Go Further
Director: Ron Mann

The world premiere of Ron (Grass, Comic Book Confidential) Mann’s new documentary on SXSW’s opening night found Mann informing a lustily hooting crowd that the film had been viewed in its completed form for the first time at 11 p.m. the previous evening, after 48 hours of uninterrupted editing and mixing. Inauspiciously introduced as “Canada’s greatest living documentarian” (As opposed to whom? Peter Lynch of Project Grizzly fame, now relegated to mere Canadian TV audiences? Mann is, at any rate, Canada’s only documentarian to get consistent American distribution), Ron Mann proved to be a middle-aged man with a strangely curly head of white hair.

I fear, however, that no one came to see Mann (whose infectious pro-marijuana screed Grass earned him my loyalty a few SXSWs back). Rather, they came for Woody Harrelson, the ex-“Cheers” star who can still command an unearned standing ovation before even saying anything. The heir apparent to the Martin Sheen throne of mediocre actors with overly prominent activist tendencies came to bring us a cinematic extension of his SOL (Simple Organic Living) Tour, to sell environmental and health-food ideas to an audience of Austin liberals predisposed to love the film—a chronicle of Harrelson’s 1,300-mile biking trip down the west coast, stopping along the way to lecture adulatory, privileged college students—before they even saw it.

Why do I sound disgruntled? Because, frankly, Mann can do better than inflate ex-sitcom veterans to godlike, or at least Ken-Kesey-esque (close enough to God for this audience) status. Grass was a miracle of lucid agitprop for the legalization of marijuana, demonstrating Mann’s skills as a compiler of obscure footage for his subversive purposes. Indeed, that’s all Mann’s done for nearly two decades. His last non-compilation effort, nearly 20 years ago, was the quietly buried Canadian drama Listen To The City (described by one of its few viewers as “nearly incomprehensible and, at best, unwatchable”). However, Go Further isn’t some kind of verité freak-out for Mann. Indeed, it’s as controlled and manipulated as any of his archival excavations, boasting as it does occasional musical numbers by Dave Matthews and the like, in addition to an ADR (additional dialogue) credit and (the final nail) a dream sequence. This is no mere documentary; it’s a piece of propaganda for Harrelson.

What subversive ideas does Harrelson promote? Nothing political, it turns out—just abandoning all meat and dairy products, doing yoga, and saving the environment. He’s smart enough to avoid alienating anybody through needless political stances, and slacker-ish enough to connect with the young crowds. The first half-hour is pretty much a series of Woody postcards. Grim-faced Woody riding through a devastated and definitively cut-down forest, turning toward the tracking camera and announcing that, “Someday, we’ll look back on these as the dark ages.” Woody unshaven at the campfire in a beanie preaching about the dangers of dairy. In short, the deification of Woody as jes’ another common man with heightened environmental awareness. Of course, Harrelson can afford to finance this sort of expedition (which includes a hemp-fueled bus), and the privileged college kids he talks to can afford to abandon their studies temporarily and follow him down the road. But when Harrelson has a brief altercation with a logging-company security man, telling him smugly that, “I just hate the sin, not the sinner. I know you’re just making a living, I respect you,” it comes off as cluelessly condescending. Just who asked for Harrelson’s activist absolution anyway?

I’ve made Go Further sound like an unbearable, politically inchoate lecture. It isn’t, not really—it’s a skillfully manipulated road trip of good times and conversions. The focus gradually shifts away from Harrelson to his personal assistant, Steve Clark—quite possibly the most infectious stoner screen presence since Owen Wilson. Clark starts out the trip by hitting gas stations for Snickers bars, and quits smoking, eating meat and dairy, and even begins doing yoga, as the trip progresses. Clark avoids Harrelson’s tendency to showily stand at cliffs and conspicuously exult in nature’s glory, opting instead to hit on college girls and deliver monologues on the horrors of Virginia. The film boasts much such hilarity when not bogged down with Harrelson’s preachiness.

