A Slipping Down Life
Written and Directed by Toni Kalem
with Lili Taylor, Guy Pearce, John Hawkes, and Sarah Rue
1999
C
The Book of Stars
Written by Tasca Shadix
Directed by Michael Miner
with Mary Stuart Masterson, Jena Malone, Delroy Lindo, and Karl Geary
1999
B
EDtv
Written by Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel
Directed by Ron Howard
with Matthew McConaughey, Jenna Elfman, Ellen DeGeneres, Woody Harrelson, Martin Landau,
Sally Kirkland, Rob Reiner, Dennis Hopper, and Elizabeth Hurley
1999
C
Desert Blue, the sophomore effort from Morgan J. Freeman, opened the festival with a
whimper. Abandoning the urban setting of his first film, the Sundance fave Hurricane
Streets, Freeman sets this well-meaning clunker in a Nevada ghost-town named Baxter
(pop. 83), whose claim to fame is a roadside attraction which bills itself as the world's
largest ice-cream cone (though, rather disappointingly, it appears to be made out of sheet
metal). Quarantined when a tanker truck overturns releasing a mysterious chemical, the
local teens, along with a just-passing-through TV star from L.A. (Kate Hudson), face their
mortality and try to make the best of a few idle days. Sort of an anti-road movie,
Desert Blue celebrates stasis and comfort, though there are, of course, a few dopey
crises to be navigated. The gentle camaraderie of the cast is infectious--it's too bad
Brendan Sexton III, who was so vivid in Welcome to the Dollhouse, barely registers
as the naïve hero. And Christina Ricci needs to make this the last gleefully nihilistic
spitfire she plays for a while.
After the amateurish Desert Blue, the gorgeous black-and-white cinematography and
precise compositions of La Ciudad immediately lifted my
spirits--writer/director David Riker and cinematographer Harlan Bosmajian have a nice feel
for faces and textures, and the visuals of this film are clearly as important as the
narrative or dialogue. La Ciudad is an expansion of Riker's Oscar-winning short of
the same name, and contains four separate tales set in the Latin-American immigrant
community of New York City. Made over a period of seven years, Riker conducted interviews
with dozens of immigrants and wrote the film based on their stories; the cast is made up of
the people he interviewed, non-actors all. It's an interesting idea, but unfortunately the
episodes are too schematic to have much resonance, and the tone of the film is so noble as
to eventually become oppressive. Surprisingly, Riker gives us little cultural detail and
almost no humor--this is a film that's supposed to be good for you, and knows it.
While La Ciudad presents its immigrants as homesick wanderers estranged from
their adopted country, American Hollow's relentless ethnography ends up
(inadvertently, maybe) asserting its exotic subjects' universality. A documentary
detailing a year in the life of an extremely poor extended family living in a remote area
of Appalachia, the movie is less a shocking exposé than a gingerly portrait of
unconditional familial love. It's most significant storylines--a confused teen trying to
deal with his fickle 17 year-old fiancée; a woman separating from her abusive
husband; the family's futile attempts to round up bail money for an incarcerated son--though
compelling, seem to have little to do with the participants' "hillbilly" status and a lot
to do with poverty in America. Troublingly, the film sometimes reminded me of Jerry
Springer (especially during a few sequences when director Rory Kennedy's camera becomes
uncomfortably intrusive), though it's unquestionably more compassionate.
What pisses me off most about Happy, Texas isn't that it uses laughably shoddy
plotting to justify comedic set pieces, or that its rural Texas setting has about as much
cultural specificity as Pepsi, or that it makes shameless attempts at sentimentality, or
even that it takes full advantage of borderline-offensive gay stereotypes. No, what really
gets me is the fact that this stupid, crowd-pleasing junk, by virtue of its low budget and
first-time writer/director, I guess, is taking up valuable space at this film festival.
This is about as unimaginative as movies get, folks, and it goes against everything SXSW
supposedly stands for. The audience loved it, of course. "Happy, Texas is astounding,
just astounding," said some guy behind me in line the next day. Yeah, astounding. Who would
have thought a $1.5 million comedy could look so much like Hollywood crap?
Gregg Araki's previous movies have always been bubbly, in a certain way, but they've never
been as effusive as Splendor, his latest, a self-conscious screwball comedy
in which one of the love triangle's points is actually two guys (Jonathan Schaech and Matt
Keeslar), who form with the heroine (Kathleen Robertson) a comically blissful
ménage-à-trois. By far the most accessible Araki film I've seen, though
not without a kink factor, it's probably worth seeing just for the production design (by
Patti Podesta), the hypnotic soundtrack, and the deep, saturated colors of cinematographer
Jim Fealy. After a gorgeous title sequence, the story breezes by pleasantly enough, but
it's light as a feather, and some scenes (the disrupted-wedding ending, most direly) are
marred by Araki's trademark beyond-ironic tone. I'd be interested to see what this kinder,
more mature Araki could do with someone else's material.
