SXSW 00–Around The Fire/Silver And Gold/High Fidelity/Rated X: A Journey Through Porn

This was the day of my mini-butt-numb-athon. (Apologies to Harry Knowles for stealing his phrase.) Four movies in one day. A personal record. And people wonder why I love Austin.

The day started off around five (I’m a late riser) with Around The Fire. In this one, Simon (Devon Sawa from Casper and Idle Hands) is a young man with a problem. He’s being literally thrown into rehab right at the beginning. He meets up with Kate, a (of course) sensitive counselor who uses tough love to get through to her “kids.”

Throughout his time in rehab, Simon flashes back to all of the good times he had while growing up. His mother died when he was very young. (Ok, so that’s not really a good time, but bear with me here.) So he pretty much grew up with his father and step-mother raising him. Then, when he went away to boarding school, he met his new best friends: Jennifer (the ultra-beautiful Tara Reid from American Pie and Body Shots), Andrew (Eric Mabius from Welcome To The Dollhouse and Splendor), Trace (Colman Domingo from the Clint Eastwood debacle True Crime) and Kevin (Henri Lubatti from Felicity). They introduce him to a Grateful Dead type tour and, of course, drugs. I got the feeling that he had never seen a bong before these guys came along.

Things degenerate, but Simon has a lot of fun. He starts a relationship with Jennifer (who wouldn’t?) and starts noticing that his friends deal as well as do.

Meanwhile, the home life isn’t getting any better. He resents his step-mom for taking his real mom’s place. He resents his dad because he married her. He keeps remembering walking towards a door with sex sounds coming out of it back when he was about three. Then there’s the fact that his parents just don’t trust him. After he got a week suspension from school for doing a bong hit the trust thing is just gone. Then they met his new friends at his graduation. They were hippies! God forbid! So they must be on drugs. And when he gets a package at home one day, WOW! They try to force him to open it in front of them because it must be drugs.

After a while even his friends start to worry about him. He starts dealing and ignoring Jennifer (MORON!!!!!) and they both have an explosive dinner with his parents. (And I’m talking Rebel Without A Cause explosive, not Blazing Saddles explosive.) What else do you expect from this family?

This movie doesn’t really offer anything new to the world. (Except for maybe the fact that hippies still exist in the original form at Grateful Dead concerts. Funny, I thought they had all learned from the mistakes of the past. And who still says, “I’m just gonna hang out over here and be mellow”?!?!) It’s not a bad little movie, but it’s predictable and not amazingly creative. But it’s full of good performances (including a really cool appearance by Stephen Tobolowsky) and might deserve a look on video. It’s opening in a week here in Austin and we’re supposed to go out and tell ten friends about it. Well, here’s my word: See it, but wait for video. It’s not worth $7. Silver And Gold is a concert video of one of the few 60s icons whose new albums still matter. (And Bob Dylan is a maybe on that list of two. When was the last time even the guys from Oasis said that Paul McCartney’s new album influenced them?) Ol’ Neil just keeps on truckin’ and puts out a great album every once in a while that even Pearl Jam can jam to.

This was the world premiere of this hour long film and Mr. Young was in attendance. I didn’t see him, but he was there according to the director. It’s nothing more than a straight concert video shot right here in Austin at the Bass Concert Hall. I’m not sure if it was shot for video or VH1 or what, but it exists and we’re probably better off for it. Neil is still in great form even if I didn’t recognize most of the songs. (There were really only three that I knew and I think only one from the old days. Sorry, no Heart Of Gold…he hates that song. He got quite a few requests for it shouted out by some morons in the audience. That is, until another audience member told him to shut up. Even Neil laughed at that one.) He just goes through the songs and only talks to the audience a couple of times: once to complain about the traffic (that got a big laugh from both live and filmed audience) and once to say what a great crowd they were. Otherwise it was just a one man show with him just blazing through a few acoustic versions of some great songs.

This was the first digital projection at the Paramount and it looked ok. Kind of like a really big screen tv. The sound, though, was amazing, mainly thanks to the sound system that Ron Howard and Matthew McConaughey helped put in for the EdTV premiere last year.

It’s really hard to critique these kinds of shows because all that really counts is the music. And with Neil Young, how can you go wrong? I guess some of us Southern men need him around, anyhow.

High Fidelity is the new Stephen Frears (director of The Grifters and Dangerous Liasons) and John Cusack movie. In this one, Cusack is Rob Gordon, and ex-DJ who now owns a record store that doesn’t get a whole lot of business. He and his co-workers, Dick (Todd Luiso from The Rock and Jerry Maguire) and Barry (Jack Black from The Cable Guy and The Jackal), know everything there is to know about music and most other pop culture. They spend their days making Top 5 lists of just about anything they can think of.

The movie starts with Rob’s girlfriend, Laura (Iben Hjejle) walking out on him. We’re not sure why until much later. But that’s not important right now. What is important is Rob telling us about his Top 5 Breakups. (He talks to the camera through the whole movie like some kind of nervous breakdown version of Ferris Beuller–not that that’s a bad thing.) In a style not unlike Loving Jezebel, he goes through each one and we get flash backs of what was so right and so wrong about each one.

