SXSW 01–The Journeyman/Atomic Ed And The Black Hole/No Early Birds

It’s that time of year again. Time for a bunch of us film geeks and music morons to run around at break dick speed trying to see as many movies and bands as possible before the whole thing ends and our badges turn back into what they are: useless pieces of paper wrapped in hard plastic. On a string. Yes, it’s time again for South By South West.

Now, some of us are smart enough (dumb enough?) to realize that you don’t have to buy the damn things. Yes, we are the few, the not so proud…the idiotic. The Volunteers.

But, you what? Screw that. I always have fun with it. It’s a nice change from real work and, while I still have to work with pretentious assholes at times, these people can actually help me with my career if I kiss their asses with just enough tongue.

So let’s start with the festivities!

When I heard that there was a new spaghetti Western shot by a local dude playing the festival, I got so excited that I nearly broke my neck trying to tell everyone about it. And that was before I saw it. That’s how much love those flicks.

THE JOURNEYMAN

When I heard that it had Willie Nelson and Barry Corbin (Northern Exposure and WarGames…oh, and a little thing called Lonesome Dove) in it I was doubly excited. This local kid actually got a living legend and another really cool actor to be in his first feature! How cool is that? Add to that that he also got a great character actor John Beasley (The Apostle, Crazy In Alabama) and you should have a recipe for something that could bring back the Western as we know it.

When I heard that it was shot on digital video I started to get worried. How’s that going to look? Everybody knows that even digital doesn’t look nearly as good as film when it’s projected onto a movie screen (or any screen for that matter). But I understand. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper. Hell, that’s what I’m going to shoot on if I can ever get the damn camera.

But a Western has to be beautiful. It has to have expansive landscape shots, epic sweeps…you know, the works.

Well, it looks like my internal warnings were warranted. What director John Crowley got was a movie that would have looked great if it were on film. There were lots of sweeping shots, but they were all marred by the fact that when you move a shot on video the whole thing blurs. And it’s just not as clean as film. The colors were a little wacked up.

Storywise it was alright. Two brothers see their father (played by a WWWAAAAYYYYY under-used Willie….and let’s not make any jokes about that last line. This is Willie NELSON we’re talking about. Show some damn respect.) get brutally murdered by a group of gun men led by Barry Corbin. He didn’t do that actual shooting (and, in fact, was pretty pissed that it happened), but he didn’t do much to reprimand the guy who did it.

Soon after it happened the two kids ran to the outhouse and hid until the older one (who was always pretty cruel to his little brother until this day) made his little bro get in the hole and he ran out to distract the killers. They drag him off (literally) and a preacher eventually finds the other kid in the outhouse.

Thirteen years later we see a robbery go horribly wrong. Pretty much everyone gets killed except for the supposed leader of the crew (Dash Mihok from The Thin Red Line), who is badly injured, and one especially crazy young man who looks a bit like death warmed over. (Mostly because of an intense morphine habit.) He starts the killing spree and the local law (led by Barry Corbin who has apparently turned over a new leaf) finishes the job.

The film then turns into a kind of cross between The Searchers and one of Clint’s Westerns. The psycho’s brother shows up in the town soon after the bloodbath chasing after him. He ends up on the hunt with Barry and his boys (which includes Willie’s killer), but soon goes off on his own. Dash also gets into the action because he realizes that a)what he’s been doing is wrong and b) what this psycho is doing is wrong. He’s out to kill the son of a bitch who double crossed him…but no more lawlessness.

So the story is almost spaghetti, but stylistically it’s very conventional. A real spaghetti Western would have weird angles, extreme close-ups, Mexican stand-offs…none of which did this movie have. No feeling of Clint at all.

In fact, not much feeling at all really. The story was interesting, but it didn’t seem that Crowley really knew how to get the emotion of it onto film…or video. Only occasionally did that come out.