Still, I left unconverted. Harrelson offers environmental solutions for rich kids who can afford to buy organic food, and offers no fully thought out political plan. To be fair, Mann is obviously sincere and passionate in his support of Harrelson, and the film never pretends to be an unmanipulated chronicle. Hell, even Ken Kesey shows up (which seems appropriate since, a) Harrelson considers Kesey’s Merry Pranksters a major source of inspiration, and b) Tom Wolfe, who chronicled that trip in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, also wrote about the subject of Mann’s next documentary, Big Daddy Roth, in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Stream-Line Baby).

A post-screening Q&A left everyone aware of exactly how carefully Mann had edited the film to keep only ebullience and no unpleasantness. A St. Edward’s chick, called on, boldly advanced to the front of the auditorium and began loudly ranting about, apparently, the idea that the media is controlling the minds of impressionable children, and then broke down in tears, while speaking loudly and incoherently. When SXSW managers attempted to get her to shut the hell up as audience murmuring grew, she shrilled, “Please don’t censor my freedom of speech.” Like all intense causes, environmentalism attracts many of the insane and overly-righteous. It is Mann’s great feat to have edited them all out.

I could elaborate and expound for you on all the reasons why Clark Walker’s Levelland, this year’s TBA screening, is a terrible, atrocious waste of film. Walker, a longtime Richard Linklater collaborator (presumably the one and only reason why this film received a potentially promising TBA slot, rather than some kind of quiet burial), has produced a sort of ESPN2 After-School Last Picture Show, in which a bunch of small-town Texas skateboarding kids (amateurs and unknowns one and all) clash up against their “shithole” town. You see, land in Texas is flat/level/unimaginative, and the skaters depend on rounded curves in ditches, swimming pools and ramps to liberate their imaginations... do you get the subtle symbolism? That’s how Levelland plays, a train-wreck melange of the least-admirable sub-genres of recent years: skating pics + “I hate my small town” spiritual descendants of The Last Picture Show +, oddly enough, Fight Club (the kids steal plywood boards and build a ramp in the back of an uninhabited house and later, ill-advisedly, “Where Is My Mind?” rings out and makes one long for David Fincher).

None of these are things I want to see emulated, and certainly not so poorly. The kids (all boys, naturally, except for the one rebel girl and attendant girlfriends) ride around in their Chevrolet Suburbans, railing “Fuck this town! Fuck it all!”, Coke bottles littering the windscreen and impeccably dressed in Skechers attire. They’re brand-name rebels; mom bitches, “If you want to skate all the time, you have to at least put on the appearance of being good kids.” What’s she talking about? The kids are all blond, blue-eyed Aryans who happen to be skaters. There’s hardly anything truly rebellious about their teen bonding, driving around, doing generic “crazy shit” in drawn-out montages (a particularly inexplicable one finds them knocking over toilet-paper down grocery store aisles while Elvis Costello inquires “what’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?” So is that, like, irony or something?). They deliver generic speeches about life (“You can’t just do nothing all the time”), lust, etc.

I could complain that the one truly original, disturbing thing in the film is a sympathetically filmed teacher-student affair that borders on soft-core porn, devolving into a truly embarrassing monologue where the teacher rants that, “I love you so much. If I can’t have you, I don’t want to be friends.” What’s a horny high school senior to do but get the hell out of that car and go do some angsty skating in the rain? The one thing I can’t complain about is the skating footage, which is pretty superb and easily outdoes Dogtown And Z-Boys. But I can easily complain about the generic dialogue, the clichéd coming-of-age set-ups, the idea that being a skater automatically makes you rebellious when being a fucked-up blond boyo that happens to skate makes you anything but, the blindingly amateurish acting (and reaction shots in particular), etc. Well, I could. Or I could simply note that this “regional”/”local” filmmaking is actually overpoweringly generic and, if the rest of the world is lucky, will never make it past Austin.

