Archive for the 'SXSW' Category

A Necessary Death

Published
by
James McNally
on April 16, 2008
in Film Festivals and SXSW
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A Necessary Death

A Necessary Death (2008, Director: Daniel Stamm): This was the last of the screeners I was sent for films showing at SXSW this year, and to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t looking forward to watching it. In fact, I’d been putting it off for weeks. Here’s why: the concept is that a graduating film student chooses as his thesis project to create a documentary following a suicidal person from their initial decision to the final act of taking their own life. I don’t think it will spoil the film for you if I tell you that this isn’t a real documentary.

Instead, director Daniel Stamm films in a documentary style as his brash student director Gilbert gathers his crew and starts sorting through responses to the audacious ad he’s placed in the newspaper: “Suicidal individual wanted for documentary. Project will follow individual from first preparations to final act.” I don’t want to say too much more about plot, but I was consistently impressed and surprised by how unscripted and natural the film felt. Even after I knew it wasn’t “real” I was still tense as “the end” approached. Great performances highlight a smart script that explores many of the ethical issues that surround documentary filmmaking. Does a filmmaker have the right to manipulate his subject? How about befriending him? Is the film more important than the relationships formed? Many documentarians struggle with these issues only after beginning what they think is a straightforward film, and Stamm perfectly captures that sense of losing control of the story.

Stamm can’t avoid having one of the film’s conceits break down early. He’s supposed to be a friend of documentarian Gilbert, but it doesn’t really make a lot of sense to film a documentary about the making of a documentary. Nevertheless, this conceit is essential to portray Gilbert’s character in the fullest way. I certainly didn’t feel cheated or fooled by the faux-doc approach. In fact, I was relieved that Gilbert’s audacious experiment wasn’t real. It didn’t lessen the impact of the film, and I’m sure I’ll take many of the ideas explored here into my coverage of the Hot Docs festival, which begins here in Toronto this week.

Official site for the film
Trailer

8/10(8/10)

Ibid

Published
by
James McNally
on March 15, 2008
in Film Festivals and SXSW
. 1 Comment

Ibid

Ibid (2008, Director: Russell Friedenberg): Billed as a sort of road movie about two escaped mental patients on a quest from God to write “new commandments” before the world ends, Ibid is actually a mess of styles and techniques that thinks it’s being clever. As a first feature, the film could be forgiven for the borrowings from other directors and other decades. But when it becomes self-referential (are the two escapees simply acting in a play?), it loses any narrative thread completely and we end up literally wandering in the desert with a cast of crazy people.

Ibid reminded me quite a bit of Roger Corman’s Gas-s-s-s! (review), only more pretentious and mystifying. I saw this with two friends and all three of us fell asleep for at least part of the film.

Official site for the film

5/10(5/10)

Joy Division

Published
by
James McNally
on March 15, 2008
in Documentaries, Film Festivals and SXSW
. 0 Comments

Joy Division

Joy Division (2007, Director: Grant Gee): I wanted to catch this back at TIFF in September, but saw Anton Corbijn’s Control (review) instead. The two films essentially complete each other, and seeing this after Corbijn’s dramatic film made me appreciate how closely that film hewed to the facts. And seeing footage of Ian Curtis performing made Sam Riley’s performance that much more eerily compelling in retrospect.

Gee fashions his film around the image of the changing city of Manchester. He points out explicitly how many of the landmarks in the life of the band no longer exist. Sadly, this also applies to the people themselves. Manager Rob Gretton and engineer Martin Hannett are no longer with us, nor is radio DJ and supporter John Peel. Most poignantly, Tony Wilson, who appears in the film, died in August 2007. The images of transformation describe the career of Joy Division especially well; after the suicide of Ian Curtis, the three remaining members decided to change their name to New Order and keep going. Just as Manchester rose from the rubble of its industrial past, New Order became one of the most successful British groups of the 80s and 90s. It started so much more inauspiciously.

Inspired by the punk of the Sex Pistols, Joy Division (originally called Warsaw) formed in 1977 and quickly gelled around the magnetic figure of Ian Curtis. The film brings together lots of old performance footage in addition to interviews with the surviving band members. Especially welcome is the contribution of Annik Honoré, Curtis’ Belgian girlfriend, who still seems deeply affected by his death. She is still incredibly beautiful and embodies the sophistication that made some of the other band members a bit nervous.

Gee also spices up some audio-only interviews with motion graphics and otherwise mixes up his methods to keep the audience interested. It was understandable but still disappointing that Deborah Curtis’ (Ian’s widow) wasn’t featured, though there were a few written quotations featured on-screen (from her biography Touching From A Distance, I assume).

It’s particularly fitting for me to be reviewing a film about a great band in the middle of a music festival where more than 1,500 bands are playing in the space of a week. Among so many hard-working and talented musicians, this film makes the achievement of four working-class lads from Manchester that much more impressive. Gee’s film has given me a better appreciation of the band, and of Corbijn’s film in particular. They should be sold as a set, I think.

Official site for the film

8/10(8/10)

Medicine for Melancholy

Published
by
James McNally
on March 8, 2008
in Film Festivals and SXSW
. 0 Comments

Medicine for Melancholy

Editor’s Note: I’ve decided to begin posting my reviews of films screening at SXSW early, hopefully helping anyone attending make some decisions about what to see. Medicine for Melancholy is screening on Sunday March 9 at 2:30pm, Tuesday March 11 at 5:00pm and Wednesday March 12 at 2:30pm. All screenings are at the Alamo Ritz 2.

