Moving and switching gears at work is hell on your free blogging time.
Read MoreI'm moving this weekend, so expect me to disappear for a few days. Back with reviews of Stop-Loss, They Killed Sister Dorothy, and Flying on One Engine at the very least, more if I can.
Read MoreI saw Mongol in December at BNAT 9, and if you're here this week, I definitely recommend seeing it at SXSW. Even roughly 6-8 hours in to a 24-hour film festival, this one kept my wife and I rapt with attention for its 2 hour-plus runtime.
Read MoreIn a Dream
Sister Dorothy
Read MoreAs I do every year, I hit a point when the overwhelming wave of SXSW's first weekend knocks me over. I'm behind on writeups, interviews, panels, photos...everything. It seems to happen earlier every year.
Something relatively new keeps happening to me this year though: I can't get into anything at certain points in the day. Today and yesterday alone I completely struck out over and over, and when I went to the next closest option, that was full too. Is this karmic retribution for skipping 21 and Harold & Kumar 2? Couldn't be, if anything I should get bonus points for choosing stuff I can't see on 3000 screens soon.
The Missed List (so far):
Monday
Forgetting Sarah Marshall and #2 pick during the same slot Where in the World is Osama bin Laden? (didn't get there in time running from downtown to South Lamar) as well as...
Dear Zachary set to start 90 minutes later, already full, and then...
Battle in Seattle: tried running back to downtown from S. Lamar with no luck
Tuesday
Nights & Weekends
Catching up on the last few days today...I'm taking the time I need to blow through my backlog.
Read MoreI went to college in the southeast, so this doc focusing on the Homecoming Queen race at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa caught my eye early on. Alabama isn't really known for its progressive race relations attitudes, in case you didn't know (it's the internet, who knows where you're reading this from).
Jessica Joyce Thomas, a black undergrad, decided to take on an entity referred to as The Machine, which consisted of the most powerful, oldest, and white sororities and fraternities, who all compromise on one candidate to support every year, and in fact succeeded in passing voting reforms that made it easier for them to get what they want. Ostensibly this type of organization exists at all major universities in the US.
In particular, the southern universities I'm familiar with that have this type of group have the same organization and aims, which appears to promote keeping everything as crusty and white as possible in terms of not only people in power, but those in merely symbolic positions like Homecoming Queen.
Even though the position means very little to those anointed into them each year compared to others who run that have more passionate, progressive ideas of how to use the position, like Jessica.
In places in Bama Girl, you get to see the real-life people who were born into The Machine by virtue of who their parents are, but resist the trappings of what their great-grandparents decided the future should look like.
Jessica's quest for the crown is undeniably the focus of the film, but there are a few other candidates whose stories get some coverage, and that's what makes this a really compelling look at how primitively-minded many of the college kids put into places of leadership can be even in this enlightened age of information.
Bama Girl does not currently have a distribution deal, but certainly deserves to be seen by more people.
Read MoreI first met Michael Blieden five years ago when he came to SXSW 2003 with a wonderful film he wrote that Bob Odenkirk directed called Melvin Goes to Dinner. He returned a couple years later to SXSW 2005 with his own directorial debut, a doc called The Comedians of Comedy that followed Patton Oswalt, Brian Posehn, Maria Bamford, and Zach Galifianakis on a different kind of comedy tour than the plethora of other docs that end with "of Comedy". Both projects involved a select number of people talking about things that are important to them, why they're important, and why it matters in the grand scheme of things.
The moment I became aware of Super High Me's existence, my first thought was "I remember some kid making a joke about how he should do Super Size Me but for pot and he'd get paid to get high" coming out of the Super Size Me screening at SXSW 2004. Then I found out Doug Benson was the subject of the movie.
Then I found out Blieden directed it and I decided I had to see it, completely blind.
As I prefaced a review of an Obama documentary last week, I have to add a disclaimer here too: I don't smoke pot and think it should be decriminalized, but at the same time, I don't want people lighting a joint in public. Of course, I don't think we should have people just strolling the streets blowing tobacco smoke around either.
Economically speaking, legalizing and regulating the sale of marijuana would do wonders for the flagging US economy, as well as transform the paper industry, since non-"drug" hemp is a lot faster to renew than the wood pulp used for most paper these days. If people want the US to really "go green" it must start with how and what resources we use. Where the US goes, the world will follow.
People should be free to do whatever they please with their lungs and mental state, but it's my air just as much as it is yours. If you want to complain about where you can and can't smoke your dried leaf product of choice and enjoy another activity, like drink or watch a movie or eat dinner, that's the beauty of a market economy: somebody will build a business model around it.
The other thing I can't always get behind pot docs about is to some extent promoting the idea that getting stoned all the time isn't a major detriment to leading a productive life. The great thing to teach people is an ok way of living life just like any perpetual, anti-productive behavior...notice I said nothing about addiction.
Liking Blieden's previous work got me interested in seeing it past my personal barrier of it being "another pot doc" that says the same stuff, but...like, different, you know?
