SXSW 01–Memento/Godass/Los Trabajadores (The Workers)

MEMENTO How would it feel if everyday you woke up and couldn’t remember what happened the night before? (I know, some of us have that feeling every morning anyway…but those people have problems of their own.) Or if you start a conversation and then can’t remember who or what you’ve been talking about for the past five minutes? Or maybe you looked into the face of some one that ten minutes ago you were falling in love with and suddenly you don’t even know that you had ever met them before?

That is the tragedy that is Leonard Shelby’s (Guy Pearce) life. No, he’s not an old man with Alzheimer’s. He’s a young man who has no short term memory. Basically, his RAM’s all screwed up.

And now he’s looking for the guy who raped and killed his wife. (Now we know that this isn’t Clean Slate.)

He’s got a couple of people helping him, but can he trust them? Hell, he can’t even trust the guy at the front desk of the motel he’s staying at. That guy has rented him two different rooms because he knows that he won’t remember which one he was in or even if he was staying there.

One of his friends is Teddy (Joe Pantoliano from The Matrix). He’s kind of a slimy looking guy, but he seems to really like Leonard. But is he really the one who committed the deed?

Then there’s Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss, also from The Matrix). She’s a beautiful waitress who has a problem of her own. She’s willing to help Leonard if he helps her with her abusive boyfriend. But is she playing him for her own sinister purposes?

The real help to Leonard are his pictures and notes. Ever since “the incident” he’s had his own portable memory. He takes pictures of everyone he meets and every important place he goes and writes a little note on it so that he remember who the hell they are. The really important stuff he gets tattooed on himself. But even these methods are necessarily trustworthy.

So basically this is a film noir in reverse. Literally. We start with the final scene and from then on it’s totally non-linear, much like The Limey. And then it ends with more questions than it began with. And, like The Usual Suspects, it works extremely well!

This was a great movie with more than just a cool gimmick. The script is very tight with no glaring holes in it that sometimes pop up in movies like this. (I’d have to watch it again to know for sure.)

And Guy Pearce was awesome. His character seems to have come to terms with his condition, but he’s also extremely pissed off by it. He can laugh at it, but there’s a hint of hatred for it in his jokes. (Go figure. But the jokes actually make this a very funny film as well as suspenseful and intriguing.) And his single-mindedness for getting his wife’s killer shows through all of it. That’s all he lives for. It’s part of his being.

Everyone else is also very good. But then Joe is always good and Carrie is turning out to be a pretty good actress who can do more than just shoot people and look cool in black leather.

I guess the most interesting thing about this flick is the fact that it teaches us not to trust our own memories. After seeing it my viewing buddy and I both felt like we were afflicted with the same condition that Leonard was.

Why do we rely so much on our memories? When the police get testimonies from people they will often get three or four different stories, sometimes from the same people. So, are our brains really that reliable? Well, no. But they’re all we really have. We can’t go around taking pictures of everything we see. (Although certain grandmothers give it a good try.) So we try to remember everything that we can.

And after seeing Memento you won’t take it for granted.

GODASS

Before you start to think that this is some perverted movie about blasphemous pornographers I’ll tell you this: the title really has nothing at all to do with the film except for the fact that it becomes the name of the lead character’s magazine.

Teri (Nika Feldman) is a young woman (we never really know how old she is) somewhere south of New York. She runs a little punk ‘zine in 1988 and interviews all sorts of “celebrities” for it. Her life revolves around the ‘zine so much that she sometimes forgets that she has a real life. When one of her friends tries to kiss her (and she seems to want him to), she stops him because she can’t be bothered with that right now. In fact, early on she figures out that she is probably a no-sexual–someone who will never have sex–because she had to watch one of her celebs suck his own dick. (For those keeping score, that’s two movies that I’ve seen during SXSW where a guy sucks his own dick, the other being Pornstar. Is this a new trend in movies? Let’s hope not.)