Stevie offers urbanites another horrifying excursion into the heartland of America, surpassing both Bowling For Columbine and About Schmidt for pure depressive effect. In 1995, documentarian Steve James returned to check up on the kid, Steve Fielding, he was supposed to mentor a decade ago as a Big Brother, and never did much for. The next five years—as covered in an exhaustive 150 minutes—find James repeatedly struggling to help Fielding out. Fielding is a sex offender, child molester, and has numerous charges on his arrest record for assault, attempted murder, and the like. He lives in Pomona, Illinois, a real shithole of a town where the nicest, most sympathetic guys belong to the Aryan Brotherhood.

James traces Fielding’s history since 1985—from foster homes to the mental hospital and finally back out into his own life—up to his 10-year sentence for child molestation. James is, frankly, a crap documentarian, with no visual sensitivity. On the other hand, he’s never behind the camera and mostly in front of it, a participant in the story. His cameramen have no visual sensitivity or acuity, and the shakiness comes off without meaning. James attempts to edit stuff together for maximum effect, but, at 150 minutes, the film could stand to lose a good hour or so.

Nor does James ever question anything outside of James’s family. Instead of questioning the entire Midwest lifestyle, which appears to consist of a culture of victimization and self-righteous rage, he assumes that everything in town is as it should be, and that only Stevie is in trouble. (Great dense warning clouds should be set off in the viewer’s head by the time the mother of the girl Fielding molested notes, about Stevie’s mom, “That’s where she and I differ: I don’t agree with beating.”) Nor does James question the fundamentally bad assumptions at stake. When Stevie joins the church, in an almost parodying voice-over James notes, “Tonight I wanted to forget about Stevie’s upcoming trial and possible sentence.” James should either be a friend or a documentarian: Doing both is too much of a strain for him. As a friend, he does his best, but it’s not nearly enough. And as a documentarian, he indulges his worst instincts—gratuitous slow-motion, crap sentimental music, and the like. Stevie is a sadly acute portrait of a lifestyle of diminished expectations, but it’s a movie which succeeds only by showing that which is rarely shown on American screens, not by how it shows it.

Cinemania is probably the scariest film I’ve seen in ages, although I probably wouldn’t have been so unnerved had I not seen three movies a day every day for the previous four days. This is contrary to my usual viewing habits. Three to four movies a week is my norm, which is more than your average American but, I think, a reasonable and not debilitating amount. And there’s more to it than just blank viewing. I watch, think, and write about what I see (to you, my ever-loving readers’ benefit... right?). If I sound defensive, it’s because I’m afraid you might confuse me with the subjects of this documentary. Cinemania scours the dregs of the New York film scene to show my antitheses, five devoted freaks who regularly watch three to five movies a day, every day, subsisting either on an inheritance or disability payments. Their disability? The “neurosis,” as one of them turns it, which is a compulsive need to see film. After watching the film, you’d probably agree with that psychiatric evaluation. They live in filthy, cramped apartments, and have no qualms about their anti-social ways. Says one, “Film is a substitute for life. It is not pathological—to not have had sex for many years, but to have seen all these experiences instead.”

What’s truly unnerving, then, is that that’s all they have: experiences. Thoughts? Critical evaluations? Nothing of the sort. They exchange two-sentence judgments on obscure 40s starlets. Their memories are nostalgic, not acute or critically pointed, and they bring nothing to the movies they see other than other movies. The fundamental error one of them makes is in assuming that “these films are being made for us.” Dead wrong: Films (especially those of Godard, whom one of them confesses to trying to emulate, unsuccessfully, in a Paris cafe) are made for active, vital humans with a variety of interests and messy lives, not sterile overweight losers. “Film buffs do not socialize”? Shut the hell up and stop ruining my reputation. Cinemania is basically a comedy, which a German TV team has edited down to all its funniest bits, and it’s wildly amusing (it also features a bouncy and apt score by Stereo Total), but anybody who loves film may find themselves unnerved and praying that they bear absolutely no resemblance to anyone on-screen.

