The Screengrab

Goliath, a quasi-mumblecore tragi-comedy by the Zellner Brothers of Austin, TX plays this weekend at the Independent Film Festival of Boston. The indie feature, about a man who loses both his wife and his beloved cat in the same harrowing year, was first reviewed here at The Screengrab by Scott Von Doviak during the 2008 South-by-Southwest Film Festival.

David Zellner and his brother, Nathan, have been crafting distinctive independent cinema since 1996, but I first became aware of them at a terrible film festival called 30th Parallel that leeched onto the back of the 1997 SXSW fest, analogous to the Slamdance/Sundance arrangement, but much shoddier (and short-lived, since 30th Parallel barely made it through its first and only installment).

I know about the 30th Parallel Fest, because it featured the Texas premiere of my own indie film, Apocalypse Bop. The whole misbegotten affair kicked off with a back room hotel reception marked by a sad tray of vegetables and the absence of any members of the 30th Parallel staff to greet us. This led to some awkward bonding among the invited filmmakers as we all stood around, confused, waiting for some information about what we were supposed to do. Then, eventually, we all left.

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Like me, Agnes Varnum of IndieWire saw a whole lot of music documentaries at the recent South By Southwest Film Festival, and like me, her ass probably got pretty tired doing it.  Even if you aren't straddling both sides of the movie critic/film critic fence, or particularly fond of the you-got-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter synergy of music and film that SxSW is peddling, you can't help but notice that there are more rock documentaries (and rap documentaries, and jazz documentaries, and minimalist concert music documentaries) being made than ever before, and, as Varnum puts it, "2008 will be the year of the music doc".

With the question of what out of the way, though, we have to approach the question of why.  While it's nice that some of these films are being made -- especially ones that painstakingly gather together footage and concert material from influential, if lesser-known, musical figures, as with The Upsetter, the Lee "Scratch" Perry doc that tipped at SxSW this year.  And it's undeniably a good thing when a masterful filmmaker like Martin Scorsese turns his hand to the job for a band he really cares about, like in Shine a Light.  But there's such a flood of rock docs these days that you have to wonder if it's not so much a golden age of musical documentaries as it is another manifestation of the document-everything zeitgeist that's been made possible by media oversaturation and cheap, easy access to digital cameras.  Fifty years from now, is anyone going to care about the brief eruption of the microgenre of nerdcore?  As much as I loved them, is Tad really worth making a feature-length documentary about?  Has everyone already seen all the great movies in the history of film, that they can spare the time to see an hour and a half-long documentary about Harry Potter-inspired "wizard rock"?  

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To some people, Alfredo "Fred" Cruz was one of the greatest civil rights activists in all of Texas, and one of the few unsung heroes in American history (he doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry, a sure sign you're being slept on).  To others, he was "the most dangerous man in the Texas prison system".  The documentary Writ Writer makes director Susanne Mason's views on the subject crystal clear -- and aims to correct the fact that, some 30 years after his groundbreaking and difficult work was completed, Cruz remains largely unknown even in Texas, let alone the United State, although hundreds of thousands of people in every state in the union have benefited from his toil and sacrifice.

Born poor on the bad side of San Antonio, Alfredo Cruz got hooked on heroin at a young age (several members of his family were dealers) and, after accidentally killing his best friend in a shooting accident, went into a downward spiral that eventually led to his conviction for robbery.  Handed a ridiculously long sentence, Cruz -- who always maintained his innocence -- could find no one willing to defend a wild youth with no money and dark skin, so he had no choice but to take up his own cause, teaching himself law and filing appeals on his own behalf.  It wasn't an easy task; at the time, it was frowned upon for anyone to read law, and Cruz, who rapidly developed a reputation as a troublemaker for daring to take an interest in his own affairs, was often defeated in court when prison officials would confiscate his books, papers and legal briefs, leaving him unable to mount a convincing defense.  Not content to take up his own cause, Cruz also became a "writ writer", or jailhouse lawyer, filing appeals on behalf of other prisoners -- an activity that was, astonishingly, illegal under Texas law at the time.