She and her two best friends, Kevin (Arik Roper) and Skank (Preston Miller), go with her to NYC to spread the ‘zine around. While there they get their car stolen and end up staying with Teri’s biological father (George Crowley) and his boyfriend (Fred Schneider–yes, the same one who sang about a love shack about 10 years ago). Teri’s not too happy about this because, of course, she’s a rebel and she hates her family. Although she desperately wanted her step-dad’s love, a man whose final thought about her was that he wanted her out of “that damn leather jacket.”

The story was interesting enough. Too bad the script and the acting SUCKED!!!! There really wasn’t a single redeeming performance in the entire film. Even Fred couldn’t play a gay guy in front of a camera.

If I were to say something nice about this film I guess it would be the attention to detail. Now, I didn’t live the punk life in the late 80s. (I was too busy trying to not be the quiet, fat kid in the back of the class. Let me tell ya, growing your hair out doesn’t do it.) But a few people who did live it said that it was exactly like this. Lots of parties, puking and rebellion. (That’s another trend this year. Lots and lots of puke on the screen. At least there were no gay cowboys eating pudding.)

I really wanted to like this flick because I liked the director, Esther Bell. (Do people still name their daughters Esther? I thought that went out with Ethel.) I didn’t actually meet her, but during her intro she just seemed like a rather insecure punk-ish chick who happened to be pretty cute. Extremely natural, too. She didn’t really seem to like being on stage, but she was happy enough to be there. That’s cool. Unpolished, a little uncomfortable, but still able to plug a casting call for her next movie.

Unfortunately I just couldn’t bring myself to like it. I guess it was directed well enough, but it just looked really bad. It reminded me of Whatever and Girl, both movies about punk girls in the rock scene and both very disappointing. This wasn’t even as good as those. In fact, those were Citizen Kane compared to this one. They at least made a little bit of sense.

Godass won the Festival Choice Award at the New York Underground Film Festival. Those people must have remembered what it was like to be a punk kid in the late 80s, because there’s no way that this movie would win any awards here. We take quality over subject matter.

LOS TRABAJADORES/THE WORKERS

I have to preface this with the reason for my watching this documentary. There is no way that I would have been interested, but it was directed by one of my old TAs from U.T. So, maybe it’s a bit of a conflict of interest that I write a review of it, but I guarantee that if I had thought that it sucked I still would have reviewed it honestly. I just wouldn’t have told her that I reviewed it. As it is I’ll probably e-mail her and let her know that she got a good review.

The Workers is a very short documentary about day laborers here in Austin. A while back the city decided to move their headquarters from 5th Street to somewhere off of 51st Street. Of course this pissed a bunch of people in the neighborhood nearby off.

What they didn’t realize is that these guys aren’t out for their daughters or anything like that. These guys are just working stiffs like you and me. In fact, they probably work harder because they have more at stake. They’re working for their families back home. A lot of them send almost all of their money back to Mexico.

So why are they here, you may ask? And I may answer, Because their government is full of a bunch of corrupt assholes who don’t care about their workers or their families. (Hey guys, we’re starting to know the feeling.) These guys may be illegals, but would you work in your own country if you were only paid $2/hour? Hell, no! You would probably run to Canada. They’re very proud of their homeland (one guy even makes his food the color of the Mexican flag), but they can’t work there. Pretty sad state of affairs.

Through Heather Courtney’s documentary we get to know some of these guys and their families. She took a trip to Mexico to interview one guy’s family after he went back for a visit. It’s a very emotional experience to hear how the family feels about him having to be away from them for so long and then how great it feels to have him back even for the short periods of time that he can come back.

The only real criticism that I have for it is that there were a couple of awkward editing choices. At one point she went to an establishing shot, cut to another closer shot and then went back to the same establishing shot. That could be chalked up to a cinematic typo, though.

Other than that, Heather has made a film that will make me think twice as I drive by the building where these guys hang out to get their daily jobs. They’re some of the hardest workers around and most of them are nicer than the people who were complaining about them coming to their neighborhood. (Most of those people have changed their tunes, by the way. They’ve met the guys and found out that they’re just normal folks like the rest of us.)

Hopefully someone like Sundance or IFC picks this up. People need to see films like this (especially in Texas and some of the other Southwestern states) in order to understand the culture that they’re living in.