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Written by Bryant Johnson Tuesday, 25 April 2006 08:19

“Getting fired is God’s way of saying, ‘Do something else.’” These are the words of one of the many firees in Annabelle Gurwitch’s entertaining and (sadly) relevant new documentary.

 

This year’s SXSW Film Festival was both a rewarding and painful experience. Rewarding because of the nearly 30 films I viewed, with only a handful of exceptions, they were all worth watching. Painful, because of the 100+ movies screening, seeing one often meant not seeing another.

While there was an incredibly wide range of styles and subjects, some trends did emerge. Films about Iraq were common, as were coming-of-age stories and Forest Whittaker and Aaron Eckhart. (Helpful note to indie filmmakers: Please avoid opening shots of waves crashing. It’s been done. To documentarians: Easy on the black and white ’50s stock footage. Yes, it’s cheap way to fill the screen, but it gets tiring.)

Obviously, giving all of these films the attention they deserve is impossible. So, instead, here are six greats worthy of sharing because (1) they’re powerful, well told, and relevant; (2) they represent a variety of genres (documentaries, a concert film, a narrative feature, and a rerelease); and (3) you most likely will have a chance to see them.

maxed out
(dir/prod: james d. scurlock; 2006; 86 min.)

Never has it been easier to borrow money, nor have the costs ever been higher. In what should be mandatory viewing for every college freshman, this timely documentary explores the credit card debt that burdens millions of Americans often least able to afford it.

Between interviews, director James Scurlock unleashes a barrage of disturbing statistics: four billion credit card offers a year; an average household credit card debt load of $9,200; a 100% increase in credit card fees in the last five years; $75 billion in bad debt purchased by banks in 2005. “More Americans will go bankrupt this year than will get divorced, go to college, and develop cancer,” a title card warns.

The credit card companies (who decline to comment) appear as bastions of greed and unaccountability. Their lobbyists kill pending legislation designed to curb lending practices. They spend millions to gain access to college orientations. And they target those least able to pay—in particular, the recently bankrupted. Why? “Because they have a proven weakness for credit and can’t declare bankruptcy twice,” says Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren.

It’s the ordinary people, however, who make this film compelling. In one account, a woman whose identity was confused with a dead person’s testifies before a group of skeptical credit card execs that she indeed exists. Most harrowing are the families of those who found the ultimate debt relief: suicide. One young man hung himself after he maxed out 12 credit cards; his mother still receives credit card offers addressed to him.

The film offers no easy solutions. Clearly, something needs to be done, but what and by whom? In what is perhaps the film’s biggest shortcoming, it doesn’t look hard enough at where personal responsibility ends and societal responsibility begins.

don’t come knocking (dir: wim wenders; scr: sam shepard; 2005; 108 min.)

In his latest movie, the German director Wim Wenders holds a celluloid mirror up to ourselves and the result is a gorgeous and poignant view of America.

Sam Shepard plays Howard Spence, an aging bad-boy actor whose drug and booze-fueled exploits off-screen (which include “terrorizing plane passengers”) overshadowed his roles onscreen. The movie opens with his disappearance from a Western movie set, and a detective named Sutter (played with grim determination by Tim Roth) hired by the film’s insurance company hot on his trail. Howard visits his mother (Eve Marie Saint), who sweetly awaits his arrival on the tarmac with a bouquet of flowers. It’s been 30 years since he’s been home.

Howard’s reasons for returning aren’t clear. This is one of the many similarities Knocking shares with Wenders’ 1984 Paris, Texas, also scripted by Shepard. In fact, they seem to comprise the first two films of a trilogy.

While visiting his mother, Howard learns he’s a father. Borrowing his mother’s ’50s turquoise Ford, he drives to Butte, Mont., where he’d had an off-the-set tryst 25 years prior. There he catches up with the weary-but-still-trying waitress, Doreen, his son’s mother, played by Jessica Lange. Their son (Gabriel Mann) is a tattooed rockabilly singer whose simmering resentment at the world is pushed over the edge—and his furniture out the window—by his father’s unexpected return.

Once again, Wenders beautifully captures the lonely grandeur of an emptied American West. Himalayan-sized clouds in limitless skies. Hopperish buildings lining wide, empty streets. A lonely neon light advertising a corner bar. Completing the plaintive mood, a long, held note echoes from a slide guitar.

before the music dies
(dir: andrew shapter; scr: andrew shapter & joel rasmussen; 2006; 84 min.)

Popular music sucks. Record companies only care about profits. Real artists get screwed.

These allegations are hardly new. The litany of brilliant-but-starving musicians extends through Delta bluesmen to Amadeus Mozart and probably back to cavemen bone drummers owed animal skins by evasive cave-agents.

Even against this backdrop, however, things look bad. Clear Channel issues stale playlists to its 1,200-plus stations; TV rewards shallow sirens over truer, less-photogenic talent; and corporate consolidation has shrunk the recording industry to just four major labels staffed by ex–Wall Street execs who depend on focus groups for musical guidance.