Raising Victor Vargas
Director: Peter Sollett

Raising Victor Vargas is a lovely film, and I wish I could tell you more about it, but in all honesty its 88 minutes passed so quickly that I emerged with very little in the way of notes or thoughts. Peter Sollett has constructed an idealized portrait of Lower East Side love which is enchanting, although almost surely mythical: Not just because it’s the mean streets of New York, but because I sincerely doubt there are any teens anywhere this sweet and good-intentioned. Victor lives under his grandmother’s reign, a would-be playa with no actual conquests who gets inducted into swoony-love with “Juicy Judy” Ramirez after a great deal of awkwardness necessitated by his attempts to stop being a smooth asshole and do something real (the lessons of Cameron Crowe, it seems, have still not yet been learned).

Beautifully shot by Tim Orr (George Washington), who has a marvelous eye for urban environments, there’s not really much in the way of heavy drama: a great deal of youthful charm, some family conflict between the incredibly conservative grandmother and her young charges (including Victor’s younger brother and sister), and non-sexual good times. Sollett seeks to find the perfect balance between a conservative Spanish Catholic upbringing and Victor’s father, who abandoned the family long ago (although, as Victor’s younger brother admiringly puts it, “How many half-brothers and sisters we got? The man’s a playa,” indicating the teens still have a lot to learn), and he finds it by omitting sex altogether. The whole film’s a bit deceptive, honestly, and cleans up the streets of violence and drugs altogether, but it’s ridiculously sweet and humane, and that counts for a lot in between the scabrous doses of Mexican and midwestern fear and loathing.

7th Street
Director: Josh Pais

Even more fond regional filmmaking is exhibited in Josh Pais’s 7th Street, part of the increasingly popular first-person documentary essay format. Pais grew up on a particular block of New York’s 7th Street—Alphabet City—and set out in 1993 to document the history and lore of the area, only to be shut down by a threat to his life from a local drug lord. Pais, who looks a great deal like Jerry Seinfeld, sets out to paint the area as a cross between Hell and Sesame Street, a racially diverse mecca of artists and the impoverished which was also full of regrettable crime. He sets up a three-way conflict between the artists of the area, the drug lords, and the indifferent police, in addition to the typical clichéd dilemma between the colorful free spirits of the Lower East Side and the elite, supposedly inhuman Upper East Side.

Pais’s honesty is appealing, noting that he’s not sure if all people don’t perhaps romanticize their childhood environs in this way, but paying attention to the movie shows that he’s actually not nearly as honest as he ought to be. Filming himself walking through the neighborhood in slow-motion is a bullshit tactic. Worse yet is the coda to the film, which finds Alphabet City cleaned-up and gentrified. Pais wanders around, discovering, among other things, that Merlin, the “neighborhood greeter” (read: alcoholic, overly educated bum) has died. So, in the years when he put down his camera (1995-2001), did Pais actually stop associating with his so-called “street family”? That’s what it seems like, which makes it even more irritating that Pais (who confesses early on to having felt like “the first Jew on 7th Street”) repeats that phrase over and over, seemingly exorcising any feelings of white-boy guilt he may have. In any case, linking Merlin’s death (an inevitable occurrence for an aging alcoholic) to gentrification is sloppy thinking and worse editing. Ethical issues aside, Pais delivers a good cross-section of interviews with longtime residents of the area, and an even better look at Giuliani’s epic impact upon New York in the ’90s.

Lilja 4-ever is considered a depressing film. It’s about a teenage Russian girl who becomes a prostitute and eventually ends up killing herself. If that summary doesn’t clue you in, the opening will: a gray sidewalk and skies and the growling of those talentless bastards Rammstein makes it clear that you are screwed from hereon. Lukas Moodysson was formerly one of the most cheerful directors in Sweden. His Together was so accepting that even a former wife-beater was redeemed by the end of the film, which offered up not a single villain or unsaveable character. Lilja 4-ever compensates by not offering up a single likeable character who stays alive, and making all the others assholes.

