SXSW 2006 - Sunday, March 12 - Day 3

As I write this opening paragraph I'm sitting in the Paramount theater... that's another cool thing about SXSW (and Austin in general)... the majority (all?) theaters/venues for the festival provide internet access. That's the kind of thing that becomes invaluable when you're watching movies from 11AM to 2AM for a week straight. Looks like Jam is going to fill the Paramount... again, I'm surprised at the audience volume this year. I haven't heard the numbers, but it seems like there's a ton more people this year than in years previous. I'm trying to figure out my schedule for today... if I go to Cassidy Kids at the Paramount at 7, and it's 90 minutes, can I make it to the Alamo South Lamar in time to seek Jack Ketchum's The Lost?.... hmmm.... I don't want to miss either film... argh.... just one of the frustrations that comes when a festival has so many good films screening in a relatively short amount of time... I guess it's much better than the alternative though. OK, looks like they're about to start the screening. Be back after the film.

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Jam
Director: Mark Woollen
SXSW Summary: They were television sports stars of the '60s and '70s, a bigger draw than major league baseball. And then, virtually overnight, they disappeared. Now, one man has brought them all back to together. JAM is the seven year saga of the America Roller Derby League. With their outsized egos and broken bodies; they struggle with addiction and financial ruin in the pursuit of making the game a national sensation once again.

Matt Dentler introduced this movie, and promised us that by the end of the film, we'd be cheering for and crying with the characters... he was right. Jam was filmed between 1998-2005, and revolves around one man's, Tim, attempt to start a roller derby revival in San Francisco with a cast of older athletes who experienced national fame for their activities in the late 70's and early 80's. In the process Tim spends hundreds of thousands of dollars, only to perform in front of crowds that sometime number in the teens. That alone would be enough for an entertaining movie, but Woollen wisely also focuses on the personal lives of these people who have devoted their lives to roller derby. It reminded me a lot of last night's Darkon, in that these 10-20 people have become completely subsumed in a world that most people don't realize exists. I was sitting next to some of the skaters for Austin's Roller Derby Team, the Lone Star Ladies, and their obvious enthusiam for the film's subject matter further enhanced my enjoyment of the film.

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Gretchen
Director: Steve Collins
SXSW Summary: Gretchen is the story of an awkward girls struggle to overcome an obsession with Boone High Schools most powerful dirt-bag, Ricky Maraschino. Her affliction is so severe, she's banished to an emotional treatment center, where she begins to question why everything that she wants in the whole wide world, is a boy. Gretchen is an extreme tale of ordinary things: Prom, boys, and going 2nd base, told with the unique gravity of a 17-year-old heart.

NOTE: As I was walking into the theater for this screening, I overheard a middle aged yuppish-looking lady complaining on her cell phone that SXSW "isn't at all like Telluride... it's so spread out [the 3 main venues are within 5-7 minutes walking distance from each other]... and it's really hot here! [it's currently a windy 82 degrees outside, with a projected high of 88]." You heard it here first folks... Austin is hotter than Telluride. It's world-exclusives like this that keep people coming back to Dumb Distraction.

Although this really wasn't my kind of movie, I will admit that it was well-made and probably effective for what it was. The title character is described in the SXSW handbook as Deb from Napoleon Dynamite without the self-respect, but I saw her more as a teenage Chloe from 24 before she learned how to use computers. Gretchen has a perpetual scowl on her face as she goes from one mouth-breathing loser boyfriend to a mentally unstable mouth-breathing boyfriend to her mouth-breathing, long-absent loser father (played to perfection in a memorable role by Stephen Root) and back to the original mouth-breathing loser boyfriend. See a pattern? I did, and although it wore thin for me, the rest of the audience seemed to like it.

Fired!
Director: Chris Bradley & Kyle Labrache
SXSW Summary: When Annabelle Gurwitch (Melvin Goes to Dinner, Dinner and a Movie, NPR) was fired from a play by Woody Allen, she was devasted. She started asking friends in show business if they had ever been fired and began collecting these stories and producing literary events in Los Angeles and New York. It was only the beginning of a journey that has grown into a look at what it means to be both hired and fired as an American worker in the global economy.

I like the first half of the film, which consisted of actress Annabelle Gurwitch (Melvin Goes to Dinner) interviewing other celebrities to get their stories of being fired in Hollywood... people like Tim Allen, David Cross, Andy Dick, Illeana Douglas, Jeff Garlin, Anne Meara, Bob Odenkirk, Robert Reich, Jeffrey Ross, Harry Shearer, Fred Willard... this segement of the film is really funny and interesting. The last half of the film, unfortunately, tries (I think unsuccesfully) to become some sort of social statement about what it means to be fired in America today. I didn't get the sense that Gurwitch was really interested in finding out about her working-class subjects, and at times it's quite clear that she's actively mocking them. Before the film we saw a short called Derek & Simon: A Bee and a Cigarette, directed by Bob Odenkirk (Mr. Show), which was a funny vignette about a guy who manages to step on a bee a and a lit cigarette at the same time.

