The South By Southwest Film Festival has come a long way since it started out as the red-headed stepchild of the music festival back in 1994. (Nearly 20 years ago!)
From premiering movies that no one ever saw again (Go, Mating Habits Of The Earthbound Human, The Newton Boys) to premiering big budget Hollywood films that don’t seem particularly festival friendly (Source Code, 21 Jump Street).
Whether that’s a good or bad thing is up to you, dear reader.
Either way, the festival has gotten bigger. (And MUCH more doc heavy.)
Every year there are some breakouts that I’m still talking about the next year. I think these might be the ones for 2012.
Stay tuned in two weeks, because I’ll have a round up of the best horror films that played at the festival.
Hands down, the best film of the festival.
Everyone I talked to who saw it agreed with me. If you’ve never heard of Wayne White, you should look him up. He’s the guy who built your childhood…if you grew up with Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, that is. He created Chairy and a host of other puppet characters on the show, along with some of the animations on Beakman’s World and a few other lower rent kids’ shows. What’s he up to now? He’s a successful artist, selling his weird wares to the people who laughed at him before. (He even has a giant art book. It’s called, of course, Maybe Now I’ll Get The Respect I So Richly Deserve.)
The documentary is inspiring, but not in a cloying way. I attribute this not only to director Neil Berkeley for always treating Wayne as a human being and not as a story, but to Wayne himself for being that human being. Yes, he’s a larger than life character, but he doesn’t shy away from his dark side. He had a lot of dark years after Pee-Wee went off the air and he has no problem talking about them. He’s hilarious and a little bit crazy (ok, a LOT), but he never comes across as anything but real. Beauty Is Embarrassing really was the one to beat at this year’s festival.
BEWARE OF MR. BAKER
Speaking of roller-coasters, Ginger Baker’s life has certainly been that.
If you’ve never heard of him, read up on your rock and roll history. He was the drummer for Cream and Blind Faith, two of the greatest “supergroups” to ever exist. Since then, he’s been up and down on drugs and career, but he’s survived it all and is now living in South Africa with his fourth wife and her daughter. He’s still a rock and roll mix of Hunter S. Thompson and Harlan Ellison.
The film opens with him hitting the filmmaker (Jay Bulgar) in the face with his cane. He doesn’t get much nicer than that, yet somehow he manages to be sympathetic. Through his constant assertions that he’s a jazz drummer (totally valid, actually, if you listen to any of his stuff after Blind Faith) to his dismissal of a genre that he supposedly helped create (“Birth of heavy metal? Should’ve been aborted!”), he’s the crazy grandpa that we all…well, don’t really want, but want to hear stories about. Ginger Baker was a crazy young man and has remained a crazy old man.
Hopefully someday he’ll get the respect that HE so richly deserves.
SMALL APARTMENTS
Loneliness is tough.
Especially when you don’t know just how lonely you really are and all you really want to do is get out of America and into Switzerland. That’s only part of the lesson in Jonas Akerlund’s Small Apartments. It’s an adaptation of Chris Millis’ book about a young man (played by Little Britain‘s Matt Lucas) who is a loser in just about every sense of the word. He lives in an apartment between an angry old man (James Caan) and an angry young man (Johnny Knoxville). Nothing seems to go his way until the dead body of his landlord (Peter Stormare) appears on his kitchen floor.
But, of course, the movie isn’t really about this dead body.
It’s really about a brother’s love and the need to be free…from whatever it is that’s imprisoning you. It’s also about Billy Crystal (who plays a fire detective on the trail of a killer/arsonist) outshining everyone else in the film. We can only hope that this is a late career turn-around for the not so much respected anymore comedian. He’s darker here than I’ve ever seen him. Luckily, every performance is nearly as good. It helps that they all have so much to work with. All of the characters have a full arc of development. Like the titular living space, there’s really no room to waste in this film.
PAUL WILLIAMS STILL ALIVE
Paul Williams isn’t a household name anymore, but for about five years in the 70s he was hard to get away from.
He was on tv just about every week, whether on Hollywood Squares, The Love Boat, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson or guest hosting just about any talk show. All of those appearances nearly overshadowed the fact that he was one of the best classic songwriters of his generation. He’s part of what I like to call “vaudeville pop.”
His songs were old-fashioned and, of course, not as cynical or outlandish as the other folks in this loose genre (Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson, Leon Russell). He leaned more towards a lonely Cole Porter. Songs like “We’ve Only Just Begun,” “Rainy Days And Mondays,” “Evergreen, “Out In The Country” and, of course, “The Rainbow Connection” made him, quite possibly, the most popular songwriter of the 70s. Then, just like that , he was gone.
As filmmaker Stephen Kessler said, he died too young. BUT he didn’t die. He just disappeared into a cloud of addiction. When Kessler found this out, he had to make a movie about him to tell people that their favorite diminutive songwriter was still alive. The movie is almost as much about their budding friendship (he basically goes from stalker to brother) as it is about Williams’ life, but it works so well that you just kind of figure that’s how it’s supposed to be. After all, what’s better for overcoming the loneliness that Williams always wrote about than making a friend?
WE ARE LEGION: THE STORY OF THE HACKTIVISTS
Fox News calls them terrorists, but when they’re really only out to take down child porn sites, white supremacists, and Scientologists it’s hard to see them that way.
Anonymous has been the fly in the ointment for plenty of possibly evil groups for the past 10 or so years.
But who are they?
Where did they come from?
What are they really out there for?
Brian Knappenberger set out to answer some of these questions, and even gets a few of the members of the notoriously secretive activist group to talk on screen. Through interviews with people who have worked with them in the past and even a few current members. I kind of wish that Knappenberger had been able to get more interviews with members of the groups that were in Anonymous’ cross-hairs, but I guess it’s pretty hard to get time with people who know that they’re in the wrong.
We Are Legion does more, though, than tell us the story of this particular hacktivist group and its targets. It shows us how activism is still alive and well and, best of all, that it still works. It needs to be gone about in different ways from the past, but it’s still viable and there are still millions of people who are willing to be a part of the movement.
Against all odds, this movie became one of the more emotional documentaries that I saw if only because it showed the true power of numbers that you never knew were there.
Note: My actual favorite film of the festival was the last film I saw, but I can’t really count it as a new film, so it’s not officially part of the list.
Yellow Submarine is being re-released in a beautifully hand-restored print. That movie is a part of my childhood and I will always love it. It was amazing to finally see it on the big screen.
