SXSW 2009: Day Three

Trying to take a snapshot crossing Congress Avenue with the Texas Capitol in the background... only my noggin's in the way.

Two days after my last post, here I am in San Diego, fully recuperated from a surprising amount of jetlag. The flight from Austin to the West Coast is only a bit more than three hours, but I conked out for 13 on the night of my return. Maybe it was all those Auntie Annie’s pretzels I ate in the airport terminal at the recommendation of Emily Blunt, who devoured one of the garlic twists a few nights ago on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” after discussing what a life-changing find they were for her while shooting the recent Sunshine Cleaning in New Mexico. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, if you thought you were looking for SXSW film festival coverage, you’ve come to the wrong place: The Bucket ‘Blog has now officially become a source for long-winded descriptions of simple foods I enjoy.

The festival closes tonight without me, with the Zooey Deschanel/Joseph Gordon Levitt romance and Sundance fave (500) Days of Summer. But SXSW keeps on rollin’ in my mind because I’ve got five more days of coverage to post for you people.

I was able to catch five films on Day Three of the festival thanks to one of the great time-savers employed by the SXSW crew this year: the screening library. Lodged in Downtown Austin’s Hilton Hotel, which is far more expensive than the place I’m staying, this small, dark room houses six small viewing terminals where we critics can select from a wide array of festival titles. I only took advantage of the opportunity the once—I didn’t fly 1,400 miles to miss out on the theatrical experience—but it was a great way to squeeze in two of the best films I saw all festival long.

In Breaking Upwards, New York twentysomethings Daryl (Daryl Wein) and Zoe (Zoe Lister Jones) struggle to break off their relationship because they’ve become dangerously codependent on one another as they’ve grown. First failing at a cold turkey separation, they decide to dedicate days they will speak to each other and days they won’t (“Tuesday? But that’s ‘Idol’ night!”). The results are even more destructive this way, of course, because the time has come for the couple to part ways and their need to dwell on what they had in the past only ends in an argument, heartbreak, or both. Things get even messier when Daryl and Zoe start seeing other people. The film is supposedly based off of Wein and Lister Jones’ real-life relationship, which explains the authentic performances, but it’s hard to believe the two experienced all this and still liked each other enough to make a movie about it.

That’s not to say that Breaking Upwards is a depressing, brooding deconstruction of the pains of relationships. Most of the time, the movie’s upbeat tempo mitigates a lot of the hurt that exists underneath this relationship, which is ultimately a good thing because it gets us to genuinely like these two so much that we care about their futures. In other words, the experience isn’t detached like those of many realistic “breaking up” movies. Breaking Upwards probably would have failed for most viewers had it been that way, too, because Daryl and Zoe aren’t instantly relatable as people given they walk and talk like the young, hip, and artistic New York Jews they are – not a demographic the movie-going masses know very well.

But Breaking Upwards ultimately succeeds on a universal level because its portrayal of modern American values and emotions is dead-on, no matter how distant the main characters may seem from one’s own life. Rarely has a movie felt so honest about what it means to love in the era of Facebook and Netflix, both of which receive their due amount of time. Daryl and Zoe are about as far from romantic-comedy characters as you can get – trapped in the conventional crux of co-dependency, but as real people trying to deal, not caricatures marching around farcically. And it’s great that the film is perceptive enough to realize that this reality involves, for instance, Daryl being a flagrant metrosexual who touts expensive, tight designer jeans. You wouldn’t see that in a studio film or even a “quirky” low-budget comedy. Nor would you see his mother’s reaction to said pants, which is a part of the film’s grander, no-bullshit discussion of Daryl and Zoe’s generation’s values as opposed to those of their parents. For a refreshing take on the love-gone-bad scenario with two surprisingly engrossing characters, viewers would be hard-pressed to do better than Breaking Upwards. Keep an eye out for it. 3 ½ Buckets out of 4.

Lake Mungo fooled me good. I didn’t know anything about the Australian ghost-story mockumentary when I popped it into the screening-library player—the film I intended to see wasn’t available—and, until looking at the movie’s IMDb page yesterday and reading that it featured actors, I believed it was all true. I gasped repeatedly in disbelief as it rolled, often horrified by what I was witnessing. While I feel more than a bit cheated now and I doubt I would’ve had the same strong reaction had I known it wasn’t real, it took an incredibly well-done movie to get me to buy some of the farfetched suggestions the characters make. I’m so in awe of writer/director Joel Anderson’s accomplishment that I’m hardly embarrassed admitting that I planned to write that the film’s only flaw was it too strongly resembled a CourtTV documentary as if to stylistically confirm is evident legitimacy.