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In my other life as a music writer, I listen to a lot of heavy metal music, and one of the things that I always tell people about the contemporary metal scene that seems to surprise them is that it's one of the most diverse types of music, both in terms of the material and the people who make it, imaginable.  So ingrained in the American psyche is the image of metal as strictly the provenance of jacked-up white dudes from the hinterlands that it shocks people when you tell them that there are more women in metal than ever before, or that there's hardly a corner of the globe, from Southeast Asia to South America, without a thriving extreme metal scene.  Even in the volatile Middle East, metal has found a home, but to hear Heavy Metal in Baghdad directors Eddy Moretti and Suroosh Alvi tell it, there's only one metal band in all of Iraq -- and they can't wait to get out.

The compelling documentary follows the exploits of Acrassicauda, a Baghdad thrash outfit, from their earliest gigs before the U.S. invasion of Iraq (where they were obligated to sing a ridiculous anthem to Saddam Hussein in order to get permission to play gigs) to their life after the war, when their practice space was hit by a missile that destroyed all their instruments and they are faced with the unwelcoming choice of either leaving behind their families and home in order to have a shot at living and working free of the specter of death, or staying in their native country and sacrificing their careers as musicians -- and possibly their lives.  Some of the movie's most tragic -- and hilarious -- moments come when we see how difficult it is for Acrassicauda to accomplish things that metal bands elsewhere in the world take absolutely for granted.  They're afraid to grow their hair long lest they become targets for anti-Western extremists; in the newly oppressive religious atmosphere of post-Saddam Iraq, women don't dare come to their shows; a brief sojourn in Syria finds them finally able to record a short EP, but the men who run the studio have never recorded any kind of rock music before and don't know how to mic them; and partying and drinking are special treats to be kept hidden behind closed doors, not everyday activities. 

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For animator Emily Hubley, filmmaking is a real family tradition. Her parents were Faith and John Hubley, the legendary team of independent animators whose work goes back to the 1950s. Emily worked on a number of her parents' films (including the classic feature The Cosmic Eye) and has been directing her own short films since 1981, but The Toe Tactic, which was well-received at this year's SXSW, is both her first feature film and her first experience mixing animation with live action.

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Some of us have loved Zooey Deschanel since the first ten minutes of Almost Famous. ("This song explains why I'm leaving home to become a stewardess.") But I guess if you're not into brainy, doe-eyed ingenues, this clip (of her performing with her new band She & Him at SXSW last week) won't do much for you...

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Second Skin, reviewed here last week, is a documentary about MMORPG: Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. Full Battle Rattle is also about a kind of MMORPG: let’s call it a Massively Multiplayer Outdoor Role Playing Game. The film documents the U.S. Army’s Iraq Simulation in the Mojave Desert of California, a gigantic make-believe war designed to prepare soldiers for the real one.

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In a way, Second Skin is the dark flipside of last year’s SXSW hit, The King of Kong. Both documentaries are about people who spend way too many hours playing videogames, but this one is a much more downbeat, dispiriting and at times tedious account. Say what you will about the denizens of the Funspot arcade in Kong, but at least none of them came to believe they were Mario or Pac-Man, and a few of them actually saw daylight on occasion.

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After the surprisingly good-natured and occasionally hilarious Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle became a huge cult hit on DVD, it was only a matter of time before we were treated to a sequel.  Writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg picked up the directorial reins as well, and brought back Kal Penn and John Cho as the leads.  This was an absolute necessity, as it was their insouciant stoner charm that gave the first movie its lasting appeal; the big surprise came when it was announced that the new film would feature the boys being arrested and incarcerated in the most famous prison in the world.  Would the Harold and Kumar franchise become a sounding bell for radicalism?  Would the bodily secretion jokes and dope references take a back seat to fiery condemnation of America's notorious prison camp on foreign soil?  Was this movie actually going to teach us something?

