SXSW

Capsule movie reviews

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

'Scott Walker: 30 Century Man'

An alternate universe version of "30 Century Man:" Imagine Justin Timberlake leaving 'N Sync at the height of the group's fame (which he did). But instead of making hits, Timberlake makes increasingly odd albums that bear little relation to the direction of American popular music, growing even stranger as his songwriting voice asserts itself. Then he vanishes from public view for years, avoiding the media, making increasingly avant-garde albums once a decade and inspiring a fanatical cult while remaining a complete enigma.

That's exactly what Scott Walker did, and "30 Century Man" shows us the bloke behind, as they say, the music. An American in one-third of the fab '60s Britpop trio the Walker Brothers, Walker left the band under the influence of Jacques Brel, Igmar Bergman and his own singular muse.

Walker made four albums of orchestral MOR ballads, Brel covers and his own surreal songwriting. After awhile, he becomes a total media recluse, making mind-blowingly avant albums such as "Climate of the Hunter" (1984), "Tilt" (1995) and "The Drift" (2006) about once a decade, inspiring a cult which includes Sting, Radiohead, David Bowie ("I have no idea what he's singing about and I never bothered to find out"), Brian Eno and the New Wave massive. Walker's music seemed to ignore rock tropes entirely, starting with his basso voice and moving into the eighth dimension. We're still catching up with him.

Complete with celebrities singing Walkers praises and vintage clips, "30 Century Man" almost gets four stars for existing at all. It's pretty much required viewing for anyone with even a passing interest in one of the weirdest men in pop history.1:45 p.m. Thursday, Alamo Downtown.

— Joe Gross

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'Third Ward, TX'

Slow-moving and uplifting, "Third Ward, TX" is a documentary in love with its story and therefore unwilling to leave out witnesses, footage and talking heads that don't keep it compelling to viewers. Even at just under an hour, perfect for the PBS special it'll one day be, the mini-DV-shot film feels about 20 minutes too long.

Directed by University of Texas associate professor Andrew Garrison, this straightforward doc follows a remarkable art project which is helping restore a notorious Houston 'hood as a neighborhood. In 1993, seven African American artists used an NEA grant to buy 22 condemned shotgun shacks, converting them into art exhibits, which were eventually passed on to single-mother families. After that initial success, these inner-city heroes built more houses amid the ominous encroachment of gentrification. Cool story.

But it's the people, not the project, that keep this film from feeling entirely like something you watch because you're going to be graded on it later. More about Third Ward history and neighborhood eccentrics, bound by the film's cool, bass-heavy soundtrack, would've upped the interest level.

Noon Thursday, Dobie.

— Michael Corcoran

Read an interview with director Andrew Garrison on The M.O.

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'Love and Mary'

You can't wait until the main character returns home to Texas in "Love and Mary." The weather grows hotter, the food turns better and Dad shows up at the family barbecue dressed in a Speedo.

This movie could have dripped as syrupy as the pecan pie that saves the day, but some genuine sweetness and hilarious moments seep through. Mary is fleeing Los Angeles, leaving behind a failing bakery and an finicky boyfriend who won't come home with her. The boyfriend's twin brother, Jake, fakes his way as Mary's fiancée.

Mary's family in Houston includes her grandfather, with his floury, pecan-picking wisdom, her mother, who has a pet pig with "issues," and her flailing rocker brother who can't stop from singing about his ex-girlfriend "the whore" at a wedding. The scenes located in Texas ring true with margaritas, mosquitos and way too many deer heads. 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Dobie

— Claire Osborn

Read an interview with director Elizabeth Harrison on The M.O.

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'Fish Kill Flea'

There's a sad sack Easter Bunny, posing for pictures with young shoppers. There are dogs that wear clothes and a human who smokes one fearsome cigar. There is, in a moment that actually makes your jaw drop, a vendor who nonchalantly sells Nazi memorabilia, deeply racist statues of black people and, oh yeah, Cabbage Patch Kids. "Fish Kill Flea" is a sad, funny and astute collage about life at a flea market that's set up shop at a deserted mall in Fishkill, N.Y. Hanging over the vendors and customers is the threat that the market will have to move to make way for new development. At first glance, "Fish Kill Flea" looks like one of those "People in Small Towns Are Quirky" documentaries — a genre that's the scourge of film festivals. But "Fish" is no such beast. In a moving moment, one of the vendors slams "flea market snobs," who come to the market just to mock its denizens. The filmmakers' hearts are with her. "Fish" never mocks, even when it's funny (which is frequently). It respects the people whose lives we watch — their hustle, their tenacity, their passion for the market that brings them together.

11:15 a.m. Friday, Alamo South.

Read an interview with co-director Aaron Hillis on The M.O.

— Sarah Lindner

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'Confessions of a Superhero'

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. 9:45 p.m. Tuesday, Alamo Downtown; 9:30 p.m. Thursday, Convention Center.

— Chris Garcia

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'Last Days of Left Eye'

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.

— Sarah Lindner

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'Monkey Warfare'

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.

9:30 p.m. Tuesday and 6:45 p.m. Thursday, Alamo South.

— John DeFore

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'Manufacturing Dissent'

"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.) 4:30 p.m. Tuesday and 11 a.m. Saturday, Alamo South.

Read an interview with directors Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine on The M.O.

— Patrick Beach

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'Fall from Grace'

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." 9 p.m. Wednesday, Alamo South.

Read an interview with director K. Ryan Jones on The M.O.

— Chris Garcia

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'The Price of Sugar'

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). 5 p.m. Tuesday, Dobie.

— John DeFore

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'Silver Jew'

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. 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Alamo South.

Read an interview with director Michael Tully on The M.O.

— John DeFore

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'The Prisoner, or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair'

"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. 11 a.m. Wednesday, Alamo Downtown.

Read an interview with directors Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein on The M.O.

— John DeFore

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'Pretty in the Face'

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.11 a.m. Thursday, Alamo Downtown.

Read an interview with director Nate Meyer on The M.O.

— John DeFore

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'Itty Bitty Titty Committee'

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. 11:59 p.m. Tuesday and 4:30 p.m. Friday, Alamo South.

— John DeFore

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'Forfeit'

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 Friday, Dobie.

Read an interview with director Andrew Shea on The M.O.

— Sarah Lindner

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