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Film
March 12, 2007
- 'Forfeit'
- 'Itty Bitty Titty Committee'
- 'Pretty in the Face'
- 'The Prisoner, or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair'
- 'Silver Jew'
- 'The Price of Sugar'
- 'Fall from Grace'
- 'Manufacturing Dissent'
- 'The Lookout'
- 'Monkey Warfare'
- 'Last Days of Left Eye'
- 'Confessions of a Superhero'
The presence of Gregory Itzin, who’s so delicious as the disgraced President Logan on TV’s “24,” drew us to this heist drama. Not suprisingly, he’s also wonderful here, as are fellow TV vets Wayne Knight (“Seinfeld’s” Newman) and John Aylward (Dr. Anspaugh from “ER”). Unfortunately, the scheme that drives the movie is so elaborate, it’s hard to maintain interest. Armored car guard Frank (Billy Burke, who’s also appeared on “24”) is up to something, and it involves his old girlfriend (another “ER”-er, Sherry Stringfield). Burke and Stringfield aren’t as compelling as the supporting cast, but that might be because their characters are ill-defined. And as good as Itzin is, his character, a TV preacher, feels dated — like something that might have been provocative in the ’80s. Andrew Shea, a film professor at the University of Texas, directs competently, but the plot never really builds much tension. 7:30 p.m. Tuesday and noon March 16, Dobie.
Read an interview with director Andrew Shea on The M.O.
Coming off a disastrous stab at taboo-tweaking in “The Quiet” and a run of TV directing gigs including “The L-Word,” director Jamie Babbit takes aim at the patriarchy in “Itty,” starring a misfit-militant crew reminiscent of a John Waters film but without the laughs. Teen lesbian Anna, disappointed in love, joins a crew of feminist protesters hoping to hook up with sexy Sadie, only to find enough stymied romance to fill, well, a season’s worth of TV soap opera. Billed as a comedy, the film is more light and romping than funny, painting its would-be revolutionaries with such broad strokes that the merits of their cause are irrelevant. Likeable leads keep things afloat, but the film’s throwaway tone doesn’t live up to the more credible anti-establishment stance of the bands (Le Tigre, Sleater-Kinney) on the soundtrack. 7:15 p.m. Sunday, Alamo Downtown; 11:59 p.m. Tuesday and 4:30 p.m. March 16, Alamo South.
A reminder that coming to terms with sexuality often takes longer than the awkward years of adolescence, “Pretty” plays a teen boy’s curiosity against that of a young woman wondering how her already-established sexual life compares to those of the more worldly people around her. Shot with mostly novice actors and a one-man video crew that results in some distractingly mismatched footage, the movie gets some intimate moments just right — a couple awkwardly skirting around the issue of sexual fantasy, for instance — while having dangerously little to say about some of the other big topics (like American obesity) it wants to address. A strong performance by Meagan Moses keeps us curious about the story, which is undercooked but has strong moments. 4:30 p.m. Sunday, 11 a.m. Tuesday and 11 a.m. Thursday, Alamo Downtown.
Read an interview with director Nate Meyer on The M.O.
“The Prisoner,” a new doc by “Gunner Palace” team Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein, will rightly be a must-see for some simply by virtue of its chilling story: the firsthand account of an Iraqi journalist captured in a mistaken raid, then imprisoned more than half a year — most of it in Abu Ghraib — despite his obvious innocence. Content isn’t particularly well served by form, in this case: Almost the whole story comes from the victim’s mouth, in a casually shot interview that is only corroborated late in the film by an American soldier. Frequent comic book-style illustrations flesh out the tale, but their use is haphazard and often cosmetic — an effort to increase the aesthetic appeal of a story that ought to have American viewers squirming in their seats all by itself. 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Convention Center; 11 a.m. Wednesday, Alamo Downtown.
Read an interview with directors Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein on The M.O.