Almost entirely through flashback “interviews,” the film tells the story of the Palmer family, which tragically loses its 15-year-old daughter Alice (Talia Zucker) in a drowning accident. A month later, they hear someone in their house late at night, only to then see the image of her ghost. The crazy plot-twists fly from there and while you won’t be left as dumfounded by them as I was because you’ll know the movie isn’t real as you watch it, I will still refrain from divulging them in an effort to preserve the movie’s effect.

Reflecting on the experience, I’m still befuddled by the fact that filmmaker Anderson got me to buy into the movie’s superior imitation of the documentary style. My response is a testament to the strength of the production values and performances, all of which are spot on. Lake Mungo is a reminder of the sheer power a film can have over the viewer when they see it without any prior knowledge. In fact, in writing this review, I’m no longer angry at the fact I got duped because the 89 minutes of sheer belief that the movie provided me, prolonged for days until I finally wised up and read something about it, made for a fascinating experience that got me to think about the story far more than I would have had I known it was fiction. I marveled over each twist and what it meant on narrative and social level. I considered the supernatural more than I ever had before. While some narrative movies are meant to be seen as fiction, many would be better if we thought they were real. Lake Mungo is certainly one of these movies and, while it would be irresponsible to review it as if it were a documentary, I wish I could because doing so could lead others to have similarly fascinating experiences watching it. 3 ½ Buckets out of 4.

After two exceptional movies, I suppose I was due for a bad one, and boy did I get it in the form of Tim Disney’s American Violet, the latest liberal guilt trip designed to expose racial injustice only to encourage further hatred and division among blacks and whites in the U.S.

No, I’m not about to doubt the movie’s legitimacy as a “true story.” But given what we know about media effects, I would assert that it marks a step backwards for racial tolerance, not the leap forwards that the cast and crew probably intended. It’s the year 2000 and Dee Roberts (Nicole Beharie) is an African-American single mom living in a Texas housing project with her four children. When a government raid sweeps the project, Dee is taken into custody for what she believes to be unpaid parking tickets, only to find out she’s actually being held on drug charges. Soon, injustice in the system is exposed: squeaky-clean Dee is offered a plea bargain for 10 years probation, a much better deal than she’d get if found guilty by a jury. Ya think a district attorney is looming in the background looking to better his crime credentials? If Dee accepts the deal like so many other women, she’ll be out of jail. But she’ll also be doomed to unemployment given her newfound criminal record. Enter ACLU Attorney David Cohen (Tim Blake Nelson), ready to save Dee from her rotten fate by taking on the corrupt legal process, as the ACLU has a time-honored tradition of doing (wink, wink). As Dee, David, and helping company try to get to the bottom of Dee’s arrest, they discover a long history of racial motivation in the D.A.’s office.

The film selectively uses a bad moment in recent history to show that racial problems still exist in America. The cause of promoting awareness is noble, but the issue will only get worse if filmmakers continue to depict it in such a stereotypical light. As is the case with all groups who are minimally represented in movies, each portrayal of African Americans is particularly important to how the group is seen by consumers of media. For American Violet to so clearly depict Dee as an innocent black victim helpless to the whims of a racist, deep-Southern government is deplorably regressive. These images are bound to make African-American audiences who racially identify with Dee to view whites (particularly those with Southern accents) as villains. Whites, myself included, are equally bound to have a visceral reaction to the material given that it promotes an utterly racist version of our group. (Sure, one could argue that the Tim Blake Nelson character and the former assistant D.A. who help Dee take on the system are both noble Caucasians, but they’re depicted as few-and-far-between progressives willing to tackle a long oppressive government power-structure). Alas, we have a movie that encourages racial tension, whatever its intention may have been.

American Violet’s technical elements are top-notch and the cast is full of excellent actors, but I would argue that these are not redeeming qualities because the more the movie looks like a mainstream piece of work, the more acceptable its dangerous intrinsic message becomes. Nonetheless, it’s worth noting that cinematographer Steve Yedlin, who worked on both of Rian Johnson’s films, is a heck of a talented guy. Buzzed-about lead actress Nicole Beharie also turns in exceptional work and is unbelievably beautiful. But American Violet, made by a Disney clearly racked with white liberal guilt, is not the movie that President Obama’s so-called “post-racial America” needs to succeed. 1 Bucket out of 4.

