sxsw 2006

Cruising into Austin I knew there was no way I could see more than a dozen films and assorted shorts before notching another South By Southwest Film Festival on my celluloid belt. Thirteen features and five short subjects later my eyes are blurry but I’m well hydrated as one sponsor, Aqufina, offered free bottled water inside and out. (Lose the artificially fruit-flavored swill, it tastes like cough medicine.)
To put the amount of films I saw in perspective consider that SXSW 2006 programmed 118 feature films in categories including retrospectives, special events, premieres, narrative and documentary competition, midnight screenings, and emerging visions. Everywhere I walk, since most of the events are all within shouting distance of one another, I meet filmmakers most of whom are Austin residents, the rest attendees. The filmmakers literally outnumber regular audience members at some events. While publicists from Gotham might generalize Austin as a music festival town, the locals know that Austin has the biggest filmmaking scene of any Texas town, and in fact that week’s cover of the Austin Chronicle celebrates a total of five films that were locally produced and playing in the festival.
SXSW always plays great documentaries and the music themed documentaries in particular benefit from the Capital City’s special relation with sound. The BBC docu The Passing Show – The Life and Times of Ronnie Lane encapsulated his entire career from the Small Faces, The Faces, solo and otherwise. Fans of Lane know he spent time in Houston and Austin before his death in 1997. Funny how Rod Stewart, original lead singer for The Faces, is absent but rock legends Pete Townsend and Eric Clapton can’t praise Lane’s influence on rock enough.
Quite another story with loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies. Sometimes you don’t want to know too much about rockers you adore because loudQUIETloud was somnolent. This is not a concert film but rather a behind the scenes look at the Pixies on a reunion tour. Imagine a reality show about people who don’t do drugs anymore. The filmmakers show us Frank Black a.k.a. Black Francis in three different scenes chest naked. But Kim Deal - clothes on in every scene. I feel ripped.
My personal favorite film was the music docu Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey. This film may not see theatrical but you can get it on DVD in late May. Not personally being a fan of metal other than a song here or there I was fascinated by how director/producer Sam Dunn approached the subject in an anthropological manner befitting his own training in behavioral science and his love for heavy metal.
The film covers Richard Wagner, Metallica, Black Sabbath, worldwide banned LP covers, Dee Snyder testifying before Congress and Tipper Gore in the mid-80s, who was the first to use the fore-finger and little-finger devil-horn sign (other than UT alumni), and Norwegian Death Metal just for starters. Dunn never stays too long on one subject and the result provides a rocking ride through two generations of rock culture. Plus Dunn makes for a gracious host; his asides are illuminating, he talks to all the right people and he never deigns to his audience. A pedigree of heavy metal graphic chart comprehensively allows us to follow what for many will be an unknown road.
Also look for these above average documentaries to appear somewhere before the end of the year: This Film Is Not Yet Rated takes on the ratings board for motion pictures, going so far as to hire private detectives to identify who the actual members are; Maxed Out!, an eye-opening report on many misunderstood facets of credit card debt; and Shadow Company takes viewers into the outsourced military industry. Mercenaries are people too this film says.
Less interesting was Fired! (the title says it all), although the shock of recognition factor is high on this one. And Nobelity, where the filmmaker interviews Nobel Prize winners, is well meaning but meandering. The docu The Last Western, about a town time has forgotten on the edge of the desert, will itself be forgotten very soon.
Don’t fret, your humble scribe merely uses the docus as a diving board for the more cerebral fictional features. Oddly the one that stuck when the others had faded was Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. Behind the Mask is a horror spoof that’s smart enough to cast Robert Englund in the kind of role that would be played by Donald Pleasence twenty years ago. But Englund’s just a guest star. Leslie Vernon (Invasion’s Nathan Baesel) wants to be the next famous mass murderer and a television reality crew films him stalking potential victims. Everyone thinks it’s a big joke, natch, until Leslie turns the tables on everyone.
Other highlights included The Cassidy Kids, a mobius strip of a plot that involves the cast of a hit 80s TV Saturday morning show who reveal grim secrets when they meet in the present day to record the show’s DVD commentary. Not to be outdone in the next voice you hear department, Forgiving the Franklins shows what happens when a family loses its guilt and religious inhibitions after they meet the real Jesus while in a group coma following a car accident. Watching this film it seems logical that the phrase “What the fuck,” is the perfect way to start a prayer.