Come on, folks.  It's Harold and Kumar, not Vidal and Chomsky.  The boys spend all of five minutes of screen time in Guantanamo Bay and the rest of the movie is devoted to more of the low-comedy high-jinks that one would expect from the people who made America's favorite stoner road picture.   George W. Bush is brought in mostly to make a weed gag, the bits where people learn a valuable lesson about racial profiling are as subtle as a hailstorm (if occasionally quite funny, as when Harold and Kumar encounter gangs of rural whites and urban blacks, and a memorable scene where Klansmen refer to the duo as "Mexicans"), and the movie's main argument against terrorism is to bellow "Fuck you!  Donuts are awesome!"  No one should go into this thing expecting carefully crafted political arguments from any point on the political spectrum, nor should they go into it expecting subtle comedy, crafty worldplay or an absence of jokes involving pubic hair.

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Once again it’s that time of the week for us to acknowledge, however grudgingly, that there may occasionally be a reason or two to check out film blogs that aren’t the Screengrab. While our SXSW continues, we must admit we can’t be everywhere every day, so here are a few of our imaginary Internet friends who are picking up the slack:

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The Zellner Brothers have practiced their own brand of deadpan absurdity for more than a decade in Austin, TX, but with their third feature Goliath, writer-director David and producer-director Nathan are looking to expand their emotional palette. David Zellner stars as a man in a downward spiral; he’s in the midst of a messy divorce, he’s been demoted at his workplace, and now, worst of all, his beloved cat Goliath is missing.

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This year’s Grand Jury Prize winner for best narrative feature proves (if it needed to be proved again) that it’s possible to create a fully-realized movie world on a minimal budget. Wellness brings us into a salesman’s bleak reality of crappy motel rooms, slush-covered sidewalks and 99-cent gas station hot dogs. By the end, that world has become so vivid and all-consuming, it may take hours to fully recalibrate to your own reality. That’s a compliment, by the way, to director Jake Mahaffy and his star Jeff Clark.

Clark plays Thomas Lindsey, a hard-luck sad sack who thinks he has found redemption through Wellness, a new health product that is short on particulars and long on marketing lingo.

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One of the most engaging documentaries to play at South By Southwest this year so far is Bulletproof Salesman -- the story of engineer/salesman Fidelis Cloer, a German whose job is to help manufacture and sell armored cars to governments and other very wealthy clients.  The film, directed by the Gunner Palace team of Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein, follows the engagingly blunt Cloer from the early days of the Iraq War -- when, in the spring of 2003, he took a nervous road trip to Baghdad to try and sell his nearly impenetrable SUVs to a curiously uninterested occupational government -- to the current height of imperial Afghanistan, where he has considerably more success pushing his product, now retrofitted to resist improvised explosive devices as well as repel gunfire. 

Cloer's forceful personality -- which blends an almost fanatically apolitical engineer's devotion to perfecting his product with a slick and confident salesman's swagger that's as old as time -- carries the weight of the film, but Tucker and Epperlein find ways to keep it visually engaging as well, particularly in scenes where Cloer's associates detonate a test vehicle again and again, and in its amusing and clever conceit of making the entire movie look like a particularly hip and edgy car commercial.  It's very easy to go into the film expecting Cloer to be nothing but a contemptible war profiteer, and he doesn't exactly go out of his way to deny the charge (the first time we see him, he laughingly mutters under his voice to a protester:  "Peace?  Go away!  We want war!").  But there's a lot more to it than that.  Although he's almost chillingly honest about what his product is and what it's for -- "People have to die to improve the product", he says of clients who have met their end inside one of his armored cars -- he also correctly points out that he makes money off of saving people, not killing them, and there's a bit of steel in his voice when he notes that he didn't start the war, and that the people who did were almost criminally unprepared for how bad it would get.  While Cloer speaks of Iraq as a "perfect war" of the sort where a few suppliers can sell thousands of units, it becomes increasingly clear that the real crime isn't his faith in his product, but the fact that a businessman was able to predict the course of the war with far more accuracy than the politicians who started it or the generals who fought it.