The bet pays off in spades, because Blieden and Benson do more with the material than just Super Size Me with marijuana, really digging in to some of the capitalist hypocrisy of ongoing US domestic policy with regard to pot. Highly recommended, no pun intended.
Read MoreThe Wild Horse Redemption is one of the few instances of a documentary made about convicts that I enjoy. Most, along the lines of the filler content on MSNBC these days, make you feel trapped "on the inside" with them. This one frees you instead of trapping you. It's uplifting
I've been doing SXSW with my wife for the last two years, and whereas there are spots in the schedule where I say "you pick" and she invariably chooses something I'm not terribly interested in but then end up enjoying, I circled this one immediately after reading the synopsis of my own accord.
This review is short, but please do not read into that length a statement on the doc's quality. Anthropologically, the individual convicts the film focuses on have interesting personal stories that lead to a very interesting case study overall, especially parallel to the wild mustangs they help train. A guy who just can't get his act together, a guy whose life is irrevocably improved by the program, and an African American guy just starting his journey with it are the ones that stood out the most for me.
The only thing I could have done without were a lot of the music choices that took me out of the experience, but honestly it could be due to spending my life thus far hating the living daylights out of the twangy inspirational/semi-spiritual western music that make up the majority of the cues they use. That in and of itself isn't a reason to avoid seeing it though.
The Wild Horse Redemption plays on Sundance this May and later this year on Animal Planet.
Read MoreI skipped the opening night movie (21) because it would be coming out soon and I had some things to take care of (aside from the fact it didn't seem like it'd set me on fire), so I've only just been able to see my first film at South by Southwest 2008, and if this is any indication, it's going to be another great year.
David Modigliani's Crawford is a about much more than the major change felt initially when George W. Bush first moved there in 2000 a few months before the election. It's more than you get out of a trailer or a quote from a friend. In fact, Crawford, Texas itself is a lot more than it may seem like at first.
This movie is more than a chronicle of events, humorous anecdotes, or an examination of what direction small-town America went in during these last eight long Bush Years. This is a movie about the future, and the film's relevance is even greater considering the pivotal role of the recent Texas Primary and the still uncertain picture regarding the Democratic nominee.
The intellectual elite (high-thread-counters, in the Hollywood Elsewhere parlance) may have it stuck in their heads that small towns across the country are full of ignorant, tobacco-chewing pro-Bush morons, a complacent idiocracy. Many saw the 2004 election map as straight up red and blue thanks to the arcane effect of the Electoral College on our voting system. Crawford as presented in the documentary by pro-Bushies and anti-Bush residents alike is that it's definitely a purple town, and you'd be surprised how often this is true in what are considered "rural" communities.
Those particular locals include a woman who owns a Bush merchandise shop and a Baptist preacher who prays for the day Bush will visit his church, expected types you'd see in "Bush Country". They also count among them anti-war activists who founded a Peace House and kids who completely defy the stereotype of their small town by not "chewing grass and wearing boots".
There are good ol' boys who as "good ol'" as they come but don't fall in line with the crap others buy on Fox News each night. They know Bush only gets outside with a chainsaw to get at some cedar trees when there are cameras on him and they wish he'd pick up more of his trash.
Plenty of people dislike the Bush regime and are aware of how disingenuous the "Crawford Good Ol' Boy" image is, but the more important examination, which Modigliani wisely chooses to focus on, is the tragic rise and fall evinced in the 74 minutes that the film runs. I watching it, the movie feels longer and richer than its runtime suggests.
The beginning of the Bush years in Crawford begins a local economic boom: every storefront on the main street is rented, and the town's former glory many recall comes back. As the years wear on, we approach the point where the country began to implode, and once it does, it's kind of surprising how bad things turn out until you remind yourself that George W. Bush invaded Crawford before Afghanistan or Iraq.
For me, the most pivotal story and relationship present in the film is shared by Misti Turbeville (a progressive, liberal history teacher), and a young man who became one of her pupils during those years named Tom Warlick. Tom went from believing everything he was told to searching out his own truth and standing up for it.
Tom goes through years of being picked on and emotionally crucified just for having his beliefs. One day he went to school wearing a homemade t-shirt that read "America Your Hands Are Bloody" listing the military casualties of most of the U.S.'s major wars. I grew up in north Texas, and I didn't make one of those shirts, but I know what just having that opinion is like, and it isn't pleasant.
In the film, Tom Warlick leads what I consider to be the epitome of the young "examined life": the kid who does like Walt Whitman urged and tore the pages out of the book of life that offended logic, reason, and decency and blazed his own path. Teachers like Mrs. Turbeville are the reason guys like him make it through the bullying and the intimidation. During Q&A after the screening, Misti remarked she thought Crawford "has matured like the nation has matured," which I took to mean that whether or not everyone is more open to the idea of thinking about and doing things differently, they know it's time for the new direction toward progress that Tom represents.
I'll say that you should take care reading other reviews that may ruin seeing the movie yourself. This is a movie that should not be spoiled for anyone. It really says something about where "red America" is at this point in time.
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