Then, for the rest of the movie Rob tries to figure out where (if anywhere) he went wrong with those relationships and get Laura back. Did he just lose the love of his life? Were those other women really as perfect as they seemed to be at the time? Those questions will be answered next time on The Dork Is Right!

This movie is hilarious. I laughed from beginning to end without hardly any interruption. It may not be a great film or anything, but it’s so cool and so funny that that doesn’t matter. It entertained me (and the rest of the audience) for nearly two hours. That’s all that counts. And it had both John and Joan Cusack in it. That’s always a plus. And there’s small appearances from Lili Taylor, Catherine Zeta-Jones-erm-Douglas, Natasha Gregson Wagner, Sara Gilbert, Lisa Bonet and a great, but strange, part for Tim Robbins. Funniest thing I’ve seen him do since The Spy Who Shagged Me. Of course it’s the ONLY thing I’ve seen him do since then. Still very, very funny, though.

One thing that I loved about the movie is that these guys are me and my friends. We may not make Top 5 lists all the time, but we talk just like these guys. Everything is drenched in references and saying how stupid everyone else is for not liking what we like or liking things like Michael Bolton or saying that people who like Life Stinks are missing the point that at one time Mel Brooks was a genius, so his recent sins are that much worse. These guys are music elitists and, sorry, but so am I and so are my friends. We try not to, but we look down on people with bad taste. And so do you, you hypocrite. The quote at the beginning of my review is the story of my life. It’s my adage. We also deal with heartbreak or tragedy with our pop culture. We watch movies. We listen to music. We make tapes of music that will remind us of how we felt at the time so we can prolong that feeling. Why? Because we’re creatures of habit. In essence: we’re stupid.

Then there’s the way he obsesses over women. He thinks about it and thinks about it until it finally takes over everything that he does. That’s all me, too. Maybe I should keep that to myself, though. Forget I said anything.

In case you hadn’t figured it out, I loved this movie. There’s really nothing wrong with it, but I can see that it’s not for everyone; although, it seemed to be for everyone in this audience. Everyone had a great time. But I was disconcerted by one thing: why is it that, as John gets older, he looks more and more like Alan Rickman. And why is he wearing eyeliner? Ponder that as you’re watching the movie. And you will watch the movie. Because I told you to.

Rated X: A Journey Through Porn is, well, just that. One man’s journey through making a documentary about the porn industry. It’s part of the prerequisite porn trilogy that apparently all festivals have. And I thought it was just SXSW.

Dag Yngvesson picked up a porn movie when he was 13 and it started a love (lust?) affair with the genre ever since. Now that he’s grown up he’s decided to get a closer look at the industry that he found out was right in his backyard in San Fernando. With camera in hand he went to talk to the star of his first porn film, William Margold. William no longer acts in the films, but he is a producer. He, like Boogie Nights’ Jack Horner, tries to make the atmosphere more pleasant and familial for his crew. They really are one big happy family. Bill even has a bunch of teddy bears around his office to make people a little more comfortable. He also was one of the big factors in getting the Meese Commission out of the porn industry’s hair back in the late 80s. Kind of a porn Frank Zappa.

Dag gets most of his information from Bill, but he knows that he has to dig a little deeper and maybe even see the sleazier side of things (if that’s possible). He goes to Regan Senar (not sure if that’s right, but I have nothing to go on but my sketchy memory) and finds out that this guy has tapes of all of his starlets having sex with him as part of their interview process.

He also finds a director who is using porn as a stepping stone to legitimate film, a 19 year old girl whose family seems to be ok with her getting into porn films and a porn queen who happens to be happily married and have a young son. Of course she also has an ex-boyfriend who, during the course of filming, gets out of prison and an old drug habit that keeps threatening to come back. And there’s always the threat of “the AIDS” as the people in the film like to call it. What can be done? No one wants to use condoms in these movies, so there’s not much that can or will be done.

Near the end of the film, Dag is asked by the director on the rise if he would be the camera man on a shoot. Dag is, of course, nervous about it, but agrees. He sees how it could be addicting. Lots of money. Always a job to be had. Pretty easy work. What could be wrong with that?

Dag made a very good movie that partially exposes the porn industry for what it is (a sleaze market that also happens to be one of the biggest money makers in the world) and partially tells us how the films are made (we find out what happens when a girl has her period and we are prompted to ask the musical question, “Got milk?”). He shows a little bit of himself (no, not that little bit) and shows how he could be one of them if only he had the nerve. By doing that he shows us that we could even be seduced by it. Hey. Lots of sex and money! Sounds good to me.

Ok. I couldn’t do it, either, but there are a lot of people who could and do. Should we look down on them for it? Probably not. It is, after all, a job that keeps them off the streets…for the most part. And, besides, pretty much everyone uses their product. How many of you have never seen a porn film? Yeah. That’s what I thought.

By the way, if you’re wondering what the hell the German says on the High Fidelity poster, it basically says, “For 30 years I’ve been hearing people sing about broken hearts. And has it helped? Like shit it has.”