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Mumblecore, in case you missed the seventy majillion articles about it in all the smart magazines, is the hot new thing in the indie film biz, and South By Southwest is no exception. Love it or loathe it, it's the mode of the moment, and probably half the movies I saw over the last few days could be jammed into that category with a minimum of injury. For those blessedly unfamiliar with mumblecore, it involves low budgets and a bunch of attractive but poorly dressed young white people who spend a great deal of time pouting because they are emotionally paralyzed and cannot communicate with each other. I'm sure you can imagine how exciting this all is. With The Lost Coast, writer/director Gabriel Fleming has presented us with a colossal leap forward in this boundlessly underperforming genre: the gay mumblecore movie!

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The SXSW Film Festival Awards were handed out last night. I’d love to tell you how worthy all of the winners are, but as fate would have it, I have yet to see any of them. While I try to rectify that situation, here are the big winners:

The Grand Jury Award for Narrative Feature went to Wellness, Jake Mahaffy’s independent feature “about a man trying to succeed in a business that doesn't exist.” (There’s a lot of that going around Austin this week.)

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Odds and ends from the first few days of SXSW:

Humboldt County – After being flunked out of medical school by his own father, Peter Hadley (Jeremy Strong) goes for a ride with free spirit Bogart (Fairuza Balk) and ends up in California’s redwood country. There he meets Bogart’s friends and family, all of whom live off the grid and earn their keep by growing and selling marijuana. The debut feature from writer-directors Danny Jacobs and Darren Grodsky boasts an alluring setting and several strong performances, most notably Brad Dourif as the patriarch of the pot-farming clan. There’s a hole in the center, however: Hadley is an underwritten character and Strong is unable to breathe much life into him.

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Emily Hubley comes from a family of legendary animators (her mother, Faith, is one of the medium's greats), and her reputation as a filmmaker rests on her clever and amusing animations, so it was difficult to know what to expect going into her new feature, The Toe Tactic. Although it contains a number of animated sequences, the bulk of the film is live-action, and viewers are faced with the uncertainty of seeing a filmmaker work in an unfamiliar medium as well as the notoriously finicky process of blending live actors with animations. Happily, The Toe Tactic succeeds far more than it stumbles, and while it's not without its difficulties, its relentless good nature and some exceptionally keen performances outweigh them in the end.

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Although it's home to one of the most dynamic, diverse and (thanks to the Desi diaspora) popular film undustries in the world, India's Bollywood scene is still a shadowy world with internecine feuding, shadowy financing, and ties to organized crime, banditry and even terrorism that puts the dirty deals behind Hollywood blockbusters to shame.  Liz Mermin's highly engaging documentary Shot in Bombay not only sheds a light on the often bizarre world of Bollywood filmmaking and its ties to real-world crime, but does so with a cleverly metafictional structure that echoes the multiple layers of coincidence and concurrence that make it all so alien.

At the heart of Shot in Bombay is Bollywood legend Sanjay Dutt, who's been harried for over a decade by the Indian authorities for his alleged connection to a series of bombings in Mumbai with murky ties to both organized crime and terror.  It follows his struggles with the law, but it also follows his professional career as he stars as a cop in an action thriller called Shootout at Lokhandwala, based on a real incident where five wanted criminals were gunned down by the police.  By no means incidental to the labyrinthine story (it's no coincidence that Shootout's director, Apoorva Lakhia, fancies himself the Indian Quentin Tarantino, as Mermin's narrative sprawls out into Tarantinoesque complexity) is the fact that the cop portrayed by Dutt in the film later became tangentially involved in the police investigation of Dutt.

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Reggae, dub & ska are extremely popular musical genres with documentarians, and it can be hard to believe that any figure in Jamaican music hasn't already been covered in film to the point of oversaturation.  This would seem to be especially true of Lee "Scratch" Perry, perhaps the towering figure of dub music and one of pop music's all-time mad geniuses.  So influential in the world of Jamaican music is Perry that he's been featured in nearly every single film or television documentary about it, but amazingly enough, this is the first one to focus on him exclusively -- a fact that's almost unbelievable given the reach of his five-decade career.

