What Have We Seen?
Well, quite a lot, actually. Where should we begin?
Fri., March 17, 2006
A/K/A TOMMY CHONG
D: Josh Gilbert
Perhaps the biggest issue shaping our post-9/11 world is just how many civil liberties Americans are willing to cede in order to feel safe. A/K/A Tommy Chong presents former Attorney General John Ashcroft as the leader in the cultural wars that sent half of Seventies comedy duo Cheech and Chong to prison. Chong's crime? Selling handmade glass bongs to someone in Pennsylvania, where water pipes are considered drug paraphernalia. Josh Gilbert presents Tommy Chong as a gentle man caught up in a government culture war, and includes commentary from Cheech Marin, Bill Maher, and Jay Leno, as well as vintage Cheech and Chong clips to illustrate the point. The documentary is straightforward, allowing Chong's quiet charm to lead the way. That, and facts like Chong being sentenced to nine months, when most would receive probation for a similar charge, and receiving the verdict on the anniversaryof 9/11. – Joe O'Connell
Animated Shorts
D: various
There's plenty of sticky kids' stuff to be found in the Animated Shorts showcase, in both the Dreamworks-produced "First Flight" (beguilingly sweet or gratingly saccharine – you choose), and in similarly polished CG entry "The Zit" (a sight gag that makes the most of itself) – yet it's curdled childlike wonder and grudging acceptance of adulthood that imbues the best shorts. "Stalk" plays like David Fincher's take on the Wererabbit, while "Pilgrims_Progress" turns innocent, pre-Windows video-gaming into unmistakable political allegory over a scorching glitch soundtrack. Felix, the clay protagonist of "The Wraith of Cobble Hill" idles at a Brooklyn crossroads of immaturity and responsibility, until a dark chain of events nudges him to choose. Professional neuroses are proudly displayed in "A Painful Glimpse Into My Writing Process (In Less Than 60 Seconds)." A similar frenetic beat bumps in meta-entry "I Am (Not) van Gogh," wherein a filmmaker desperately describes his intentions to doubtful festival programmers while they explode on the screen. The elegant and startling "Mural" also deals in the intangibilities of artistic inspiration – for centaurs, at least. Emphasis on the arts – specifically music – currents through crowd-pleaser "Tall Tales & Other Big Lies," as Ray Wylie Hubbard recounts the unfortunate tale of an inebriated concertgoer and a randy mammal. Decidedly more ephemeral is "Octave," a line-drawing dreamscape scored by Yo La Tengo and directed by Emily Hubley (best known for her Hedwig and the Angry Inch animations). Visionary works, and like "Octave," too fleeting: All shorts deserve more than two festival showings. In a post-screening Q&A, "Chronicles of a Professional Eulogist" director Sarah Jane Lapp snarked off on distribution in the iPod age: Would she rather show her film in "a wonderful theatre to 300 people, or on a postage-stamp sized screen?" We'll take a guess. – Wells Dunbar
AUTUMN'S EYES
D: Paola Mendoza & Gabriel Noble
Talk about putting a human face on a subject. Mendoza and Noble's fine personal documentary looks at three generations of women in poverty from the perspective of Autumn Collier, a clever and observant 3-year-old girl in Jersey City. Her mother, 19-year-old Antoinette, awaits sentencing in the Hudson County Jail for robbery, conspiracy, and aggravated assault. Her grandmother, Rose, is obese and severely diabetic, probably too ill to raise a young child. Autumn likes hot dogs and Dora the Explorer, but she's no naïf: She knows her mother is gone and might not return for years. The film aptly demonstrates how poor women cycle between illness, domestic abuse, and crime with seemingly no way out between one generation and the next. (While baking Autumn's birthday cake, Rose lectures her on finding the right man someday – otherwise she'll be tempted to cheat on Mr. Wrong, and he'll kill her.) But it is at heart the kind and sensitively filmed story of a little girl longing to reunite with her mother, and vice versa. – Marrit Ingman
Crazy Again
D: Zalman King
Dale Watson is a tortured soul. The beloved Austin honky-tonker went down a rough road that led him from an assisted suicide attempt to the Vatican alleyways after his fiancée Terri Herbert was killed in a car wreck. The voices of Jesus, a spiritual adviser, and his lost love turned him into a prophet until the man in black leather finally realized that he might just be going insane. This is the story of Watson's mind trip, recorded by director Zalman King as he met Watson in preparation for the upcoming country musical Austin Angel. Told primarily through his own words, Watson's tale reaffirms that it takes pain to make something great. Despite a few corny moments involving satanic voice effects, subliminal Ouija board shots, and cheesy country videos, Crazy Again is a welcome invitation into the mind of a confused man. – Darcie Stevens
GRETCHEN
D: Steve Collins; with Courtney Davis, John Merriman, Becky Ann Baker, Stephen Root, Macon Blair
"You're flat-chested, you dress bad, you've got no make-up, and you're ugly in the face," the class slut tells Gretchen (Davis). Indeed, Gretchen wears unicorn sweaters and pegged stonewashed jeans, and she's as awkward as an overgrown 7-year-old. Austin-based writer-director Collins spares nothing of her shame. So, why is this movie so funny? Driven to violence by her consuming passion for potbellied hesher Ricky (Merriman), Gretchen is shipped to the Shady Acres Center for Emotional Growth, an encounter group for teenage deviants rendered in savagely satirical detail. Rarely is a movie this low-budget and homemade so stylish and well-acted. As Gretchen's mother, Baker gives her Freaks and Geeks vibe an edge of exhaustion and abandonment, and Root is a delightful match as Gretchen's sketchy deadbeat dad. But Davis carries it, indubitably. She's an absolute star. And though two of the actors have to share a wig, Collins' camerawork is still clever and polished. – M.I.
THE LAST WESTERN
D: Chris Deaux
Pioneertown, Calif., is notable as a Western movie set that morphed into a real town, the kind of real town where bikers and drug dealers hang out and dreams go to die. It was built in the Forties by Gene Autry and Roy Rogers as a living movie set, with functioning buildings, not just facades. By the Fifties it was abandoned, then repopulated by those on the fringes of society. Documentarians live and die by the focus they choose. Here, Chris Deaux scores with Buzz Gamble, a drunken ex-con living with his Alzheimer's-addled mother and playing some badass blues at the local bar. Buzz is as likable as he is painfully pathetic. Also enthralling is an elderly woman whose one claim to fame was a bit role in one of the town's famous Westerns. Oddly, the doc is least interesting when it throws in a series of clips from the Westerns shot in the town. It is failed dreams that draw us in, and Pioneertown is chock-full of them. – Joe O'Connell
Small Town Gay Bar
D: Malcolm Ingram
Rumors. Sugar Shack. And, more tellingly, the Chute. Gay bars all, none too surprisingly, but their locales might be: rural notches along Mississippi's Bible Belt. Intimate and oftentimes hilarious, Small Town Gay Bar, from Kevin Smith's View Askew production company, traffics both in his nonjudgmental, warts-and-all mindset and juvenilia (see Ween's "The Rainbow": "Many colors in the homo rainbow/Don't be afraid to let those colors shine!"). Largely the story of Rumors and its import to the town's marginalized GLBT community, the film turns darkly to the brutal murder of a young gay teen, and to Fred Phelps, the delusional asshole of "God Hates Fags" infamy. Director Ingram expertly manages the shifts in tone, yet the film falters somewhat by veering from location to location. Regardless, Small Town Gay Bar is surprisingly moving, an affirming celebration of community and acceptance in those places where they're needed most. – W.D.
