The Long Goodbye
We're having a tough time letting go of SXSW Film 06
Fri., March 24, 2006
It's over. Still, we took the time to watch these films and review them, so we're running what we've got. We also shot some photos. For various reasons, the following didn't fit into our March 17 Music issue or the daily editions of March 16, 17, and 18 (you can find that coverage and more on our SXSW page).
Also, it should be said that Air Guitar Nation received the 24 Beats Per Second Jury Award, while The Refugee All Stars was the runner up. For the other awards, announced March 14, see "SXSW Film 06 Film Awards."
95 Miles to Go
D: Tom Caltabiano
Everybody loves Raymond, indeed. Ray Romano has seated himself comfortably on the couch of America's living room with his safe-for-the-whole-family brand of humor, which deftly and hilariously covers such universally understood and easily relatable topics as marriage, child rearing, the inevitable slide into old age, and an occasional dabble into fairly harmless sexually themed material. 95 Miles to Go follows Romano and friend/collaborator/opening act Tom Caltabiano on an eight-day stand-up tour of America's Southeast with Romano's fear of flying necessitating the tour be undertaken via car. This turns out to be just one of Romano's many eccentricities. While some of Romano's stand-up material veers into slightly more risqué territory than his television series, his wholesome boy-next-door, aw-shucks demeanor remains as threatening to viewers as the Devil Rays are to the Yankees' and Red Sox's pennant dreams. Mark Fagan
Apart From That
D: Jennifer Shainin & Randy Walker; with Kathleen McNearney, Kyle Conyers, Toan Le, Tony Cladoosby, Alice Ellingson, Michelle Sheiman, Gary Schoonveld, Kwami Taha, Susan Alotrico, Jessica Marlowe-Goldstein
It's no surprise that the co-creators of this wonky little film come from illustration and design backgrounds. Watching Apart From That feels like happening upon a box of photographs or an unknown artist's sketchbook. That experience is a pleasure when the viewer gets to concoct a story from the mute images. Here, the images talk and move with disquieting ease, like characters in a Juan Rulfo novel. Their stories are somewhat related and in some cases told with a heady solemnity that doesn't feel as earned as it does imposed. Some may revel in this wasteland of quirky characters. Disorientation and frustration is a more likely response. What holds interest is the astonishing cast. Each performance is disarmingly candid, giving the impression that you're not watching a work of fiction, but that you're watching the private moments of these people's lives captured by an omniscient camera. Creepy, yet enormously memorable. Belinda Acosta
THE CASSIDY KIDS
D: Jacob Vaughan; with Kadeem Hardison, Anne Ramsay, Judah Friedlander, Tiger Darrow, Jonathon Lewis, Gabriel Folse, Brian Matthew McGuire, Chris Doubek, Helen Merino, Rusty Kelley
The filmmaking team of Vaughan and Poyser, in a follow-up to their well-reviewed indie psychodrama Dear Pillow, reverse their roles of director and producer for this decidedly more engaging and definitely more commercial feature project that represents the latest offering from the University of Texas' innovative Burnt Orange Productions. Deftly handling the story's three separate time periods that capture the same group of characters in childhood, adulthood, and TV reincarnation, the filmmakers create an absorbing whodunit amid a plot that has no initial clue that a crime has been committed. Atypically cast in the lead dramatic role, Hardison shines, as does Darrow as the story's central preteen. Also lending impressive technical assists are Austin industry stalwarts, cinematographer PJ Raval and editor Kyle Henry. The film's complex tone which switches from the amusing (and flawlessly executed) re-creation of a cheesy Eighties TV show to the dark narrative undercurrents of murder, deceit, and their lingering toll might make The Cassidy Kids difficult to market, yet ultimately appealing to audiences who love to be challenged and don't mind the dark edges. Marjorie Baumgarten
Music Is My Life, Politics My Mistress
D: Donnie L. Betts
Subheaded The Oscar Brown Jr. Story, the former actor and current radio producer Betts' first directorial effort more than delivers on the promise, telling it with style and substance. A joy to watch throughout, layered with performance footage, private photos, animation, and interviews with the likes of Studs Terkel, Abbey Lincoln, Amiri Baraka, Charles Weldon, Nichelle Nichols, and the great songwriter, author, and performer himself (shot skillfully and tenderly in black and white). A heroic artist dear to Chicago, America, and admirers overseas, Brown died in May of 2005, and this is a crucial, unifying document of his considerable legacy. At times, that document numbs with an overload of imagery and information, but ambition in the work of, in this case, a reporter trying to capture and scale the personality of a force, is rarely a bad thing. Also rare: Capturing it so well. Watch for this one when and if it comes back around. Shawn Badgley
Puppy
D: Kieran Galvin; with Nadia Townsend, Bernard Curry
If 2002's Secretary - a James Spader/Maggie Gyllenhaal-fueled love story that manages to make sadomasochism sweet had been made 30 years ago, it probably would've been a thriller. So to with Galvin's Puppy. Asking similar questions as to the proper ingredients that should constitute a stable relationship, we are given the adulterous Liz (Townsend) attempting suicide after getting kicked out of her sister's apartment and her rescuer Aiden (Curry), a man who is seriously off his medication. Believing the unconscious Liz is his run-off wife, Aiden takes her back to his remote house and ties her to the bed, Misery-style. Thus begins a version of this latest twist on the traditional love story, as the two reverse roles, literally and figuratively. Although the fractured plot leaves many questions, Townsend's Liz manages to hold the story together with the requisite subtlety that handles all the presented madness. Some of the images and wordy script muddle the effectiveness of Puppy's emotional commentary, but the concept is carried through with the earnest performances of its two leads. Frank Rivera
