Directed by Amy Elliott, Elizabeth Donius
What makes a man want to build the world’s biggest lava lamp? From the 40-foot metal stalks of wheat in Williston, N.D., to the bull-sized fiberglass killer bee of Hidalgo, America’s heartland has long been a home to giants.
Continue reading Review: World’s Largest (2010)
A few Texas hearts got broken when it was announced that Whip It, Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut set in Austin’s Roller Derby community, was filming around Detroit. But whatever the location, scriptwriter and derby player Shauna Cross said, “It’s a total love letter to Austin” – and to its derby girls.
Austin and its derby scene are as much the film’s stars as Juno‘s Ellen Page. She plays reluctant pageant queen Bliss Cavendar from Bodeen, Texas, who straps on her skates to become Babe Ruthless, the ass-kicking jammer for the Hurl Scouts banked-track Roller Derby team. Before signing on as producer and then director, Barrymore’s derby experience was restricted to a montage/homage sequence in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. She explained, “I knew that the sport had different evolutions of being real and being staged, but I didn’t know about the new revolution of these leagues cropping up across the nation until I met Shauna.”
That would be former Austinite Shauna Cross, aka Maggie Mayhem of the L.A. Derby Dolls and a part of that modern derby revolution. Quick recap: In 2001, a group of Austin women joined together to revamp the lost sport of Roller Derby, a mash-up of speed skating and rugby. After a major internal rift in 2003 (well recorded in Bob Ray’s rink-rash-and-all documentary Hell on Wheels), they split into the banked-track TXRD Lonestar Rollergirls and the flat-track Texas Rollergirls. Both leagues have remained the godmothers of women’s Roller Derby, now at roughly 400 skater-run and skater-owned leagues internationally and counting. Although Whip It concentrates on a semifictionalized version of TXRD, Cross said: “I was really scared about the whole flat-track/banked-track thing. There are more girls that skate flat track, and I hoped that they would be supportive or at least see that it’s still great both ways and not feel left out.”
Continue reading Interview: Drew Barrymore and Shauna Cross on Whip It (2009)
Directed by Craig Zobel
Starring: Pat Healy, Kene Holliday
Martin is a nonentity, a failed radio engineer who dreamed of being a deejay. As played by Healy, he hangs onto a shadow of his dream of being “something” in music. With Holliday’s gregarious Clarence, he’s dispatched by a record firm as a talent scout. At least, that’s what they think they are. Really, they’ve been duped into scamming wannabe musicians. They are “song sharks,” getting hopeful nobodies to hand over cash for a record that will never be released.
Continue reading Review: Great World of Sound (2007)
What’s that old saying about a prophet being despised in his homeland? Until his death in 1994, Bill Hicks was a cultural exile in the United States, a stand-up comedian both cerebral and visceral who poured fiery scorn on corruption and apathy, Reagan Republicans, and corporate whores like Jay Leno. For his effort, he was a cult performer, notoriously censored from The Late Show With David Letterman. But in Great Britain in the early 1990s, when the culturally literate stared in despair at the nation that gave the world the First Gulf War and Carrot Top, he was the best evidence for the defense. Hicks was the angry American whose fury was driven not by greed but by disappointment that things weren’t just better.
Matt Harlock, half of the team behind new documentary American: The Bill Hicks Story, explained, “I was one of the guys who was at university in the UK in the late Eighties, early Nineties, who was handed a sweaty and much-coveted bootleg” of Hicks’ work. For co-director/producer Paul Thomas, the interest was much more professional. Harlock explained, “His job for [Welsh TV broadcasters] HTV and the BBC was to find and bring on new comedians, so he came upon [Hicks] that way.”
Continue reading Interview: Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas on American: The Bill Hicks Story (2010)
Directed by Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman
Everywhere has its myth to scare kids away from the bad places. Along the border, it’s La Llorona near water. In England, it’s the boggart on the moors. On Staten Island, it’s Cropsey at the abandoned asylum. But this unnerving documentary asks: What if Cropsey is real?
The starting point here is the trial of Andre Rand, charged with the 1987 abduction and murder of 12-year-old Jennifer Schweiger on the sleepy island. But just as the community started to connect him to more missing children, and this puny outsider filled the mythical role of Cropsey for the local kids, filmmakers Brancaccio and Zeman aim broader. Their Staten Island isn’t a leafy suburb off Manhattan, but a polluted dumping ground and a secret burial ground for mob corpses.
Directed by Robinson Devor
Bestiality. An act many people can scarcely comprehend how, never mind why, it’s done. But when a man died in 2003 after having sex with a horse, the quiet rural town of Enumclaw, Wash., was confronted with the trans-species taboo. In an elegiac and perturbing exploration of the events, documentary-maker Devor mixes re-enactment and audio interviews with two communities: the zoophiles, who cannot understand why they are shunned, and the families and friends that struggled to understand them.
Directed by Srdjan Spasojevi´c
Starring Sergej Trifunovi´c, Srdjan Todorovi´c, Ana Saki´c
There is a good reason why this is called A Serbian Film: Only the Balkan nation of Serbia could produce this landmark of transgressive cinema. With the nation’s terrible decadelong civil war a constant and unspoken subtext, former porn star Milosh (Todorovi´c) is lured back into the industry by enigmatic producer Vukmir (Trifunovi´c). Short of cash and intrigued by the suggestion of porn as art, he finds himself duped into a hell of depravity that would make Hieronymus Bosch blanch.
Directed by Thanakorn Pongsuwan
Starring: Preeti Barameeanat
Extreme basketball doesn’t sound like the basis of a great action movie. But just for a moment, imagine Yao Ming going for three points when he’s taking an elbow slash to the face.
Fireball may be a bybrid martial arts/sports movie, but this is no Shaolin Soccer. Instead, it’s a gritty and stunt-heavy actioneer set in the wild world of fireball, a no-holds-barred street basketball game run by the local mob bosses. Forget dribbling fouls: This is five-on-five meets muay thai, and if players die in the game, that’s just fewer team members to split the winnings.
Continue reading Review: Fireball (2009)
Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe
It made sense that this documentary was preceded at its SXSW screenings by the short <i>Star Wars: Retold</i> (retold by someone who’s never seen it). Even people who have never sat through George Lucas’ epic tale of a galaxy far, far away have been touched by its cultural impact.
Directed by Clark Lyda and Jesse Lyda
The T. Don Hutto Residential Center has become infamous as the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility up in Williamson County that used to house immigrant and asylum-seeking families as their appeals go through the courts. That makes Hutto a prison for children and parents, none of whom has been convicted of anything.