And most of his actors didn’t help. Yes, Barry was great. Yes, Dash was pretty cool in another crazy, comical role. Beasley was good in a very strange role. (Was he supposed to be part Mexican? Is that why he kept speaking Spanish? Funny that he’s a black man.) Willie was alright as the dad, but we didn’t really get a chance to know him since he got blown away within the first ten minutes. And the guy who played the evil brother wasn’t bad. (He did pretty well with those overly surreal drug scenes, which actually seemed to work.)

But everyone else was just kind of there. The guy who killed Willie was by turns comically stupid and supposedly menacing. I was never menaced and I didn’t laugh too much at his antics. I just kind of wished that he would go away. (Granted, that’s as much a problem with writing as with acting, so we can blame Crowley and the actor for that.) Nothing much in the way of actors here. I guess that’s what you get when you get gay porn actors to be in your movie. (Don’t ask. It’s on the IMDb. Funny what you find there.)

So not too great of a start for the festival or the director. It certainly wasn’t a bad movie (and the morphine addiction was an interesting twist…you don’t get much of that in Westerns), but not a very good one, either. Kinda boring at times. The best scenes were the ones with Barry yelling at his crew because every one of them was dumber than the next.

ATOMIC ED AND THE BLACK HOLE

How do you live with the fact that you helped build something that killed millions of people within seconds and thousands (millions?) more over the next fifty years?

That’s the rather lofty question that this little documentary short tries to answer by documenting the life of Ed, an old man in Los Alamos, NM who used to work at the nuclear plant during WWII. Now he collects bits and pieces from the plant (only the non-radioactive ones, of course) and keeps them in his shop (The Black Hole) to remind him and the world of something that should never happen again. Some of the things, though, he won’t sell because he plans on opening a museum to cut through all of the Big Science (“with a capital B and a capital S” as one of the people at the actual Los Alamos museum says) behind what happened back in the 40s when those bombs were dropped.

But remember, this is a comedy! Yes, even with that question, this is very funny. This guy and his friends are a little crazy, and they seem to know it. That’s what makes this totally celebratory instead of it poking fun at the guy. The filmmakers agree with the old man, but they still want to have fun, much like the guys who made Hands On A Hardbody and American Movie.

This is a great short that, unfortunately, will never be seen by a general audience. Hopefully someone like IFC or Sundance Channel picks it up and shows it on a rotation for a while.

NO EARLY BIRDS

Along those same lines is this little documentary about Garage Sale Culture.

We follow two garage sale hunters, Roxanne and Dale, on their treks through the streets of Austin, TX as they search for the perfect piece of junk that will be their treasure. These people get on the road before sunrise (in scenes that are almost unwatchable because their just too damn dark!) and start the search in order to be the first to get to the garbage.

Roxanne has good reason to do this, if a bit of a greedy reason. She collects the stuff for her store, Curiosa?, which I pass by all the time on 5th Street. I was always a little curious (ha ha ha) about it. Now I know it’s just a junk shop. I wonder how many customers Roxanne loses because of this flick. Dale just does it because he wants to replace stuff that he’s sold because he “got broke.”

Along the way we also meet a guy whose parents died, the rather condescending estate sale coordinator that he hired, the parents’ next door neighbor and an old man who is just about the worst packrat I’ve ever seen. The path through his house is so thin that the filmmakers almost couldn’t get the camera through. The walls are cluttered with stuff that’s hanging from lines. He had to dig to get the phone. It literally looked like a junk yard. I couldn’t even tell that it was a house.

This one is a little more sarcastic and less forgiving than Atomic Ed, but it’s no less funny. This could very well be the next Hands On A Hardbody. And, like its predecessor, it shows a side of America that we don’t really know about. Something that we don’t really pay much attention to. Something that’s out there. Really out there.

One note: most Austinites are not like the people in this movie. In fact, there are quite a few of us sophisticates out here. You know, the kind of people who will wait until they are alone to pick their noses.