Luckily, the painful experience of American Violet was quickly quelled by a film with actually enlightening messages about race relations in America, even though it takes place almost entirely south of the border. Cary Fukunaga's first feature, Sin Nombre, captures the grit and brutality of life in Latin America far more authentically than this decade’s overrated critical darlings on the subject, Maria Full of Grace and City of God. Whereas those films sacrificed realism by indulging in overwrought stylistic techniques to convey their messages, Fukunaga’s film uses the drama of a traditional narrative arc to organically bring out the harsh realism of the material.

Sin Nombre interlocks two topical stories: that of a teenage Honduran girl’s treacherous trek to illegally immigrate to the United States and that of a young man running from the Mexican gang he rebels against. She’s Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), and she and her family are riding atop the freight train that Willy A.K.A. “El Casper” (Edgar Flores) has been assigned to pillage. The only problem: he’s transfixed by her and, already seeking a way out of his violent thug life, decides he’ll merely ride away from the past. If only things were that simple.

The way the various elements of the film balance drama and realism is its greatest asset. While Sin Nombre is as suspenseful as any cat-and-mouse story—Sayra and Willy become better and better friends as the gang gets closer and closer to catching him—it also provides all the insight of a documentary on immigrant journeys and gang activity south of the border. These are topics of endless discussion in the American political sphere and yet most Americans actually know very little about them. Early on in the film, Sayra’s father tells her that half of the train-riders will die on the way to the United States. The film depicts the journey in sobering detail, and yet it commendably stops short of becoming a political polemic, as was the case with Maria Full of Grace. In fact, the script fully recognizes that illegal immigration contributes to violent crime in the U.S.: running after him, Willy’s former gang members yell that they have connections in Los Angeles who will kill him if they fail to do so. Dramatized as it is, this passage is terrifyingly real because the gang is based off of an actual group called Mara Salvatrucha.

Perhaps the film’s unique, balanced style can be attributed to the fact that writer/director Fukunaga is American and made the picture thinking of U.S. audiences. While never preachy or naïve, Fukunaga goes to incredible lengths to enlighten the viewer on these topics, which is something an accustomed native filmmaker might not have done. Not to mention, he implements a distinctly American sense of drama, which works harmoniously with the story because it’s never overdone. However, my praise for Fukunaga’s work should not keep me from mentioning the great, raw performances from young actors Gaitan and Flores or the beautiful, lush cinematography from D.P. Adriano Goldman. Nearly every facet of Sin Nombre, one of 2009’s first must-sees, is as informative as it is intense. 3 ½ Buckets out of 4.

Had I been smart, I would have headed back to my hotel room to write and to get a healthy amount of shut-eye for the next day’s offerings. But I just had to stick around for Women in Trouble because of its all-star cast. I came to regret the decision enormously.

The dialogue in Sebastian Gutierrez’ farce is so obnoxious and attention-begging, it makes Tarantino seem as understated as Jim Jarmusch by comparison. An interlocking stories-formatted commentary on sex per the basic premise of its title, the movie is broad and not funny at all. Filmmaker Gutierrez shot it over about ten days and, because he didn’t need much of their time, was able to cast big stars who probably wouldn’t have otherwise even considered the dead-on-arrival script. But perhaps the inclusion of well-known names like Josh Brolin, Carla Gugino, and Marley Shelton is fitting because Women in Trouble mostly attempts graphic body-part jokes that would be right at home in the average hard-R-rated Hollywood sex comedy. (Like, oh my God, isn’t making obvious sexual references so funny?) Unfortunately for the viewer, this type of gag proves even more insufferable than failed attempts at indie edge you might expect from this low-budget a production. Because there is no reason to care about the caricatures, the fact that the goofy and humiliating plots they partake in aren’t funny renders the movie a painful experience. The only saving grace is that a few of the actresses make for nice eye-candy: when Emmanuelle Chriqui was onscreen, I was just bored as opposed to feeling like I was being stabbed repeatedly. 1 Bucket out of 4.

I probably could’ve recovered from the experience had I stuck around for the Midnight presentation of Sam Raimi’s much-awaited return to horror, Drag Me to Hell. But given it was an unfinished “work-print” and I had to be back at the Paramount bright and early the next day for an 11 a.m. “Super Secret Screening”, I decided to wait for the film’s May release instead.