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Air Guitar Nation
Director: Alexandra Lipsitz
SXSW Summary: The official story of America's unofficial pastime. Air Guitar Nation is a feature-length documentary about the year that air guitar swept America. From New York to Los Angeles all the way to northern Finland, Air Guitar Nation chronicles the rise of the US Air Guitar Championships through the eyes of former world champions, fans and media, and through the personal journeys of our top competitors

I don't know why I even bother making out a schedule, because all my favorite movies this far have been ones I walked into because the timing didn't work out right for the movie I was planning on seeing. Air Guitar Nation is no exception. Matt Dentler intro'd this one by letting us know that it was submitted after he thought he had finished programming the festival... but once he saw it, he couldn't not screen it. He described it not as a music doc, but as a sports doc with music. And like Darkon and Jam, Air Guitar Nation was a look at a small group of people who become immersed in a subculture that most people would think laughable. But unlike live action role playing or roller derbying, which I came to appreciate in an abstract manner, by the time this movie was over, I wanted to attend and/or enter the World Air Guitar Championships. As the subjects of the film performed, as small part of me kept thinking "This is ridiculous what these people are doing," but the rest of me was shouting "ROCK ON!" Lipsitz found two amazing characters in C-Diddy - the Korean-American air guitar virtuoso who wears a red silk robe and a Hello Kitty children's backpack as a breastplate - and Bjorn Turoque (pronouced Born To Rock... get it?) - the perpetual underdog chasing the title. This was the most fun I've had at a screening in a long time... I can't wait to pick it up when/if it gets released on DVD. Until then, I'll have to tide myself over with the following links:

Bjorn Turoque
US Air Guitar Championships
C-Diddy Performs Extreme
Air Guitar Nation

Also be on the lookout for Bjorn's forthcoming autobiography, To Air Is Human: The Rise and Fall of Bjorn Turoque.

The Man, The Legend: C-Diddy.

The Lost
Director: Chris Sivertson
SXSW Summary: Based on the novel by Jack Ketchum, Ray, Tim, and Jennifer were just three teenage friends hanging out in the campgrounds, drinking. But Tim and Jennifer didn't know what their friend Ray had in mind, but when they saw what he did to the two girls at the neighboring campsite--and knew he was dead serious.It's now four years later and Ray has not been charged with the murders, there's one cop determined to make him pay, but Ray figures he's in the clear. Tim and Jennifer think the worst is behind them, that the horrors are all in the past. They're wrong. The worst is still to come.

Ok, there's good news and there's bad news. The good news is that when we went into the Alamo South Lamar theater for this screening, the tables were pre-decked with chicken strip baskets, chips & salsa, and buckets of beer... all courtesy of the film's producer. Based on that alone, I feel guilty saying anything negative about the film... the guy bought me dinner after all. Unfortunately, there's not much good to say about the film, which is a shame, because it's based on a book by Jack Katchum, and author whose work I'm just getting into thanks to a loaner copy from Brian. The movie centers on Ray, an unlikable, twichy guy who kills two girls for absolutely no reason in the film's opening 10 minutes. The rest of the movie was watch this guy live his life (hint: if you've seen Crispin Glover's performance in River's Edge, you've seen everything you're gonna see from Ray), until he finally has a complete break from reality and turns into Jason in the film's final 20 minutes. I really enjoyed both the opening and the closing, but the middle 90 minutes were surprisingly boring... and it's not just me, the audience got increasingly restless as the movie went on... I even caught certain nameles parties passing notes questioning when the film was going to end.

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Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
Director: Scott Glosserman
SXSW Summary: Leslie Vernon, the great psycho-slasher upstart, has given a documentary crew exclusive access to his life as he plans his reign of terror over the next unfortunate little town.

After The Lost, I considered calling it a night. What a mistake that would have been. Barring some unforseen miracle, Behind the Mask is going to go down as my favorite film of SXSW '06. A visibly nervous Glosserman did a quick pre-show intro in which he revealed that this was his first public screening of anything, anywhere. What I and the rest of the audience experienced for the next 90 minutes was the rarest of movie-going experiences - a truly original film. Set in a world where Freddy, Jason, Chucky, and Myers are actual killers, Behind the Mask is the story of Leslie Vernon, the latest in a long line of 'supernatural killers.' What makes this movie so unique is that it's about Vernon - a 100% likeable, ordinary guy - choosing to reveal the secrets of his trade to a news crew. From the first few minutes of the film where we learn that Vernon's 'work-related books' include Grey's Anatomy and Houdini's Great Escapes, I had a feeling the movie was in the hands of someone who loved horror. That bore out throughout the film, with tons of in-jokes that horror fans will love (look for Kane Hodder's brief appearance as a neighbor on Elm Street) and cameos by legends like Robert Englund and Zelda Rubinstein. From his training sessions with retired slasher Euguene (Scott Wilson) (who settled down his former victim... Jamie) to listening to Vernon describe his cardio regimine (so that he can pull of that whole 'walking while the victim is running' deal) this movie was a note-perfect deconstruction of the genre. I'm not sure if it will be as widely-accessible as a movie like Shaun of the Dead, but there was not a better movie to screen for a room of a 120 horror geeks. If you ever get this chance to see this film, take it... you won't regret it.

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Partial cast & crew, including Scott Wilson. [Click For Larger Image]

- Micah