FILM FEST REVIEW: A Brief Overview of the 2007 SXSW Film Festival

By Mitch Myers

First things first, director Gregg Araki’s highly anticipated Smiley Face is a clever doper flick showcasing a standout performance by Anna Faris as a stoner who (accidentally) consumes her weird roommate’s pot cupcakes - all of them - and then tries to function with predictably outrageous results. Not bad for the first ever female-oriented stoner movie.

I thought I was stoned when I caught two movies in a row, The Lookout and Disturbia, both of which feature a youthful protagonist who gets in a serious car accident within the first five minutes. Third Rock’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the star of The Lookout, and he does a good job portraying a slightly brain-damaged young man who needs to write things down in order to remember them (a la Memento). This movie is suspenseful and its Hollywood ending is not handled badly, especially compared to Disturbia, which is a Rear Window-esque mystery for hip teenagers starring Shia LaBeouf that degenerates into a typical “impale the nasty serial killer with something long and sharp at the very end-type thriller.”

Since things seem to be coming in pairs here, I want to recommend two claustrophobic little office encounters featuring men of quiet desperation. Timothy Hutton digs deep into his sad character and carries the load in When A Man Falls In The Forest. Hutton is also well supported by a strong ensemble cast that includes Sharon Stone, Dylan Baker and Pruitt Taylor. Even more desperate is Christian Slater in the dark and often funny, He Was A Quiet Man, which takes the “human being as ticking time bomb” to its most extreme and illogical conclusion.

Even direr and far more annoying was Frownland featuring (a very believable) Dore Mann as a thoroughly neurotic, totally stressed-out loser who cannot catch a break with his girlfriend, his job, or his roommate. Sadly, nobody wins here, including the audience.

Blackbird, starring Paul Sparks and Gillian Jacobs, is a somewhat romantic, well-acted junkie-meets-stripper tale that shows a few slight glimmers of hope before descending into utter blackness.

Maintaining some of that dark mood was Kurt Cobain About A Son, a documentary built around journalist Michael Azerrad’s (audio) taped interviews with Kurt Cobain. Capturing the Pacific Northwest in all its depressive glory, this film features Cobain’s own narrative as he tells Azerrad his life (and foretells his death) story. Virtually no footage of Cobain or Nirvana is used, but director AJ Schnack compensates with animation, subtle visual meditations of place and time, and Cobain’s ultimate demise for dramatic import: For diehard fans only.

An equally moody but far less depressing music documentary was Scott Walker: 30th Century Man. Walker, a teen idol in the 1960s who evolved into an art-rocker of undecipherable depth, is interviewed and duly remembered by a slew of talking heads including David Bowie, Brian Eno, Sting, and several contemporary rock personalities. This is a fine primer for the uninitiated/open-minded music fan.

Probably the most anticipated documentary at SXSW was Manufacturing Dissent, a “Roger & Me” pursuit of the one-and-only Michael Moore, who dodges his would-be video-biographers until they have no choice but to expose him as a self-serving mover and shaker who manages to promote himself well beyond the (very successful) movies that he makes. That Moore is revealed to be a manipulative filmmaker - playing fast and loose with facts and making up a few of his own - is not that surprising. Nor is it much of a revelation to find that he makes better movies than these folks.

The most upbeat moment of the film festival had to be the premier of What Would Jesus Buy? Although director Ron VanAlkemade was insightful enough to capture Reverend Billy and his followers in the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir, it was producer Morgan (Super Size Me) Spurlock who had the star power to draw a SRO crowd to the Paramount Theater. Reverend Billy’s message, to quit spending so much damn money at Christmastime and the rest of the holiday season, was humorous, poignant, and extremely well conveyed.

The documentary Hell On Wheels was a long-awaited local favorite that tells the excruciating back-story of Women’s Roller Derby, which started in Austin in 2001. Nowhere near as compelling as last year’s Roller Derby documentary Jam, Hell On Wheels gives the different (competing) factions of roller derby queens a chance to tell their sides of the story and get some closure on the whole darn enterprise, which is bigger than ever and happening nationwide. Personally, I found the documentary on Jump Rope and Double Dutch competition, Doubletime, to be far more interesting.

Finally, two of the funniest films at the SXSW were Flakes and Skills Like This. Aaron Stanford and Zooey Deschanel star in Flakes, a silly little love-story/battle of the sexes set in a pre-Katrina New Orleans cereal bar where obscure feasts like Quisp and Quake still reign supreme. Monty Miranda’s Skills Like This is the ultimate tribute to smart, disaffected youth who just don’t know how to apply themselves. Just what is the ultimate solution in terms of how to win girlfriends and influence people? Why, rob banks and steal stuff of course!