SXSW2005–The Devil And Daniel Johnston/The City Of Lost Souls/The Ring Two/Dead Birds
“I am not your fucking mommy!”
THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON This is the first disturbed/schizophrenic musician documentaries that I saw at the festival. Besides this one (and the others that I saw) there was one about Townes Van Zandt (Be Here To Love Me) and one about Larry “Wild Man” Fischer (Derailroaded) one of Frank Zappa’s disciples. The Devil And Daniel Johnston is the best one that I saw, though.
Daniel Johnston is a bit of a local legend. He’s from Sacramento, but he got here as soon as he could…which for him was when he graduated from high school.
He had already started to show signs of schizophrenia early on, but it was never a big deal. But when he hit Austin and started doing drugs and getting a little bit of freedom things just started to go to hell. He started to make a name for himself by appearing on MTV (accidentally, really) and putting albums out by himself. He was writing dozens of songs a day and recording them in his own little “studio,” which basically consisted of a keyboard and a cheap tape recorder. He went to New York and things just got worse. Now he’s living with his parents because he’s unable to function on his own without a lot of help. He still makes music, though. And his old albums are selling as well as ever.
Jeff Feuerzeig has put together a great documentary using Daniel’s video and audio tapes of his own life. (Daniel is not only a musician, but he has documented his own life since high school and he had a tape recorder going for most of his life.) He shows us where his music, art and films came from and where his demons have laid their eggs. He manages to make a man who has been violent in the past (he hit his manager on the head with a pipe) and has been in and out of institutions one of the most sympathetic characters in music history. The truth is much stranger than the legend, but all of the legends are true, too.
I knew he was disturbed, but I didn’t know just how deeply it went. Now I wonder how he managed to make such great music while he was in such mental turmoil. He’s like Brian Wilson, but he’s gone further into the void than Brian ever did.
Daniel was at the screening that I attended, but he didn’t make it on stage. Feuerzeig had somehow managed to find Laurie, who is the muse behind a lot of Daniel’s songs. She was onstage talking about how she felt about being the object of his obsession for so many years. Off to the side I could see Daniel. It looked like he was not too happy about having her there. Or maybe he was too happy. Either way, it was sad to see him so conflicted. When he finally left the whole audience was heartbroken for him.
This film is coming out soon. Definitely check it out. It’s worth it. It might make you want to collect a new musical genius’s albums.
Takashi Miike has become one of my favorite directors ever. His films are so over the top and visually stunning and kinetic and…well, I’ll stop there. They’re just weird as shit and deserve to be seen by every lover of cinema.
Luckily, he’s starting to really catch on here in America. The Alamo Drafthouse and the Austin Film Society have been doing a retrospective of his films and, although I haven’t been able to make it to any of the screenings, I’m betting that they’re packed every night. They’ve actually been devoting two nights a week to Miike, making this the longest retrospective of his films ever done. Kick ass!
SXSW made sure that they didn’t interfere with the little mini-festival and, in fact, embraced it by making The City Of Lost Souls an official SXSW screening.
This is the third time I’ve seen this film and, while it still doesn’t completely make sense to me, I still love every minute of it.
Let me see if I can get some of the plot down here.
Mario (Teah) is a Brazilian gangster who is in love with Kei (Hong Kong star Michelle Reis), a Chinese girl who is being deported back to Hong Kong. Mario hijacks a helicopter in Brazil, saves Kei and takes her to Japan. (Yeah, that’s a lot of gas for one helicopter, but go with it.) Back in Japan, Kei’s ex-boyfriend is chasing after them with his gang of thugs. There are drugs and a Brazilian reporter gets involved to try to help the young lovers out. They’ve become something of a couple of heroes to the Brazilian population of Japan. (Apparently there’s a pretty large number of them there.)
So, we’ve got Yakuza, Triad and Brazilian gangsters running around Japan. And there’s a lot of violence and weirdness going on in the world.
Oh yeah, and there’s Matrix-style cockfights.
Yep, it’s Miike.