The Upsetter, written and directed by Ethan Higbee and Adam Bhala Lough, certainly can't be accused of not paying its subject the proper respect.  The filmmakers are almost uncannily attuned to Perry's colossal reputation -- to a fault, in fact:  they treat Perry, whose appeal rests largely on a sly sense of humor and a reputation as a bit of a crazy, with a degree of whispering awe that verges on the reverential.  While his contributions to the world of music certainly justify such treatment, treating Perry like a messenger of Jah kind of takes the fun out of his music.  Higbee and Lough likewise don't really want us to think of Perry as nuts, as if his being nuts in any way detracts from the brilliance of his creations, and they go a bit out of their way to try and illustrate that he's just operating on some sort of higher spiritual plane.  There's also the common problem of music documentaries:  with a limited amount of screen time, you can't give too many minutes to the most appealing thing about them:  their music.  The Upsetter's 93-minute runtime is barely enough to cover one of Lee Perry's groundbreaking albums, and too much of it is handed over to big names like Paul McCartney and the Beastie Boys, who pontificate about how great Perry is at the expense of playing his actual music, which would prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

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Just to get this out of the way early: yes, Morgan Spurlock does find Osama bin Laden in his new documentary. He runs into the Al-Qaeda leader at a Starbucks in Islamabad, wrestles the nonfat vanilla latte out of his hands, and delivers him into the arms of Prince Harry and his British Army battalion. Hard to believe this didn’t make the papers, isn’t it?

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The first feature film from Idaho filmmaker Russell Friedenberg, IBID is a strange little mish-mash of goofball road comedy, emotional drama and religious satire.  Friedenberg co-stars as the younger of the two brothers who reside in a mental instution; their life there is fairly unremarkable until God himself — in the form of a broadly drawn cowboy caricature named Don — informs Lionel, the older brother (played by the appealing Christian Campbell, who's not quite as self-consciously zany a character as Friedenberg's Tin), that it his holy duty to add an addendum to the Ten Commandments.

Friedenberg's script contains lots of clever, funny dialogue and a handful of effective setpieces, and he's found some interesting actors in Campbell and female lead Heather Rae.  It's also well-meaning as hell and works extremely well within the limitations of the budget, which otherwise could have sunk its road-picture format.  But it's also quirky to a fault, almost calculating in its goofiness; and its eclecticism can work against it,  especially in those moments when it shies away from its comedic essence and tries to make some kind of serious point about religion or the mentally ill.  

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Why would the president of the United States want to spend the hottest month of the summer in a tiny town in the middle of Texas? When asked, many residents of Crawford, TX are baffled; surely Hawaii would make for a nicer vacation spot. High school teacher Misti Turbeville isn’t mystified, however; when George W. Bush purchased his Crawford ranch while gearing up for his presidential run, it was clear to her that some image-making was on the agenda. The candidate needed a home besides the governor’s mansion in Austin, Texas, just a few short blocks from the Paramount Theater where David Modigliani’s immersive documentary Crawford premiered on Saturday.

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Most of us associate Mardi Gras with New Orleans, but the oldest such celebration in the United States originated in Mobile, Alabama, where it continues to this day. Actually there are two separate Mardi Gras in Mobile each year: one white and one black. But as this fascinating new documentary by Margaret Brown (Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt) makes clear, this situation is anything but black-and-white.

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It’s not unusual for South by Southwest to select a high-profile studio release as the opening night attraction, but it’s hard to understand how a movie as slick and empty as 21 could have been chosen for the honor. It’s an anti-SXSW film if ever there was one.

