SXSW09 – Three Blind Mice (2008)/Number One With A Bullet (2008)/Best Worst Movie (2009)/DEVO
“Are we not men?”
THREE BLIND MICE
Directed by: Matthew Newton
Written by: Matthew Newton
When I read the description, Three Blind Mice reminded me of Dogfight, the River Phoenix film from 1989 about a group of Navy boys looking for the ugliest girls they can find before shipping out for Vietnam. Luckily, it’s really nothing like that at all.
Harry (Matthew Newton who also wrote and directed), Sam (Ewen Leslie) and Dean (Toby Schmitz) are being shipped out to Iraq for their second tour tomorrow morning. Before they go, they’re going to have some fun, though. Dean wants to meet up with his fiancee and her family for a night out. Sam wants to get over the embarrassment he faced while being hazed on the ship during the first tour. And Harry just wants to get laid. He also wants to get Sam laid, but that’s almost secondary.
Sam ends up meeting Emma (Gracie Otto), a waitress who is drawn to his shyness. They run off on an adventure of their own while the other two boys are left wondering where the hell he is.
The three leads are great and turn the three archetypes of this sort of movie (stiff, crazy, hurt) into human characters while Newton’s dialogue is quick, witty and sharp. He guides the story of friendship through all of the help and hurt that friends can do to each other.
The movie is nothing too terribly special, but it’s certainly worth seeking out. It’s a pretty touching story of friendship trying to survive. It’s certainly a long way away from the only movie that American audiences might know Matthew from…the cinematic abortion known as Queen Of The Damned.
Directed by: Jim Dziura
Written by: Jim Dziura/Joshua Krause
A few days ago, some friends of mine had a pretty long discussion over why SXSW doesn’t have more black films in it. Occasionally there will be a 5th Ward or a Medicine For Melancholy, but for the most part we just don’t see many black movies here.
Well, I think the screening of Number One With A Bullet pretty much told me why we don’t: the registrants just aren’t interested. There were maybe 30-40 of us at the Paramount for the only screening of this film. I felt really bad for the director, producer and 40 Glocc, one of the rappers who was in the movie. They all showed up expecting a huge turnout and, instead, saw a sad lot of us who were probably looking more for a freak show than anything else. The Q&A session was a little bit sad. I think the girl who introduced the movie had more to say than the audience did. I really think that, if the audience ever actually noticed that there were no black films, the Festival may do something about it.
But it’s not like it’s only SXSW that has this problem. I can’t remember the last time I saw a black film at Telluride that wasn’t from a foreign country. So it’s probably a problem with indie festivals everywhere. Are black filmmakers trying to get into festivals without the words “black” or “African-American” in their titles? Somebody tell me because I don’t know. I would like to see this change, but it’s going to be hard if both sides of the river don’t try harder.
And, just so you know, the same was apparently also true of Spike Lee’s screening of Passing Strange. There were very few people there. Of course, that could just be because people are tired of Spike, having nothing to do with the fact that he’s black and more to do with the fact that he’s always angry. When he was turning that rage into great films like Do The Right Thing and Malcolm X, it was fine. Now he’s doing movies that anyone could do, like Inside Man and Miracle At St. Anna and the occasional documentary that no one but Oscar sees. (I would actually like to see some of them, but I’m never depressed enough.)
Anyway, let’s get back to the movie.
I am not a hip hop fan. I never have been and probably never will be. There are a couple of artists that I like, but they tend to be funny as opposed to all about violence. (Well, ok. Eminem is all about violence…but it’s funny violence. For the most part.) But I have a really good friend who loves hip hop and has tried his best to make me understand what it’s all about. He’s a big reason why I went to this movie. (That and it filled a slot.)
Number One With A Bullet is a documentary about gun violence and hip hop. Why are hip hop artists always screaming about guns? Why do they kill each other? Why are their fans so violent? What the hell is going on in this world?
According to director Jim Dziura and producer Joshua Krause, it’s not because of the music. (But we smart people knew that.) The music is a direct result of the violence, not the other way around. These kids have grown up in a society that seems to be built around guns. Instead of learning to get over something or hold up those violent feelings, they let them out. They pop a cap. They let their basest instincts take over. Someone hits you with a snowball accidentally? Go home, get your gun and shoot them. Oh, you’re just a kid? Too bad. You’re dead.
Dziura interviews a lot of rappers (including KRS-One, who is pretty awesome and Ice Cube, who started this gangsta shit…with fake guns on the album covers, studio execs (including the head of Ruthless Records…who is a greedy old white man), community leaders and, most effectively, doctors from West Philly who see about one person a day come in with gunshot wounds. Usually, they die. This doctor brings kids into the ER to show them exactly what happens. And this may be the only way to get through to these kids.
The movie doesn’t give answers. It only shows the problems that face all poverty-stricken kids these days and how it just gets worse. These kids shoot each other, go to the hospital and are just set right back out there again. According to the doctor, they suffer from the same post-traumatic stress syndrome that soldiers in Iraq suffer from, but they don’t get any treatment. That’s a BIG reason why the violence just increases.