Medicine for Melancholy (2008, Director: Barry Jenkins): When gorgeous Jo (Tracey Heggins) and goofy Micah (Wyatt Cenac) wake up in the same bed after a party, she’s annoyed and embarrassed. He’s curious, maybe a little infatuated. After a very awkward breakfast and a shared cab, they go their separate ways. But Micah finds Jo’s purse in the cab and sets out to return it. Gradually, Jo thaws out and they decide to spend the day together. I haven’t yet mentioned that both Jo and Micah are black, and maybe the only black people in their circle of indie hipster friends. Though it’s not explained, it might be the reason they ended up in bed after the drunken night before.

To Micah, being black in San Francisco matters. A lot. He takes Jo to the Museum of the African Diaspora for a bit of black history. Unfortunately, this is where Medicine for Melancholy begins to taste a little bit too much like medicine. Micah’s concerns revolve around the scarcity of black people in San Francisco, as well as the rapid gentrification of neighbourhoods, forcing the poor and middle class out of the city to the East Bay. Not only does he talk about this a lot, we even get to eavesdrop on a meeting of a housing rights group, which made me feel like the director had slipped a documentary short into the middle of the film.

As we follow the young couple around on the “day after” their one-night stand, we see that Micah is definitely looking for more, while Jo seems content to stay with her rich white boyfriend. The issues involved in their reasons were the most interesting part of the film. As Micah explains, black people make up only 7% of the population of San Francisco, and being into indie rock puts both of them into an even tinier group. For Micah, this means they should be together, while Jo reacts angrily to that assumption. By the end of the film, their relationship is left unresolved, but both of them are still thinking.

Medicine for Melancholy is beautifully shot in a desaturated colour palette, making it unique and even painterly to look at. Director Barry Jenkins also wrote the script, and worked with a tiny crew, but the results on the screen are polished in a way that few indie films I’ve seen can achieve. Bonus points for a great soundtrack that includes a couple of songs from Casiotone for the Painfully Alone.

The few false notes in Jo and Micah’s relationship are probably unavoidable when working with such a tight time constraint (the film covers just 24 hours). That being said, I wish the script had followed the “show, don’t tell” advice that my creative writing teacher used to hammer into my head.

Official site for the film

7/10(7/10)

We Are Wizards

Published
by
James McNally
on March 5, 2008
in Documentaries, Film Festivals and SXSW
. 0 Comments

We Are Wizards

Editor’s Note: I’ve decided to begin posting my reviews of films screening at SXSW early, hopefully helping anyone attending make some decisions about what to see. We Are Wizards is screening on Saturday March 8 at 1:45pm in the Austin Convention Center. It also screens Tuesday March 11 at 11:00am and Friday March 14 at 1:45pm at the Paramount.

We Are Wizards (2008, Director: Josh Koury): I’ll have to start with somewhat of a disclaimer. I am not a wizard, by which I mean to say that I am not one of the obsessive fans of Harry Potter who inhabit this film. That being said, I was expecting something a bit more wide-ranging from the description of the film on the SXSW web site: “An entertaining and comprehensive portrait of the passionate culture of Harry Potter fans.” Instead Josh Koury follows a few of the odder fans of the books and films, with a special focus on bands inspired by the world of Harry and his friends. “Wizard rock” is an admittedly narrow subculture, and most of these bands are simply not very good. Some, like the two brothers who make up Harry and the Potters, don’t seem to take themselves too seriously, but many of the others seem a bit delusional. I found the Hungarian Horntails especially worthy of a few wizard curses of my own. Consisting of 8-year-old Darious and his younger brother Holden, the band screech “punk” songs like “Which Witch is Which” and “Kill the Basilisk”. Though I’m delighted the boys have a creative outlet, I found their parents’ adulation disturbing, and suspect that dragging their kids all over the country to play “wizard rock” seems tied in to fulfilling their own musical ambitions.

Another major subject of the film is cartoonist Brad Neely, who gained notoriety by recording his own fan commentary for the first Harry Potter film. Unfortunately, he spoke it in a really annoying voice, which he also uses throughout the film. Yet another unsympathetic subject is Carol Matriciana, a Christian woman who is opposed to the books and films because she believes they promote witchcraft. But just like every one of the fans, she’s used Harry Potter to gain some attention and to add some meaning to her life.

Perhaps the sanest of the fans featured is Heather Lawver, who also happens to be the sister of a friend of mine. Heather began a fan site while in her teens and promptly received a threatening letter from Warner Brothers, the studio behind the Harry Potter films. Undeterred, Heather started a grassroots boycott of all Harry Potter merchandise except the books (her beef was with Warner Brothers, not J.K. Rowling). Through this process, she not only learned to express herself creatively and connect to other fans, but she learned lots of legal stuff as well as the skills needed to be a political activist. Bizarrely, though, the filmmakers end Heather’s story by showing her looking at Ferraris and explaining that she’s not really into Harry Potter anymore, but wants to become a race car driver. I found that directorial choice odd.

There are a few other “talking heads” in the film, including Henry Jenkins, Co-Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, who will be a keynote speaker at this year’s SXSW Interactive conference. Overall, though, this is not a standard talking head documentary, but more of a film for fans by fans. I thought it a little too narrowly-focused and found far too many of the subjects unsympathetic, even annoying. But what do I know, right? I’m a Muggle.

Official site of the film

6/10(6/10)