A musical travelogue boasting more than its share of quirky ingredients, “Silver Jew” might sound like this year’s “Genghis Blues.” It isn’t, thanks to a homemade casualness and lack of ambition — but it should please curious fans of the Silver Jews, whose songwriter/singer David Berman has spent years inviting curiosity. Berman, a recent convert to Judaism, has decided to overcome his aversion to live performance in a big way: with a world tour. Two stops in Israel are chronicled in home-movie fashion here, allowing us to witness Berman’s intense but somewhat addled fascination with holy sites as well as his surprise at being greeted, so far from home, by hordes of very knowledgeable fans. Under an hour long, the movie introduces themes that could have made for more widespread appeal but doesn’t have the resources to expand on them satisfactorily. 11:30 a.m. Sunday and 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Alamo South.
Read an interview with director Michael Tully on The M.O.
Here’s one for audiences who think there are no fresh outrages left in the world, or no heroes worth rooting for: This doc travels to the Dominican Republic, where not far from tourist-friendly beaches an entire industry rests on what is practically slave labor. Sugar plantations draw workers from Haiti with the promise of good jobs, then strip them of their ID documents so they’re stuck working for 90 cents a day (in credit at the company store, no less). As narrator Paul Newman tells it, the sole challenger to this system is Father Christopher Hartley, a man who has defied taboos to bring food and doctors to workers’ squalid villages and help them organize against the employers who keep them under armed guard (employers, by the way, who reportedly enjoy a sweetheart trade deal with the U.S., getting twice the world-market price for their sugar). 7:30 p.m. Sunday and 5 p.m. Tuesday, Dobie.
Right-wing provocateur Ann Coulter recently blurted the favorite word of the Rev. Fred Phelps, leader of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., a small incubator of hate, fear and biblical misunderstanding. The f-bomb that Phelps (and even his tiny grandkids) likes to spit so biliously refers, of course, to homosexuals, people who are the undisputed agents of Satan, Phelps declaims. It’s they, he preaches, who made God so mad that he caused the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and is killing our troops in Iraq as retribution for America’s tolerance of gays and lesbians. In this fair, troubling and infuriating look at Phelps and his flock — a minicult composed exclusively of family members — doc-maker K. Ryan Jones lets Phelps rage on, looping his rope of bigoted doomsaying rhetoric into a just-so noose for himself. It’s ugly, but reasonable minds crisply upend the perverted logic that leads Phelps and family to gleefully protest at military funerals waving signs that say “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and “Thank God for 9/11.” Jones’ coup is contacting two of Phelps’ estranged children, who describe growing up with a “sick,” “scary,” “loveless” “rage-aholic.” 4 p.m. Saturday, 6:30 p.m. Monday and 9 p.m. Wednesday, Alamo South.
Read an interview with director K. Ryan Jones on The M.O.
“Manufacturing Dissent” is vigorously fair, unfailingly polite (made by Canadians, could it be otherwise?) and thoroughly evenhanded. Michael Moore, the subject of the documentary by producer-directors Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine, could learn a lot from it.
As the filmmakers follow Moore on a college speaking tour, repeated requests for an interview go unanswered. Old criticisms and critics pop up: Rock critic and journalist Dave Marsh is still mad Moore never paid him for freelance pieces; Moore actually grew up in a suburb of Flint, Mich.; his films fudge chronology and are selective of facts; he’s a jerk for ambushing Charlton Heston and others; he stays at the Four Seasons while his crew stays at the Motel 6.
Yeah, we’ve heard it all, but it’s a devastating assemblage of facts. And there’s a wonderful moment between Moore’s handlers and the documentary crew that reveals the reprehensible one to be exactly what Al Franken accused Rush Limbaugh of being: a big fat hypocrite. And a serial liar. (UT film professor and former producer’s representative John Pierson is among those interviewed.) 9:30 p.m. Saturday, Paramount; 4:30 p.m. Tuesday and 11 a.m. March 17, Alamo South.
Read an interview with directors Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine on The M.O.
