Okie Noodling

Little League Pictures, $28

Still one of the best documentaries to ever come out of South by Southwest, sometime Flaming Lips-videographer and one-time Oklahoman Bradley Beesley (now an Austinite) has crafted a genuinely unique and affectionate portrait of what must surely be the world’s most obscure sport. Noodling is the term for the practice of catching catfish — huge, god-awfully ugly catfish, at that — by sticking one’s arm down their throat and then yanking them to the surface. At times it’s difficult to tell exactly who has caught whom — a man with a twitching, sluglike catfish lodged on his forearm is not a man you’d be likely to challenge to an arm wrasslin’ match anytime soon — but Beesley’s endlessly fascinating film is more than a look at an oddball pursuit and more an examination of small-town outsider art (and you’d better believe there’s an art to snookering a riverbank-dwelling catfish out of the water and onto your arm). Like that other SXSW favorite Hands on a Hardbody, Okie Noodling unearths the Truth About Folks in the strangest, most obvious places of all. (Okie Noodling is available at Waterloo Records and online at www.okienoodling.com.)

This article appears in March 28 • 2003.

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