Lilja is a young Russian girl whose mom moves to America with her Internet boyfriend and abandons her. She turns to prostitution, glue-sniffing, and other Slavic ways of passing the time. Moodysson has offered up a devastatingly accurate portrait of post-Soviet Russian life, and you’ll be hard-pressed to disagree by the time one character offers up the assessment, “This country is shit.” But Moodysson takes his pessimism and dramatic ironies further than need be: juxtaposing a just-violated Lilja with a McDonald’s Happy Meal, for example. Damn you McDonald’s, purveyor of global uncaring irony! Together was a film that actually found a legitimate narrative use for ABBA, and, similarly, Lilja uses a lot of trashy pop music. But what’s at stake in this film is more grave, and the emotions come off as synthetic, cheap, and decidedly unpotent—and that goes for Rammstein too. The ceaseless gloom and doom—it’s all pop music anyway.

Moodysson’s greatest feat, really, is to avoid any possible titillation by never showing Lilja’s body during the brief sex scenes, which concentrate on her emotionless face as if she were Dreyer’s Joan of Arc. Moodysson will never be compared with the potentially exploitative rape scene from Irreversible, for example, which now floats around the Internet as pornographic fare for those who enjoy rape. It’s effective and accurate miserabilism, but I wish it felt a little less misanthropic about the entirety of the human race, which would make it just that much more effective, and laid off the synthetic pop emotions. Some think the movie is too depressing, but I personally don’t think it’s depressing enough for Moodysson’s purposes. I think the movie should be six hours long and not end until everyone in the audience has slit their veins. That, I think, would be the only reaction Moodysson would truly appreciate.

I saw the Music Videos program. God help me, but I wasted precious festival time on something as frivolous as a series of music videos. You know what? At least it was more interesting than the animation program. Highlights included, predictably enough, a video for the first track off of Sigur Ros’s ( ), a hypnotic slow-motion trip to some kind of coal-infested yard from hell that manages to make the smashing in of a car windshield one of the dreamier sights you’ll see this year; an inexplicable video by something called Precarious Warehaus Dwellers called “Nutella and Gummi Bear Sandwich” which featured a Germanic man clad in spangly silver underwear growlingly chanting those words over and over; a techno video for Roy Davis and Thomas Bangalter’s “Rock Shock,” which combines art deco drawings with dancing senior citizens; and a satirical video by the parody boy band Boyz Up called “Pump” which acted as a handy compendium of all boy band cliches from the New Kids On The Block onward (and featured the catchy chorus “Girl, I wanna pump your holes”). A special place will be reserved in hell for Justin Lowe’s video for “Soul Systems Burn” by King Black Acid, which promulgates a number of Smashing Pumpkins-era stereotypes about overwrought goth types screaming out their emotions with too much make-up on. A number of obscure Austin bands made unexceptional appearances, and the sound quality was decidedly variable from video to video. Finally, of course, there’s no substitute for the incomparable Flaming Lips; as SXSW favorites, their video for “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots” closed out the program. If the sight of Wayne Coyne eating sushi doesn’t gratify you, I don’t know what will.

The Films of Arturo Ripstein:

• El Imperio De La Fortuna (1985)
• Divine (1998)
• La Perdicion De Los Hombres(2000)

SXSW came in the middle of the Austin Film Society’s retrospective on Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, one of Mexico’s most commercially successful directors, whose work is unfortunately underexposed in America. Hermosillo is, for the most part, a sympathetic director and largely a cheerful soul, whose movies offer unusual protagonists. The films are gay-friendly, underdog-oriented, and prone to cheerful, not bleak irony. Judging by the three films on display here, Ripstein may be viewed as the antithesis. His films have no heroes or protagonists, merely a series of unsympathetic characters plodding through their inevitable fates to their (ironic) deaths. Despite his reputation, the films on display here were fairly underwhelming at best, and drudgery for the most part.