Since it was shot near Austin and much of the audience had some
relationsip to the production, the reception for the Anne Tyler adaptation A Slipping
Down Life was tremendous, but I can't help speculating that everyone must have been
as confused as I was. After an amusingly quirky first half, it goes absolutely nowhere.
The story follows a thirty-ish wallflower (Lily Taylor) who becomes obsessed with a
pretentious small-time rock singer by the name of Drumstrings Casey (Guy Pearce). This
odd couple is fascinating for a while, but as the love story becomes more
conventional, their motivations become maddeningly obtuse. Writer/director Toni
Kalem, a veteran character actress (Private Benjamin), gets good performances out of
her leads, who for a while convinced me they had characters to play. Pearce's extensive
musical performances, though, are almost embarrassingly silly--he's like some deadly
combination of Timothy "Speed" Levitch and Bono.
Had I read the plot synopsis for The Book of Stars more
closely, I would have avoided it like the plague. I mean, the main characters are a teenage
girl suffering from Cystic Fibrosis (Stepmom's Jena Malone) and her older sister
(Mary Stuart Masterson) who's (get this) a published poet leading a secret life as a hooker.
Amazingly enough, it turned out to be my third-favorite film of the festival, and if you're
more tolerant of earnest tearjerkers you'll probably enjoy it more than I did. Even when the
script, by 25 year-old Austinite Tasca Shadix, slathers on the symbolism with a trowel, it
feels honest, heartfelt--the work of a young writer, for sure, but an uncommonly sensitive
one. Director Michael Miner, whose sparse previous credits include writing
Robocop(!), finds just the right tone for the material; the movie's a glittering
jewel-box, hypnotic and gorgeously shot. If it sounds like your thing, don't miss it.
After the mob-scene outside, when hundreds of screaming festival-goers welcomed Matthew
McConaughey, Ron Howard, Woody Harrelson, Ellen DeGeneris and Anne Heche, Martin Landau,
Elizabeth Hurley, Sally Kirkland, and Lauren Holly to the gala premiere of
EDtv, the movie seemed beside the point. Comedies definitely benefit from
this kind of charged atmosphere, but all the hubbub couldn't hide the fact that EDtv
is a disappointment. The high-concept script, by prominent hacks Lowell Ganz and Babaloo
Mandel (Father's Day, City Slickers), has McConaughey playing a video store
clerk whose life is documented on an unedited TV show that airs 24 hours a day. Much
sitcom-level hilarity ensues, punctuated, of course, with some "poignant" (cue sappy music!)
claptrap. Right up to the astoundingly stupid ending, director Ron Howard plays it bland and
safe; it's the kind of film that makes fun of product placement while cramming the frame
with more logos than the Indy 500.
As you may have guessed, the title of Ken Loach's latest film,
My Name is Joe, is one-half of a mantra that concludes "...and I'm an
alcoholic," and to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the politically-minded Loach
(Ladybird, Ladybird, Land and Freedom), it should come at no surprise that
the movie's less interested in the hereditary legacy of alcoholism (recently explored so
intensely in Paul Schrader's Affliction), than in the disease's social causes--how
it worms its way into lives of desperation.
Set in a tough, poverty-stricken Glasgow neighborhood, Joe's working-class
hero is middle-aged, dole-drawin' Joe Kavanagh (Peter Mullan, from Braveheart), who
divides his copious free time between coaching the local soccer team and performing the
occasional under-the-table odd job. Joe's been on the wagon nearly
a year when, against his better judgement, he falls for Sarah Downie (Louise Goodall), a
community health-care worker who's equally hesitant to start a relationship. Soon the
stability a recovering alcoholic desperately needs starts to crumble.
For a while, Loach and his regular screenwriter Paul Laverty are content to expertly detail
life in the neighborhood. The film's surprisingly lighthearted first half is an engrossing,
if unspectacular, slice of Loachian naturalism, featuring Joe and Sarah's touchingly
awkward courtship and a great supporting cast of societal cast-offs, each wielding slang in
an accent so thick as to require subtitles (which Loach has happily supplied, à
la his 1990 film Riff Raff).
The film's rambling, observational style eventually gives way to more standard-issue
melodrama when Joe threatens his relationship with Sarah by performing a couple of favors
for a local crime boss (David Hayman) in order to help a troubled friend (David McKay).
I was initially dismayed by this overly familiar turn of events, but there's no denying the
climax packs a wallop, thanks to Loach's passionate direction and some stellar
acting from Mullan and McKay.