This is the disturbing state of affairs presented in Before the Music Dies. Bonnie Raitt, Eric Clapton, ?uestlove, Les Paul, Erykah Badu, and Branford Marsalis are just some of the big names who attest to the music biz’s current malaise. In a humorously illuminating exercise, the respected songwriter Steve Poltz improvises a Top 40 pop song on camera. (“Mom’s not coming home tonight/Won’t you come over—alright!” is its profound refrain.) With the help of a hot 17-year-old actress, some edgy camerawork, and a technician to repair the wavering voice, a video is quickly patched together of “the single.” The result is indiscernible from most current MTV pabulum.

Fortunately, while the film squarely faces the recording industry’s woes, it belies its ominous title by spending the last half hour outlining “what could become a golden age of music,” to use co-director Rasmussen’s words. Inexpensive studio-quality desktop recording equipment along with Web sites like MySpace, Limewire, and streaming radio stations make it easier than ever for artists to be heard around the globe. Unfortunately, while the mainstream music business gropes for a new business model, it’s the musicians who are left out in the cold.

fired! (dir/ed: chris bradley & kyle labrache; 2006; 85 min.)

“Getting fired is God’s way of saying, ‘Do something else.’” These are the words of one of the many firees in Annabelle Gurwitch’s entertaining and (sadly) relevant new documentary.

Still, glib aphorisms don’t make getting canned any easier. Especially when you’re fired by a cultural icon like Woody Allen, as Gurwitch was, for “sounding retarded” during a rehearsal. (Ouch.)

In her grief, Gurwitch sought support from her many showbiz friends who shared their own job-loss stories. Tim Allen was once a machinist (!) canned for being too productive and making fellow union workers look bad. Ileana Douglas was fired from her job as a coat check girl for irking a mob boss. And Andy Borowitz was let go from a writer’s job on The Facts of Life for “not getting the character of Tootie at all.” Filming these accounts in interviews and during onstage performances, Gurwitch also canvassed less-illustrious people for their experiences. One poor bank clerk, for example, was fired for not calling the police while being held up.

Psychologists, rabbis, and economists weigh in with their insights and advice. Like breakups, nearly everybody has experienced a firing (1,450,000 of us in 2005, we’re told) and the key is learning from the experience.

The film’s only weak spot is Gurwitch herself. In her interviews, she often comes off as fawning, too quick to laugh or grin in empathy. Her hairdo seems to change in every scene and her stabs at comedy usually fall flat.

Fortunately, her all-too-relevant subject and the surprising accounts make these distractions forgettable. Getting fired could be the best thing that ever happened to you.

awesome: i fuckin’ shot that!
(dir: nathanial hornblower; 2006; 93 min.)

If you’re a band wanting to make a concert film, you can call on the seasoned brilliance of a Martin Scorsese or a Jonathan Demme to deliver greatness. Or you can just give cameras to 50 amateur strangers.

In making their “authorized bootleg,” the Beastie Boys chose the latter option, giving digital video cameras to fans at an October 2004 performance at Madison Square Garden with the instructions, “Keep shooting.”

The result is a collage of colorful, chaotic energy that befits their music. With 50 cameras guided by 50 different aesthetical sensibilities, every shot is a surprise. Footage of the band is mixed with, well, name it: fans miming; hot dogs turning; an entranced Ben Stiller lip-synching; the ordering of beers; a foot; pumping fists with index and pinky extended; ushers air-guitaring; and one fully chronicled visit to the men’s bathroom.

The look of the film constantly changes as well: some passages are black and white, others two-toned, and others animated.

The Beasties perform at their “most mackingest” as they—or, more accurately, their blurry, under-/overexposed and pixilated silhouettes—cover songs from all six albums. Sometimes, as seems to be the trend in recent videos and films, things are too cutty. There are moments when a shot could have lingered longer and provided a chance to process—even recognize—what just flashed across the screen. For most bands, this approach wouldn’t have worked. With musicians as physical as the Beasties playing music as protean and as reliant on abbreviated samples as theirs, however, the experiment succeeds.

the whole shootin’ match
(dir/scr: eagle pennell; 1978; 135 min.)

Shot around a sleepy Austin on a budget of $25,000, the grainy, unpolishedness of the film does little to detract from this droll story about friendship and Texas-sized dreams.

Frank (Sonny Davis) and Lloyd (Lou Perry) are two easygoing handymen “on the wrong side of 30” who want to make it big before they get any older. Their latest scheme is a polyurethane business specializing in coating the dome-shaped abodes of “rich hippies.” Like their previous ventures with flying squirrel and chinchillas, it doesn’t work out.

The production values of the film are rudimentary; however, none of this seems to matter. Lloyd and Frank are such real and genuine characters, so likeable in their goofiness and their irrepressible drive to make it, we root for their success. In a world of big-budget, CGI-generated vapidity, this rough diamond of a film is a welcome relief.