This year’s fest kicks off with a chilly slice of Rehabilitation Noir, one that echoes former SXSW-er “Memento” in content if not form or style. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Chris, a high-school hockey champ whose charmed life U-turns when a traffic mishap leaves him brain-injured and barely able to master life’s little routines. Resentful of his plight and easily manipulated, he’s the perfect target for a heist crew that wants to exploit his position as a bank’s nighttime janitor. First-time director Scott Frank wrote good-time crime flicks “Out of Sight” and “Get Shorty,” but here goes for a slow-build tension, more Jim Thompson than Elmore Leonard, making viewers itch over how long it’ll take Chris to figure out he’s being used — and whether he’ll then be able to work around his limitations to get out of harm’s way. Jeff Daniels lightens things nicely as Chris’s rehab mentor, but not enough to betray “Lookout’s” pessimistic bent. 9 p.m. Friday, Paramount.
A film for frustrated radicals and aspiring troublemakers, “Monkey Warfare” depicts the cost paid by those who romanticize revolution without condemning their cause. Set in a not-yet-gentrified district of Toronto, it finds Dan and Linda, a pair of housemates who clearly have a history — romantic? criminal? — that they’re trying to live down by eking out a cash-only existence selling other people’s trash. A sharp young newcomer, Susan, crosses Dan’s path and (in between selling him prodigious quantities of dope) shows an interest in his collection of revolutionary ephemera. Dan, barely in his 40s but talking like an embittered has-been, is simultaneously aroused by her curiosity and dismissive of her eagerness to put theory into practice. Does he know more than he lets on, or has age simply cured his belief that the world can be changed? “Warfare’s” production values suit its scrounger protagonists, and leads Don McKellar and Tracy Wright make the mysteriously burned-out housemates just enigmatic enough to keep you wondering where all this is going. 6:30 p.m. Friday, 9:30 p.m. Tuesday and 6:45 p.m. Thursday, Alamo South.
You won’t find a more honest title at the festival: This documentary follows TLC rapper Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes right up until the moments before her death in a 2002 car crash. Lopes was in Honduras on a spiritual retreat, and while there she was shooting a documentary about herself. Lauren Lazin, a veteran producer, director and writer for MTV, took the footage Lopes left behind and created a moving and eerie portrait of the star. The no-frills Lopes we see in the Honduran jungle looks like a different person from the glamorous performer we’re familiar with (though she’s even more luminous and beautiful), and she’s just as unadorned spiritually. She talks frankly about troubles with her ex Andre Rison (and she’s not sorry about burning down his house), her stint in rehab and, by turns, her dreams for the future and the sense that she’s doomed. This film — her last creative act — makes us all the more sorry she’s gone. 8 p.m. Tuesday and 11 a.m. Wednesday, Paramount.
Read an interview with director Lauren Lazin on The M.O.
And we thought it was the Hulk who had anger-management issues. Not so on Hollywood Boulevard, where legions of celebrity impersonators, many garbed as comic-book superheroes, pace the Walk of Fame awaiting the next shutterbug tourist. That’s where Austin-born Maxwell Allen poses valiantly as Batman and, when his notorious temper snaps, raises his voice at tourists who don’t tip. “We work for tips!” he shouts at the miserly. Allen is one in a quartet of superheroes cum struggling actors profiled in Matt Ogens’ utterly fascinating documentary about the rigors and indignities of the fame game. Allen, who appears to harbor a criminal past half-built on wishful fictions, joins a scrawny Superman (dweeby yet likable obsessive Christopher Lloyd Dennis), a guileless Wonder Woman (pretty country girl Jennifer Gehrt) and a humble Hulk (Joe McQueen, a bootstraps inspiration) for Ogens’ probing portrait of what it’s like to be human in an indifferent world. Gleaming still photos and artful interviews augment the rich scenes Ogens captures on the street and, sometimes, movingly, in these somewhat troubled characters’ minds. 1:45 Saturday and 9:45 p.m. Tuesday, Alamo Downtown; 9:30 p.m. Thursday, Convention Center.