This may not be Miike at his best, but it’s the easiest one for a lot of people to stomach. (No lactating. No severed body parts. And no apocalyptic endings that make no sense.) And it’s one of his best, anyway. If only Gozu had been this good. It’s a really fun flick.
When the first Ring came out in 2001 it caused a huge sensation. Why is that? Well, it’s a great movie, but there was something more. There really hadn’t been serious horror film about ghosts who were actually trying to hurt people and actually killing people in a long, long time. Sure, The Sixth Sense and The Others came before and were pretty damn creepy, but those ghosts were pretty benevolent. Samara, though, was out to kill. She didn’t care who, just as long as she was fucking people up. And, just when you thought it was over, “NO! RACHEL!! Don’t help her! You’re not supposed to help her!”
So, since the movie was such a success, of course they wanted to make a sequel. There are three or four sequels in Japan and they’ve been pretty successful over there. Time to jump on the bandwagon!
But just to confuse things, let’s start with Rings, the short film that is now included on the DVD of the original that comes between the two longer films.
Jake (Ryan Merriman) is desperate. He’s just watched a tape and knows that he only has seven days to live unless he gets someone else to watch it. His friends have all watched it and they got him to watch it as part of a club initiation. He’s got a kid who is supposed to watch it after him, but he has to try to last as long as possible before he begs him to watch it. And he has to videotape everything that he sees. (Which is strange, because I don’t remember anyone seeing ladders in the middle of hallways in the first movie.)
Jonathan Liebesman (Darkness Falls) built up some good suspense and made a creepy little short film. Maybe they should have gotten him to direct the feature.
The Ring Two opens with Jake getting Emily to watch the tape with expected results. This, of course, wakes Rachel (still Naomi Watts) up out of her stupor of actually thinking that she and her son, Aiden (David Dorfman), are safe from Samara’s vengeance. In fact, she’s come to the small town that they moved to just to find Aiden. She wants him as a receptacle for her soul. And she won’t stop until he’s dead and she’s in his place.
It sounds like an alright premise, but it’s not taken anywhere by director Hideo Nakata, director of the original Ringu and its first sequel. Whereas Gore Verbinski kept the pace slow and deliberate, Hideo just keeps it slow. We’re never very interested in where Rachel is going or whether Samara even takes Aiden’s body over. In fact, Rachel is actually pretty stupid in this movie and I kind of wanted her out of Aiden’s life.
The one thing that worked pretty well was the sound design. There were a lot of little video glitches that worked pretty well as a disturbing element. It made me feel like I might be seeing something that I shouldn’t be. But the video itself that was so creepy in the first film was actually kind of lame this time out. And that’s the real crime of this movie: it almost kills the creep factor of the original.
Somewhere between Peckinpah and Lovecraft lie Dead Birds.
Ok, enough taglines. This is a pretty decent horror flick about Civil War criminals who rob a bank, kill kids and then get picked off one by one by the ghosts/zombies of the slaves and family of a mad scientist. The criminals (played by Henry Thomas, Patrick Fugit, Isaiah Washington, Michael Shannon, Mark Boone Junior and Nicki Lynn Aycox) are bad. They absolutely, positively kill every motherfucker in the place in a Wild Bunch-ian ballet of blood. And then, on the way out of town, they kill a little boy. Henry feels kind of bad about it, but he doesn’t dwell on it for too long. He now has to protect the gold from the badder bad guys in the group.
Oh, and there are really creepy looking zombies and ghosts running around killing everybody.
A lot of people complained about how the zombies looked. Why did the humans turn into these weird-ass dog looking things? Well, that was a detail that I could really over-look. This guys wasn’t just doing “let’s bring them back to life” type experiments. He was screwing around with evil forces that he didn’t really understand. He was reading incantations from a book that told him to take the guts out of his slaves and…do…something or other…with them.
That’s not really important. What’s important is the mood that director Alex Turner and writer Simon Barrett create with this little horror flick. It’s a doom piece. A horror movie that, while not perfect, is still pretty creepy at times with some really cool gore effects. It may not stick with you forever, but you’ll be thinking about it for a little while.
And it certainly did more with the gaping mouthed dead than freakin’ Ring Two.
