Hey, MGK’ers – very occasional guest-poster Dan Solomon here. I’ve spent the past few days busying myself with the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, TX, and I wanted to share with you the future of film as we know it. Or something like that – anyway, here is a report on the first five movies I’ve seen.
The Snake
What It Is: A debut comedy about a serious sleaze who joins a support group for people with poor body-image because he wants to do it with one of the girls, and seduces her by enabling her bulimia.
Who’s In It: The co-directors and their girlfriends, some actors you’ve never heard of in your life, and, inexplicably, Margaret Cho for about two minutes.
Is It Good? Actually, it’s amazing. The screening on Friday night was introduced by Patton Oswalt, who hasn’t got a film in the festival, or even a gig in town – he was just taken enough by the picture to help promote it. His promotion included name-dropping the fact that other famous folks, like Joss Whedon, had seen the screener and loved it. If I were famous, he could cite me, too – The Snake is hilarious, and it manages to make a comedy about a protagonist with no redeeming qualities that neither offers him redemption nor asks you to sympathize with him in any way.
How It Will Change Film As We Know It: The thing, while it’s drop-dead hysterical, looks like it may as well have been shot on a cell phone camera. The sound in certain scenes is full of background noise that makes you strain to hear the actors. Technically, the thing is a mess. And after five minutes, there’s no reason to care. If this one catches on, it could change the rules a bit in the same way that Clerks did fifteen years ago.
Alexander the Last
What It Is: The fifth movie from some dude named Joe Swanburg about how it’s really really hard to be a white person with artistic and creative ambition in your twenties in New York, and how it’s especially hard to be that sort of person and married, because you’ll be attracted to other people sometimes and you might have to stop being 100% self-absorbed for a little while as you decide not to fuck anyone else.
Who’s In It: The girl from Teeth is the female lead, some skinny dude with a punchable face is the male lead, and the dude who played Grover in Kicking and Screaming (the 90’s one, not the Will Ferrell one) has a small part.
Is It Good? It is most decidedly not good, no. The film expects you to be concerned enough with the plight of these attractive people who do nothing but make art and googly-eyes at each other all day that it doesn’t give them any sort of personality at all. And I’m not being mean and saying, oh, their personalities are bland, therefore they don’t have them – seriously, there’s nothing to them, like, as a stylistic choice. It tries to be a character-based picture, but it tells us nothing about the characters. Big-time flop.
How It Will Change Film As We Know It: It had its world premiere last night at SXSW, and it was simultaneously shown on IFC, which could potentially be a new business model, I guess. It could also inspire a bunch of similar navel-gazing, if it somehow becomes a hit.
Pontypool
What It Is: Holy cow, pretty much the coolest, scariest horror movie since, I dunno, the last cool, scary horror movie.
Who’s In It: Stephen McHattie, who played Hollis Mason in Watchmen, is the lead here as the Kinky Friedman-esque iconoclastic host of a small Ontario town’s radio morning show.
Is It Good? The first 2/3 of the movie are fucking incredible. I don’t want to go into too much detail, but it’s a rare horror movie that’s able to be as tense and that terrifying as Pontypool without showing you much of anything in the way of scary images. The thing falls apart a little bit toward the end, when it tries (with a plot point cribbed from Snow Crash) to explain what’s behind the “horror” incident.
How It Will Change Film As We Know It: Giving Stephen McHattie some more work would be a significant enough achievement, but I suspect Pontypool is successful enough at finding a genuinely original way to scare audiences and defy convention that it will be ripped off for years to come.
Snowblind
What It Is: A documentary about Rachel Scdoris, the first legally blind athlete to race in the Iditarod.
Who’s In It: Rachel Scdoris, duh. Also her dad, whom the director seemed to try turn into a bad guy even though he didn’t deserve it, as well as Joe Runyan, a former Iditarod champion.
Is It Good? Kinda? Not particularly compelling, which is mind-blowing, considering the source material. You can tell that the director didn’t have much rapport with Scdoris, as she’s pretty guarded through the whole thing, and there’s not really an actual narrative or viewpoint – we just follow her around as she races, and occasionally her dad is played as a jerk living vicariously through her. Some of the photography is amazing, though.
How It Will Change Film As We Know It: I can’t imagine it will, really. Maybe they’ll do it as a narrative film, a la Snow Buddies? That’d be cool.
Anvil!: The Story of Anvil
What It Is: Anvil were a powerhouse of Canadian heavy metal that inspired Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, and more. They toured Japan and were cited as monsters of rock and roll, back in 1982. A few years later, they were working crappy day-jobs and forgotten, while their peers were busy getting famous. This is the story of what went wrong.
Who’s In It: The dudes from Anvil, of course, as well as metal luminaries like Lars Ulrich, Lemmy, Slash, and more, most of whom spend their screen time gushing over how good Anvil were.