Divine (aka El Evangelio de las Maravillas), from 1998, was not an auspicious beginning. A heavy-handed would-be satire about (what else?) the nature of religious hypocrisy, the film follows a cult in Mexico who call themselves the Holy Fish and the Sublimes. They parade around their military-protected compound in mock-Arab garb, having learned everything they know from movies, and divide themselves into different classes. We never learn what the men are divided into (if anything), but women are either virgins (who might potentially give birth to the new messiah) or Magdalenes who service the men. Run by the aging Father Basilio (Francisco Rabal) and his wife (Katy Jurado), the place is also a refuge for some prostitutes on the run, as well as gay officer Fidel (Rodrigo Ostap). Jurado becomes convinced that a new girl, Tomasa (Edwarda Gurrola), is the new virgin who will give birth, because the girl carries around a GameBoy-like device which allegedly contains the voice of God. All is well and good until Tomasa starts believing this and has every man in the compound copulate with her so that they may be saved. Things devolve further and further, ending in a play-like surge of tragedy, with a slew of dead bodies, a smattering of insanity, and a not particularly astute parody of The Ten Commandments.

The film is clever, utilizing a back-and-forth chronological structure that takes a while to catch on to, and admirably shot, with richly overstuffed tableaux that seem to be designed to mock iconic religious imagery, but as satire it’s unbelievable and stillborn. It opens with a church service full of that pseudo-Arab gear, which makes it impossible to tell the era until a 16mm projector is spotted. Movies, instructs Father Basilio, teach us everything. So what does this one teach us? That religion is hypocritical, an excuse for escape, unjustified sex (fornication!), hysteria, and gay-bashing; that all gay men are martyrs; and, finally, that all the film-school cleverness in the world (a side-by-side shot of Tomasa walking down the aisle juxtaposed with a cinematic depiction of Jesus, both of them hollow illusions; take-home message, that religion is an illusion) can’t save a fundamentally sterile story.

La Perdicion De Los Hombres, an alleged comedy from 2000 shot on uneasy black-and-white video begins, inauspiciously enough, with the murder of a man driving a wheelbarrow. The two murderers then do a clumsy knockabout routine with the body and wheelbarrow. It’s stale slapstick, and what follows is stale 1950s TV theater, divided in one-take sections with blackouts and absolutely no attempt at doing anything remotely cinematic. Indeed, the movie plays up its full theatricality, making use of devices like radios which talk to characters and a sudden monologue delivered straight to the camera. As before, Ripstein reduces Christianity to a hypocritical farce (Look at those relatives fighting over the deceased uncle’s eyeballs! What wackos, haha!), and makes all its unlikable characters even worse by means of virulent homophobia. Nor does its Pinter-esque, start in the middle, then go back to the beginning and end where you started-structure result in any sort of, you know, point. Take-home message? Every single person on earth is an asshole. Next!

1985’s El Imperio De La Fortuna is another tedious, hysterical dose of melodrama, albeit enlivened this time by a reduced dose of anti-Catholic material and an almost total absence of homophobia. The fortunes of the ironically named Dionisio rise and, unsurprisingly, fall as slowly as possible over the course of 130 minutes. Dionysus was the Greek god of revelry, but Dionisio is a guy with a lame left arm who finds his ascent to some sort of fame through cock-fighting (unfortunately, the fact that it’s Spanish language means we can’t make any phallic puns about how the cock restores the impotence of his arm, but it’s worth mentioning parenthetically) and gets a woman along the way, the singer La Caponera, who seemingly acts as a good-luck talisman, ensuring his financial rise through gambling once his cock-fighting days are over. Of course Dionisio can’t handle his good fortune, changes from insecure and sexually inadequate to brutish and unpleasant, and eventually the whole family suffers. The film recycles familiar Ripstein images—blinking Christmas lights, cluttered panes of religious iconography—which proves only that Ripstein’s concerns haven’t changed much in 15 years, and that’s not a good thing in this case. The first hour is actually pretty good, sucking up the sleazy carnivals and dead small towns Dionisio haunts, but Ripstein can’t make the inevitable downward arc all that compelling. The results come off like a bad Mexican retread of Giant.

—Vadim Rizov