THE LOST
D: Chris Siverston; with Marc Senter, Shay Astar, Alex Frost, Megan Henning, Robin Sydney, Erin Brown, Ruby La Rocca, Eddie Steeples, Dee Wallace-Stone, Michael Bowen, Ed Lauter
The persistent sound of buzzing insects permeating the soundtrack of The Lost is easily explained: Flies are notoriously attracted to garbage. Director Chris Siverston's adaptation of Jack Ketchum's cult novel bludgeons viewers with heaping helpings of ultra-violence, sleazy sexploitation, and goth rock. On one level, it succeeds admirably; the end result is pretty much guaranteed to induce a migraine. Ray Pye (Senter, channeling Crispin Glover), a studly, young small-town psycho, who wears more make-up than Freddie Mercury, kills two comely campers one night for kicks. Four years later, he's cleaning toilets at the Starlight Motel, holding court over a coterie of fawning local losers. But the wheels of justice, like The Lost's loopy storyline, grind exceedingly slow, climaxing in a blood orgy boasting a numbing sequence wherein Ray stabs a pregnant woman, carving out the fetus while she gurgles helplessly (oops, sorry: spoiler alert!). Most dispiriting SXSW film? Ladies and gentleman, we have a winner. Steve Uhler
TEXAS SHORTS
D: various
This homegrown collection consisted mostly of narrative shorts, with two superlative short docs included (Beef and Pie's zippy look at local bicycle race, "The Tuesday Nighter," and UT student Stephen Stephanian's terrific "Junior! The Wendy's Guy," about a beloved employee at the UT's Student Union Wendy's and his bid to break his own sales record). Celebrated Austin filmmaking team the Zellner brothers opened the show with their comic short "Redemptitude," an Outback-set piece in which a wheelchair-bound grizzly man goes head to head with a simpering priest. The film feels one beat shy of greatness, but it still brought some of the bigger laughs of the program. Michael Cahill's "Vegan Candy," about one boy's Halloween enlightenment at the hands of activist hippies, was another standout, as was Kyle Bogart's horror short, "Room 314." The film's big twist rang a wee obvious, but the kid's got a real sense of timing and the tease of awfulness requisite to the genre. I say "kid" not in a disparaging sense Bogart, like so many others in the Texas Shorts lineup, is a product of UT's RTF department. Judging by the skillful shorts of so many of its students and alum, I'd say the department's doing something right. Kimberley Jones
Letters From the Other Side
D: Heather Courtney
Using the narrative device of a video letter, this locally produced doc takes an impressively thorough look at the wide-ranging causes and effects of the ever-growing undocumented migration between Mexico and the United States. By sharing the stories of four Mexican women left by husbands in search of work in El Norte, the film taps into the human toll taken emotionally, economically, and culturally by an immigration policy that refuses to realistically regard the needs of the migrating populace. For Eugenia Gonzalez, whose husband has been in the United States for eight years and whose sons have followed him one by one, the video letters serve as the painful and honest communication of an estranged family. In the case of Carmela Rico and Laura Masacruz, whose husbands suffocated, along with 17 others, in the back of the truck that smuggled them across the border and into Texas, the video letters allow these women to confront a U.S. Homeland Security spokesperson, to ask him why policy isn't changing after all these deaths. Of course, in his video rebuttal, he offers them no real answer. And this film doesn't offer any solutions to the Pandora's box that is the current immigration debate. It does, however, ask the right questions. Diana Welch
Who the $#%& Is Jackson Pollock?
D: Harry Moses
When Teri Horton, a 73-year-old former truck driver, bought a $5 painting at a thrift store, she thought it was the ugliest piece of shit she had ever seen. When she later discovered that it might be an original Jackson Pollock and worth millions, Horton decided to try to sell it to the art world. Only, no one would take it ... because she was a nobody with an eighth-grade education. So goes the premise of Moses' documentary, a film that marries the world of the hard-working American with the art elite, and spans 10 years of Horton's life, during which she desperately tried to have the painting verified by art scholars and museum curators around the country. Even after Horton hired a forensic scientist, who discovered compelling evidence that he believed verified the authenticity of Horton's painting, she was still turned away. But as we watch Horton become all-consumed in this fruitless project, we realize there is more to Horton's goal than $50 million. Even after she is offered $2 million, and later $9 million, she still turns down the money, happily living on social security until she gets the respect she yearns from the American art elitists. We also realize that Moses' intent is not to prove whether the painting is an original, but to tell a story of a hard-worked woman with a $50 million dream. The story is compelling, and the characters, even the cretins, are quirky, entertaining, and insightful. Sofia Resnick