Is It Good? Absolutely. This is one of those documentaries like Murderball or Spellbound that sells its story better than fiction ever could. Mostly it’s due to subjects who are endlessly fascinating, a couple lucky breaks in the events that heighten the drama, and a lot of compassion for the people on screen.
How It Will Change Film As We Know It: Film? Who knows. Rock and roll? Well, Anvil are playing a showcase during SXSW Music now, thanks to the newfound attention they’re receiving in response to the documentary. If it’s not too late for some dudes in their 50’s to become rock stars after all, then everything you thought you knew about when to give up your dreams is wrong.
The festival’s only a few days old, so that’s all I’ve got. If there’s anything else amazing going on, I may sneak in another post.
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I can’t be the only one who would pay $50 to see The Snake, based only off it’s premise alone, right? Tell me there’s the obvious gag of him wanting her to finally swallow something, please.
When you’re dealing with bulimic characters, I’m guessing that there’s nothing but quality gags throughout the film.
I so truly deserve to be beaten for that.
Actually, ‘Snake’ sounds far too much like Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, ‘Choke’, the only difference being that Palahniuk’s support group was for sexaholics, there was a more complex plot, and a large percentage of it – as with all of Chuck’s work – is based on anecdotes told by real people.
…Wait, “Legally Blind”? Shouldn’t that be ‘the first blind athlete to legally race in the Iditarod’, or were there previous accounts of people sneaking in with two eyepatches?
“Legally blind” is a legal distinction. A person can have partial sight but still be impaired enough that they are considered “legally blind” when it comes to things like getting a driver’s license, etc.
I can’t believe someone needs to explain this here.
Legally Blind, aka the basis for the pun in Legally Blond, is 20/200 or worse even with glasses and such.
Also, “it’s not too late for some dudes in their 50’s to become rock stars after all,” is totally going to be the premise of the best film and next year’s SXSW.
Salieri – You know, based strictly on premise, The Snake does sound a bit like Choke, but it’s approached so differently, and has such a unique take on it, that the comparison never occured to me until you brought it up.
Mimc – It avoids that cheap shot, but it sure breathes new life into the old saw about how it’s awesome to date a girl with no gag reflex.
And yeah, Rachel Scdoris has some vision. She takes an eye test at the beginning of the film, and gets the “E” at the top, and two of the three on the second line, before it all becomes a blur for her.
–d
I really, really, really wanted to see The Snake, but since I didn’t ask for time off far enough in advance this year I’ve pretty much had to sit out SXSW. I usually get a film pass for a paltry $70 and go to town, but I simply don’t have time this year.
Really hoping it gets at least a limited release.
I did catch two movies, doing the whole general admission, thing on Sunday: Pontypool and Garbage Dreams. I feel like Pontypool is damn, damn entertaining for its first hour but kind of falls apart in the last third, where it crosses the thin line between intriguing/subtle and incomprehensible. But it’s anchored by very strong performances and a nice sense of claustrophobia.
Garbage Dreams is one of those handful of movies you see at SXSW every year that reminds you of just how bad shit can be in the third world and just how bad you, the viewer, are for not thinking about that more often. That’s not to make the film sound sanctimonious or self-righteous — it’s neither, and it’s beautifully shot and well-edited and just sort of generally quite fascinating. I liked it a lot.
Really, it’s precisely the kind of film that everybody should see after watching one of Swanberg or Bujawlski’s mumblecore movies to be remind what, you know, actual problems are like.
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Man, even the description for Alexander the Last makes me want to punch someone. Maybe even punch you, for telling me about it. That’s the most punch-worthy description of a movie I’ve ever read. How the movie itself was screened without the audience dissolving amid an orgy of violence, I’ll never now.
I really have no excuse for not seeing Pontypool yet, given that it was at the Toronto Filmest and it’s been playing at the Varsity theatre for a couple of weeks now.
Dan, since you’re here, do you mind if I ask…what happened to “your webcomic is bad and you should feel bad”? That was a vital public service you were providing.
Is there any chance that any of these will be seeing wider releases? Snake, Ponytail, and Anvil! all sound like decent flicks.
I realize I’ll probably be burning in hell for my hopes, but at least I’ll go laughing – Snake sounds absolutely fantastic.
I believe that would have been John Solomon, who was also a psuedonym.
Mimic – I’d be astonished if Anvil!, at the very least, didn’t end up with an arthouse run over the summer or fall. It’s also virtually assured a DVD release, as is Pontypool.
The Snake, though – I kinda doubt it. I mean, the movie really does look bad, technically-speaking. Maybe they’ll self-distribute a DVD on their website or something, but I can’t imagine anyone else putting it out. I’m guessing it’ll do a full run on of film festivals and smaller screenings, though, so it may be worth checking out the movie’s website to keep posted. Incidentally, to further whet your appetite, I just read Tom Scharpling’s review, where he described the lead performance as “Chris Elliott’s character as portrayed by Daniel Day Lewis”. So it’s definitely worth keeping your eyes open for it.
–d
Crap. All this time I thought it was the same person.