sxsw film pass day four

Yesterday's films kicked my ass. I saw three, and strangely they had a theme running through them which was SUICIDE. Two of them were documentaries, and the other I thought was a documentary until the very moment the dead actors appeared onstage. I'm not giving anything away here, except my own ignorance; it says clearly on the website that the film was a Narrative, but I didn't see that until after the fact, so I felt sick to my stomach, thought I might puke up my black bean burger, fries and root beer. So, yay, that was effective.

Film #5, Crawford.

Just a short time before George W. Bush announced his intentions to run for the Presidency, the New Haven-born hopeful bought a ranch in tiny Crawford, Texas. From this suitably folksy pulpit, he engineered that down-home, aw-shucks presidential campaign persona that captivated/divided the nation, and then there were those hanging chads and...well, you know the rest. CRAWFORD follows, through the eyes of the town's citizenry themselves, the crazy arc that accompanied two subsequent presidential terms: the press corps filming the same appropriately rural hay bale over and over again, the proliferation of Bush souvenir shops, flocks of tourists, and, later, the arrival of Cindy Sheehan and 20,000 riled-up protesters. The film is an examination of what happens when a town of 705 is thrust into the spotlight, and the irrevocable growing pains that linger in town long after the fuss has died down.

It was a rainy day yesterday, so I guess that was a theme too. There were scenes of rain in all of the movies I saw. Pretty cool how that all tied together. The Paramount Theater (which seats about 1,500) wasn't very full because of the weather and the fact that it started at 11 a.m. the Monday morning after the clocks sprang forward. I was okay with that, got to sit in the best seat in the house.

This is a good movie. I don't want to say more about it than that because I know it'll be coming around again and most of my four readers probably don't want to hear a spoiler about it.

Film #6, A Necessary Death.

"Documentary Filmmaker looking for suicidal individual to follow from first preparation to final act." Cut from 142 video tapes, this project sheds light on the tragedy following the infamous internet ad.

That's all they give you in the synopsis. If you look up under the title of the film, it says "Narrative Feature," but I watched hundreds of previews when I was making my decisions about what to see, I didn't have time to read every word on every page. I seriously didn't know it was a narrative film until the actors were brought out afterward. But by that time I'd already been affected, my heart racing, my stomach heaving. I had to come home and sit for a while to try to process it. This was one film I really wished S had seen with me, because I needed somebody to talk to on the way home.

This same thing happened to us recently when we went to see a movie called Woodpecker, which is also in this year's festival, but we saw a work-in-progress version of it a couple of months ago. Even though the viewing we went to was part of Austin Film Society's "Narratives-In-Progress" program, S and I were both shocked to find out that it was not actually a documentary. Neither of these films are actually "mockumentaries" in the style of Best In Show or Spinal Tap, but I think this is a new thing, this narratives-presented-as-documentaries style of filmmaking.

In some ways, maybe I'm paying the price for having spent ten years pretending I actually was the character I played onstage, the lucky green dress-wearing nephew of a trailerhome salesman from Okey-Dokey, Texas. Fans that we made friends with more often than not said they were "crushed" or something along those lines when they found out that the characters we played onstage and the stories we/I told were not fact. Hm...

Film #7, Dear Zachary.

On the evening of Nov. 5, 2001, Dr. Andrew Bagby, 28, was murdered in a parking lot in western Pennsylvania. The prime suspect, his ex-girlfriend Dr. Shirley Turner, promptly fled the United States for St. John's, Newfoundland -- where she announced that she was pregnant with Andrew's child. She named the little boy Zachary. Filmmaker Kurt Kuenne, Andrew's childhood friend, originally began this film as a way for little Zachary to learn about his father. But when Shirley Turner was allowed to walk free on bail in Canada and given custody of Zachary while awaiting extradition to the United States, the film's focus shifted to Zachary's grandparents, David & Kathleen Bagby, and their desperate efforts to win custody of the boy.

Other than the way-over-the-top sentimentality of this film (particularly the score), it is very good. I think it would probably be hard for the director not to be sentimental about the subject matter, but, jeez, back off on the synthesizers. Like the other two movies I saw on this day, there were unexpected turns and emotional twists and it was very affecting. It started out as a home movie and turned into a feature film because of what happens. Good, good, good, but enough death for one day!

That's the first four days of the film festival. I've seen seven movies, which means my pass has paid for itself. Everything after this is icing.