SXSW10-Ain’t In It For My Health (2010)/The Runaways (2010)/Monsters (2010)

AIN’T IN IT FOR MY HEALTH

Directed by: Jacob Hatley

The Band is one of the most important bands in rock history…all basically off of two albums: Music From Big Pink and The Band. After that, they started to fall apart, still putting out the occasional good music (their third album, Stage Fright, is actually really good), but never matching the majesty of those first two albums.

Although they were at their best as a collaborative unit, most of that can be attributed to Levon Helm and Robbie Robertson. As the only American in the band, Levon gave Robbie all of his ideas for those first two albums. Robbie, however, wrote the songs, so he got all of the royalties. Meanwhile, Levon has to have a fundraiser every year to pay his mortgage, taxes and medical bills.

He doesn’t live his life in bitterness, though. There’s certainly some of that there, but it only shows its ugly head when he’s talking about how the music industry ignored his good friends and former bandmates, Richard Manuel and Rick Danko until after they died. He is (finally) given a lifetime achievement Grammy, but what of Richard and Rick?

Director Jacob Hatley obviously has great affection for Levon and was given amazing access to the man’s life. Levon has been battling throat cancer for a few years now and Jacob followed him to some doctor’s appointments. We also see some of his performances in his house and home studio, including an amazing rendition of Bruce Springsteen’s Atlantic City.

So far, this is the best film I’ve seen at the festival. It may even be better than Scoresese’s Last Waltz, the concert film of The Band’s last concerts. While The Last Waltz was an amazing film, it was also self-indulgent and very self-congratulatory. Ain’t In It For My Health is just a portrait of a very important musician in the twilight of his life still doing some amazing things and doing his best to come to terms with a turbulent past. It’s a great, great film.

THE RUNAWAYS

Directed by: Floria Sigismondi
Written by: Floria Sigismondi
Based on book by: Cherie Currie

Joan Jett, Cherie Currie, Lita Ford, Sandy West and Jackie Fox. Only a couple of those names mean very much to most people, but real music fans know them as The Runaways. Although they only made a blip on the charts and were, basically, prefab, they were an extremely important step on the road to real women rockers. Before them there were some female role-models in rock, but no all girl bands at all that anyone cared about.

Then, all of a sudden, there was Cherry Bomb. These five little girls (and they were little, all around 16 at the time) recorded an ode to sex and teasing that exploded out of the speakers of an unsuspecting society. The girls and their manager/promoter/producer, Kim Fowley (played perfectly in the movie by Michael Shannon) kept it up for a little while with some pretty constant personnel changes, but the formula never changed until they broke up in 1979 with Joan going on to international fame with the Blackhearts. (The Runaways didn’t do much, chart-wise, in America, but the Japanese caught on big time.)

Now, there’s a movie.

Floria Sigismondi’s film is a VERY condensed version of what actually happened and is basically The Joan And Cherie Show. Joan (Kristen Stewart) is the rebel. She pretty much lives on the streets (we never see her family), huffs paint and really wants to play music. Cherie (Dakota Fanning) is the princess who is in love with glam rock. She rocks out a school talent show with Bowie’s Lady Grinning Soul. The school, of course, had no idea what to do with her. Neither did her mom (Tatum O’Neal). Joan meets Kim. Joan and Kim meet Cherie. History is made.

A lot is made of Joan’s bisexuality and Cherie’s eventual descent into pills and coke, but we never get a sense that it’s an actual band. Lita Ford made a name for herself, but she’s barely in the movie. (She’s played by Scout Taylor-Compton from the Halloween remakes.) A big part of this problem is the fact that the other three band members didn’t give full permission for their characters to be in the film, strangely enough. In fact, Jackie is now “Robin,” played by Alia Shawkat from Arrested Development.

Like Backbeat and Control before it, the movie tries its hardest to make a case that the other band members don’t really matter in the story. For Backbeat it worked. For Control, it may have been a better film if they had focused at least a little bit on the other guys, but it’s still a very good movie. For The Runaways…I don’t really know. I feel like we were really cheated out of another story this time. Sure, Joan and Cherie were very good friends and, possibly, the backbone of the band…but they went on without Cherie for a while. I would have liked to have seen more of Lita, since she’s more of a name than Cherie.

