngvesson doesn¹t confront the real, stomach-turning perversion that¹s not hard to find if you spend even a minute in an adult bookstore (or surfing for porn on the net). To his credit, Yngvesson does deal with the pain in the lives of the pornmakers, including childhood sexual abuse and a lingering, unspoken racism. And like Wilcha in *The Target Shoots First*, Yngvesson is upfront about his conflicted attitudes about the subject. I don¹t know how you¹ll get to see this, but start lobbying your local university or art-house to arrange a midnight screening as soon as possible. Or keep an eye out for the video. Given the fairly hardcore images in the documentary, don¹t expect to see this on TV or at a chain theater.
BLINK --
This will be on POV this year, and its worth a glance, if not a deep look. Documentarian Elizabeth Thompson checks in on Gary Withrow, the founder of the White Student Union and former lapdog of the neo-Nazi Metzger family, who now lives modestly with his Hispanic wife and struggles with the hate and rage that he¹s trying to reject. Thompson makes an interesting case that stories of white supremacists and reformed racists are too pat, and make the rest of us white folks feel complacent with our own, subtler racism -- we can comfort ourselves by saying ³we¹re not *that* guy.² But this tantalizing theory is underdeveloped, and *Blink* becomes mostly another sensationalist story of hate redeemed.
AMERICAN PIMP --
The Hughes Brothers long-awaited documentary about the culture of pimping is troubling, but highly entertaining. Kudos to the Hugheses, fist of all, for going much deeper into their subject that they had to. They get into the history of pimping (starting with the reconstruction era), they show how images from 70s blaxploitation films both reflect and belie reality, and they even talk to the owner of a legal brothel about the ³respectable² side of the business (which seems sleazier than the illicit side). They talk to pimps from just about every major city in America, and these men relate stories that are once funny and shockingly honest -- their business is ultimately all about keeping themselves flush, while their girls degrade themselves for almost nothing. In the post-screening interview (conducted by Elvis Mitchell, and taped for the IFC), a very engaging Allen and Albert said that they had footage of sociologists and more prostitutes (beyond the few they show), but that their commentary slowed the movie down, so they chose to focus on the pimps and their charming patter. I don¹t necessarily argue with that choice, but after having seen *The Target Shoots First* and *Rated X*, I wished that the brothers had put some of their own feelings into the picture. Afterward, they talked about spending their boyhood watching films like *The Mack*, and about their feminist mother¹s opinions of the movie -- just a little of that personal touch might have put what we see in *American Pimp* in context. Still, the film is far from an endorsement of the pimp lifestyle or of brutal misogyny ... and it¹s frequently hilarious. It should play around the country throughout the rest of the year, and it¹s definitely worth seeing.
DARK DAYS --
Last but far from least this is this remarkable, stark, black-and-white document of the community of homeless who dwell in the subway tunnels of New York, made by Marc Singer, who lived there himself for awhile. Equally fascinating and unnerving, *Dark Days* shows how refugees from proper society (many of whom are hooked on drugs) have carved out a little place for themselves, built from our garbage. Little houses underground, with electricity and all the luxury appliances, make life almost livable; but rats, human filth (due to a lack of running water) and food scavenged from garbage cans is the price these people pay for getting away from the culture of park benches and shelters. Singer documents day-to-day life, and eavesdrops on the funny and sad conversation and stories that help pass the time between trains. And he happens to be around when Amtrak decides to roust everybody out, which gives *Dark Days* an emotional finale. Haunting and lovely (with a great score by DJ Shadow), this will almost certainly make my year-end Top 10 list. It was a huge hit at Sundance, and so it should get a decent push at mainstream distribution. Of all the films I saw at SXSW, this is the one that no cinephile should escape 2000 without seeing.
That¹s it. I just want to add how much I enjoyed Austin itself. I had some great meals -- chili at The Texas Chili Parlor, tacos at Gueras, noodles at Manga, more noodles at this Vietnamese place on 6th -- and I want to put in a plug for the nice folks at the local comics shops, especially at Dragon¹s Lair, where they were classy enough to recommend I drive block away to the Austin Books & Comics (not in my original itinerary) to keep hunting. tanks, Austin, and I hope to see you next year!
The Cattle King Of Arizona