Mullan, who took the best actor prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival,
is absoultely unforgettable. Compact and muscled, he's an amazing physical presence, but
the triumph of his performance lies in the fact that although alcohol only makes rare
appearances in the film, its presence is felt in nearly every scene--it's in Joe's eyes,
and in the cautious way he moves. Mullan shows us, subtly, that Joe is fighting it literally
all the time. When his guard lets down a bit, it's utterly heartbreaking--a scene in which
Joe describes his violent past to Sarah is the most riveting narrated flashback since Ian
Holm's in The Sweet Hereafter. This is acting of the very highest order.
~.~
The troubled proles of Larry Clark's Another Day in Paradise are (not very
surprisingly--this is an American film after all) gorgeous, nihilistic petty criminals, with
old-school sleazy James Woods and Melanie Griffith acting as surrogate parents to a couple
of teen junkies (Vincent Kartheiser and Natasha Gregson Wagner) who look like they walked
off of the pages of Interview magazine. I'm about the only person I know who liked
Clark's debut film, 1995's Kids, and while Paradise continues Clark's
obsession with syringes and young male torsos, the addition of a tighter
narrative and the presence of icons Woods and Griffith, I'm afraid, only emphasize how
razor-thin his material actually is. Luckily, though, Paradise has Kids'
anarchic visual brilliance--for me, Clark and DP Eric Edwards' moody images
are reason enough to see this film. If you don't have a weakness for gritty, hand-held
cinematography, however, you may want to lower my grade a notch or two.
~.~
Brendan Fraser's likeable enough, I guess, and reasonably proficient at physical comedy, but
I'm definitely starting to get a little tired of his innocent, hunky fish-out-of-water
routine. I mean, even in last year's acclaimed Gods and Monsters, which was
generally considered a stretch into more "serious" roles, he pretty much played an innocent,
hunky fish-out-of-water. Blast From the Past is a comedy that I
imagine was written for Fraser. He plays a hunk who's lived underground his entire
life--since the late 1950s, when his cold-war-obsessed parents (Christopher Walken and Sissy
Spacek) descended into their time-locked bomb shelter under the impression that the Reds had
dropped the big one. When he emerges in present-day L.A., fish-out-of-water hijinks ensue.
Despite a lame romance featuring an uncomfortable-looking Alicia Silverstone, Blast
is blandly watchable, but perhaps notable only for the inspired pairing of Spacek, who shows
a nice flair for comedy, and Walken, whose typecasting I never seem to get tired of.
~.~
A pair of ensemble films with 26 featured characters and at least 12 separate plot threads
between them, Playing By Heart and 200 Cigarettes certainly
aren't lacking in ambition. Heart, the more successful of the two, is a wistful L.A.
romance that, for the most part, surveys several couples lookin' for love. Some
storylines are better than others, but the whole enterprise seems heartfelt enough to
deserve some slack. It's no Short Cuts, for sure, but at its best it's an agreeable
confection--sort of Alan Rudolph-lite. Sadly, the most seasoned actors in the movie,
Sean Connery and Gena Rowlands, provide one of the weakest segments, saddled with dialogue
that's clearly beneath their talents. More appealing are Gillian Anderson and Jon Stewart,
playing a wounded soul and Mr. Perfect, respectively, and Angelina Jolie, who
walks off with the movie (in fact, she nearly singlehandedly saves it). I've no idea whether
she's a great actress or not, but she's without a doubt a star. Playing a club-hopping
vixen with gleeful abandon, she jumps off the screen, emitting a certain honesty and
spontenaity that more reserved, TV-honed performers like Anderson and Stewart can't touch.
She even manages to make Ryan Phillippe seem appealing, which is no mean feat.
Cigarettes, which follows a host of twenty-something misfits on New Year's Eve 1981,
is pretty awful, a lame excuse to gather up a top-notch cast of rising stars and indulge in
some "edgy" comedy and cheap 80s nostalgia. The blame falls squarely on Shana Larsen, who
penned the atrocious script, and director Risa Bramon Garcia, who should probably keep her
casting director day job. The actors, at least, appear to be trying. The standout in the
large cast, for me, was Kate Hudson, who retains a certain dignity even though her virginal
princess is humiliated more often than a Todd Solondz character. It was also amusing to
watch Ben Affleck grapple with the most absurdly underwritten part I think I've
ever seen by pretty much playing himself, wondering what the hell he's doing on the
set.
~.~
Finally, I don't really have much to say about The Last Days. It's a Holocaust
documentary that tells the stories of five Jewish Hungarians who were among the last
people to be sent to concentration camps by the Nazis. It won an Academy Award for Best
Documentary this year. It's very well made, and a notch above last year's Oscar-winning
Holocaust doc The Long Walk Home. And it is awfully familiar stuff.