I have one solution: get rid of the fucking guns! Send someone into these neighborhoods to buy up all of the guns that these kids have. There’s only one thing that guns are good for: killing. They say that they get them for protection. That’s bullshit. And I say this to anyone who has a gun that they didn’t buy for hunting. White, black, green, yellow, whatever. It’s not for fucking protection. It’s to say, “Fuck with me. Please! I WANT YOU TO!” Once you put your money in front of a gun dealer, that’s what you’re saying. You want someone to fuck with you so you can shoot them. That’s all there is to it and no amount of protesting will make me believe otherwise. This is why I will never own a gun. Because, guess what kids: Most likely, it won’t happen to you. And, if it does, having a gun won’t help you. It’ll just make you dead with your hand wrapped around a gun. The end result is the same.
So, yes. Fuck guns and the horse they rode in on. They are absolutely the worst invention in man’s short history. Worse than the atom bomb because, without them, there would be no atom bomb.
Sorry. Got off on a bit of a rant there, but it’s something I feel pretty passionate about.
Number One With A Bullet is a very good documentary that, I’m afraid, no one will actually see. All the wrong people are interested in things like this. We need this kind of movie to play in inner cities. It needs to play in Compton and Detroit. Kids who look up to hip hop artists need to see it. Maybe it would change some of their minds, not about the artists or the music, but about their lives. Unfortunately, they will never be interested in a documentary. This is why cynical movies like Soul Plane and the Madea movies will always outgross good movies that actually have reasons to live.
Directed by: Michael Stephenson
Written by: Michael Stephenson
I’ve never seen Troll 2, but I may need to remedy this situation. It could possibly be the worst film ever made, but everyone loves it. Like Ed Wood’s opus, Plan 9 From Outer Space, it was made by someone who knows and loves film but, for one reason or another, made every mistake known to man on this film. The acting is atrocious. The dialogue is diabolical. The direction is dubious (at best). And the logic is lacking.
(Like my alliteration?)
Most of the actors have done their best to distance themselves from the movie, with good reason. They are all, across the board, terrible. They have probably done better, but they certainly couldn’t do worse.
Michael Stephenson is one of those actors. He played Joshua Waits in the movie and has pretty much given up his acting career. Luckily, he hasn’t put the film too far behind him. When he heard that it was a cult phenomenon the likes of which only Tim Curry has seen before, he knew that he had to tell the story. So he got a small camera crew and started to seek out all of the people involved in making the movie.
This is where Best Worst Movie become The George Hardy Show. George played Joshua’s dad in the movie and is, quite possibly, the worst actor in it. But he’s such a nice guy in person that everyone just has to love him. He’s a dentist in a small Alabama town now and hardly anyone knows that he once had this secret life as an actor. (The only other screen credit he has is Street Team Massacre, which played the Austin Film Festival in 2007.) He is absolutely the star of the documentary and it kind of shows him going from genuine nice guy to overbearing bore who wants everyone to know that he was in a movie. But at least he can admit to his limelight hunger.
Best Worst Movie is a heartfelt tribute to one cast’s 15 minutes of fame. Troll 2 is so bad that it’s good and a lot of people love it for that. The cast travels around occasionally to showings across the country and still have a lot of fun doing it. And, really, who can ask for more than fun from a movie like that.
Michael is looking to get a DVD release with Troll 2 as a double disc set. That would be pretty awesome. I hope that people can check this movie out soon.
If you had told me 10 years ago that I would be seeing Devo in concert, I would have thought that you were crazy. And if you had told me that they would be so amazing in concert, I would have punched you in the nose, because you obviously weren’t real.
I consider myself a Devo fan, but I don’t know all of their songs. This means that a lot of the songs that they played were pretty much unknown to me, but I knew the key tracks and that’s all that matters, right?
Mark Mothersbaugh, the genius behind the band, is paunchy now, but still in great voice. (Well, as great as he ever was, meaning that he still sounds geeky and thin…and that’s awesome.) Devo was all about the devolution of music and human life into the spuds that we always knew we wanted to be. And the message wasn’t lost in the set tonight.
What I didn’t expect was such a punk rock explosion of sound. These guys are mainly known for their synths and robotic rhythms, but the guitarist pulled out some screeching solos and showed us all exactly where their music came from in the first place.
They got the big hit, Whip It, out of the way right around the midway point and, not too surprisingly, people started to leave soon after they played it. Too bad for them, because Devo were just getting warmed up. They blew through probably about 20 songs in the hour that they played, including all of the big “hits.” (Whip It really was their only true hit. The rest were VERY minor.) Peek-A-Boo, Girl U Want, Freedom Of Choice, Jocko Homo. All of them sounded amazing in the live environment of the Austin Music Hall.
The boys weren’t quite as robotic as I thought they would be, but they did a bit of the old schtick. (My favorite was when the four mobile musicians–the drummer couldn’t go too far–stood together in a spotlight as if they were characters from Metropolis.) They had a few costume changes, too. They started in road crew vests, changed into the familiar jumpsuits and flower pot hats and then stripped down to wind shorts and black Devo t-shirts.
They ended the show with Booji Boy singing Beautiful World. Booji Boy is a weird creature that sings in a high pitched voice and plays what looks like a tennis racket with a calculator and a Donald Duck head stuck to it. It’s great.
If Devo ever comes to your town, go see them. They are still a great live band. I can only hope that they put out a good album again. Apparently their last few in the 90s were pretty awful. But their time in the sun, brief as it was, was great. No one deconstructed music better.