All of this isn’t to say that the movie is bad. It’s not. It’s pretty good. Not amazing, but definitely worth checking out if you’re a fan of grrrl power. (They even say, “We put the ‘grrr’ in girl!” Hmmm…) The performances are all fine, with Shannon and Fanning being the standouts. Kristin Stewart is very good, but she’s almost playing the same role that she usually does, just without the lip biting and more kissing of girls. She’s still very broody and quiet. (She’s also painfully shy. During the Q&A, she was constantly trying to make herself as small as possible on that big stage.) She’s good at that, I really hope that she gets to break out at some point and show us that she can do something else.

Dakota, on the other hand, is playing completely against type. She’s no longer everybody’s vulnerable little girl with the big eyes. She still is to an extent, but she’s a drug-addicted, bisexual, rocker girl now, and the role fit her just fine.

The real powerhouse, though, is Michael Shannon. The guy’s amazing, as always. Kim Fowley is a bigger than life character and Michael embodies him with all of his heart and soul. He yells and screams at the girls, but you can see that, underneath it all, he loves them and wants them to be the best that they possibly can be. It’s hard to imagine anyone else taking that role on and doing it as well as he did.

As dark as it gets at times, it is a fun film with a lot of really good music. (The girls play their own music at some points and do a great job of redoing the old songs. Apparently, Joan mistook Kristin for herself when she heard the playback.) It’s a bit more episodic that it maybe should be, but Floria’s background as a music video director probably made that more apparent than it would have been otherwise. (In a circle of fate moment, she directed a couple of videos for David Bowie.)

If you have the slightest interest in mid to late 70s punk, check the movie out. It did its job and made me want to check out some of The Runaways and Joan Jett’s music.

MONSTERS

Directed by: Gareth Edwards
Written by: Gareth Edwards

A few years back, Gareth Edwards got the idea to make a monster movie. Then Cloverfield came out. He knew that he couldn’t do it then, because it would be seen as a copy. So, he waited a while. Then, just as he was ready to try it again, District 9 came out. Dammit! That’s when he decided, to hell with it. I’m gonna do it anyway.

Luckily, he did.

Andrew (Scoot McNairy) is an intrepid photo journalist investigating the “infected area” of Mexico where a bunch of extraterrestrial monsters have been wreaking havoc for the past six years. The US has built a wall all along the border to keep the monsters out, but a lot of people are wondering if that’s enough.

Samantha (Whitney Able) is the daughter of the guy who owns the paper Andrew works for. She’s in Mexico for…um…I’m not really sure why. But she’s there and she needs to get home to her fiancee. It’s up to Andrew to get her there.

When his attempts fail one by one, he decides that he has to go with her to make sure that she’s safe as she crosses the infected zone by land instead of the seemingly safer water route. Along the way, they may be starting to grow on each other.

At first, I wasn’t really interested in seeing this movie. I read the synopsis and saw that a guy named “Scoot” was in it and said, “pass.” Then I started hearing about how good it was, so I figured I’d give it a try. I’m glad I did. Gareth and his tiny crew improvised their way through the entire film, shooting about 400 hours of film. His editor, Colin Goudie, had a LOT of work to do. He worked alongside Gareth who was doing all of the CGI effects…by himself…on his laptop…teaching himself how to do it along the way.

All I have to say to that is, “WOW!” The effects were fucking amazing and there were a LOT of them. Even shots that didn’t seem to have any effects, had them. All of the signs and murals were CGI. A lot of the set dressing was CGI. And, of course, the monsters, which look like HP Lovecraft’s version of octopi.

There is, of course, a lot of political stuff going on here with the wall between Mexico and the US, but Gareth really cared more about the romance than he did the politics. In fact, he and Colin never really talked about politics at all during the making of the film, which is really surprising. But it did help to make the romance very believable. (Something that also helped is that the two leads were falling in love as the filming went on.)

The only problem I had with the film I didn’t even actually notice until a friend pointed it out: the British filmmakers obviously don’t know a lot about Mexico. There are no jungles or pyramids along the US-Mexico border and any sign made by a Mexican citizen would probably be in Spanish, not English.

Other than that, this was a great film. It’s a bit slower than your typical monster movie, but give it a shot. It’s definitely a thinking man’s monster movie.