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One of our all-time favorite blog names is Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule; it really sums up the finest things in life in one pithy phrase. This week, proprietor Dennis Cozzalio has outdone himself with a mammoth rep report of his own, dedicated to specialty screenings in Los Angeles over the next month or so. A Mario Bava retrospective and a timely “Heist Films” festival are among the highlights, along with a series at the UCLA Film and Television Archives “highlighting the work of one of the pre-CGI greats of special effects, L.W Abbott. If you are of a certain age (like me), Abbott is probably directly or indirectly responsible for some of the most awe-inspiring images you eve saw in a movie theater, and maybe even one of two of your most indelible nightmares as well. Abbott started in the film business as an assistant cameraman on no less than Sunrise, ended as a consultant on the physical effects for 1941, and spent some of the multitude of years in between, for 1957 to 1972, as the head of 20th Century Fox’s special photographic effects department. The series, entitled ‘Wire, Tape, and Rubber Band Style: The Effects of L.B. Abbott’, is an unbelievable gathering of amazing imagery (and occasional patches of some clunky dialogue, if I remember correctly) that effectively illustrates the great talent Abbott summoned to create some of the most spectacular sequences in movies during the 60s and 70s.”

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In approximately 24 hours, the bars and hotel lobbies of Austin will be crawling with filmmakers, actors, publicists, studio weasels, and, lowest of the low, film bloggers. Yes, your Screengrab pals Leonard Pierce and yours truly will be on the scene to bring you up-to-the-minute news, reviews and free booze. No, wait. The free booze is for us. But you’ll reap the benefits when you get to read our semi-drunken posts.

In anticipation of SXSW Film 08, this week’s issue of the Austin Chronicle is jam-packed with coverage. The cover girl is Greta Gerwig, which is entirely appropriate as the leading lady of mumblecore is practically the face of SXSW these days.

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Yesterday we took a look at the most notable documentaries playing at this year’s SXSW Film Festival, which kicks off a week from today in Austin, TX. Today let’s check out the narrative films. Unfortunately, some of the movies we’re most excited about don’t have trailers available online, but here’s the best of the rest.

21

Truthfully, we’re torn about this one. It’s based on the terrific nonfiction thriller Bringing Down the House, about a team of MIT students who become blackjack experts in Las Vegas, and it may actually contain the first bearable Kevin Spacey performance in years. But the casting of bland Jim Sturgess and Kate Bosworth has us wincing, particularly since the real MIT Blackjack Team was made up primarily of Asian-Americans.

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The 2008 SXSW Film Festival kicks off a week from tomorrow, and naturally the Screengrab will be your go-to source for wall-to-wall coverage. We’re whetting our appetites by browsing through the trailers for the official selections and making a checklist of can’t-miss screenings. Tune in tomorrow for the five most intriguing narrative films; for now, here are the documentaries that have our attention.

Crawford

In 2005, I went to Crawford, Texas for a wedding. This was at the height of "Camp Casey," the makeshift protest community that grew up around Cindy Sheehan and spent the summer heckling the vacationing president. Looking around at the nondescript one-traffic-light town in the ass-end of nowhere, I wondered why Bush would move there on purpose, when he could be spending his considerable leisure time kicking back in Kennebunkport, Maine. Apparently the townspeople of Crawford have wondered the same thing:

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The full roster won’t be released until sometime after Super Bowl Sunday, but the preliminary highlights of the 15th annual South by Southwest Film Festival have been announced.

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Well, it had to happen sometime. What with two weeks' worth of crushing hype mid-summer, the mumblecore kids were due for a backlash, but who knew Amy Taubin would be the one to do it? Taubin, after all, went on record in 2005 with a "Distributor Wanted" for Mutual Appreciation, exceeding all the hype two years ahead of time by calling Andrew Bujalski's work "Rohmer without subtitles." The tide turns, viciously, in a Film Comment jeremiad that goes viciously ad hominem in record time, from an opening shot bidding goodbye to "the indie movement that never was more than a flurry of festival hype and blogosphere branding." Studiously ignoring her own early championing (Matt Zoller Seitz correctly points out that Taubin seems to be suffering from "buyer's remorse"), Taubin taunts the movement for not making enough money at the IFC Center, accuses all involved of racism for not inviting So Yong Kim's In Between Days to the party "because the filmmaker is a Korean-American woman and her heroine is a Korean immigrant," and calls Joe Swanberg a "lout." These aren't criticisms of film; seemingly the spirit of political campaigning in the air has infected Taubin, whose article is as ridiculously mean-spirited as any negative ad.

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