SXSW Film Wrap-Up, Part 1

After taking the fire-hose of film that is the South by Southwest Film Festival in mid-March, I like to wait a few weeks before writing down thoughts about the movies I've seen. At a festival, it's easy to get caught up in the enthusiasm of the event; sometimes the critical mind gets dialed back a bit. Here are some of my thoughts on the films I saw at this year's SXSW Film Festival. Enjoy!

Natural Selection

The audience and critics’ favorite at this year’s South By Southwest Film Festival, “Natural Selection” is a dark comedy about a woman, Linda, (Rachael Harris) who goes searching for answers when she finds her husband's been keeping secrets from her — including fathering a son, Raymond (Matt O’Leary).

Since much of the plot is given over to Raymond and Linda’s road trip back to Texas from Florida, Harris and O’Leary have to carry the film on their shoulders. They do so with two terrific performances. O’Leary, as Raymond, has to first break through the junkie stereotype character, and then make us care about his personal growth. And as Linda, Rachael Harris uses her character's guilt as a motivating factor, carrying us through all manner of implausible predicaments to some sense of peace.

As a side note, “Natural Selection” features characters who are very religious. There’s some humor in the movie that stems from religion, but I found it refreshing that their beliefs were truly taken seriously by the film.

Kumaré

A few years ago, Vikram Gandhi began work on a documentary about the yoga industry, but the more he learned, the more interested he became in the gurus that people follow. Gandhi began to wonder just what people believed in, and decided to find out from the inside. Gandhi grew out his hair and beard, dressed in flowing robes, moved to Phoenix, and added an “e” to his middle name to become “Kumaré.”

After a few weeks in Phoenix, Kumaré develops a core group of followers, who begin to open up their lives to him. When Kumaré finally “unveils” to them his true identity, the results are surprisingly emotional.

Although Kumaré won an audience award as Best Documentary at this year’s South by Southwest festival, and I loved the film, buzz I’ve read online since, and the questions it raised at screenings during the festival, demonstrated its very premise to be quite polarizing. Some folks felt Gandhi was cheating or hurting the people that followed “Kumaré,” and others have said it was downright dangerous for him to play with these poor souls’ heads.

Gandhi may or may not have realized what he was getting into when he began his experiment, but I think by the end of the film, it’s clear that the whole Kumaré persona has become very important to him, and he’s developed a real attachment to Kumaré’s followers. Some have written that Gandhi had no training to be a counselor. But isn’t that one of the points of this film? Regardless of whether he’s a licensed counselor, it’s clear that as Kumaré -- and as Vikram Gandhi -- he did his best to be a good friend.

F#$k My Life The unfortunately titled Chilean film “F#$k My Life” stars Ariel Levy as Javier, a party guy that falls in love with Sofia, a beautiful singer who’s normally way out of his league. The two date for a while, and then Javier inexplicably breaks it off with Sophia, then spends months and months trying to get her back in ways that would normally lead to a restraining order in the United States. Plus, Javier is a major jerk. He makes sexist remarks, he drinks too much, he doesn’t really care about anyone other than himself, and he’s about as deep as a kiddie pool. It’s a wonder his childhood friend, Angela, even continues to hang out with him. And when, at the end of the film, the two of them get together after Javier’s spent the entire film chasing other skirts in front of her, I wondered what planet these folks live on. The film tries to make some sort of statement about love in the digital age, and the impossibility of separating yourself from an ex when they're all over Facebook, Twitter, etc., but all of that is overshadowed by Javier's unlikeability. I will say that the film is nicely photographed, though. Santiago, Chile, looks great.

Hesher

Star Rainn Wilson described “Hesher” to me as a “dark comedy, with less emphasis on the comedy.” That’s pretty apt, I’d say, but it makes what I think should be funny moments in the film less funny, and more just... uncomfortable. Young Devin Brochu stars as T.J., who, along with his father, is dealing with the recent death of his mother. Dad (Wilson) does so by popping pills and lazing about on the couch for most of the picture. T.J. is a good kid, but he’s getting picked on by a bully at school, and that’s been getting him into trouble.

From out of a haze of smoke one day comes Hesher (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who drives around all day in his good times van blasting Metallica and smoking like a chimney. Hesher takes it upon himself to mentor T.J. in the ways of breaking and entering, vandalism, and blowing up the local bully’s convertible. When young T.J. finally takes a pair of garden shears and threatens to cut off the bully’s toe, I wondered if I just wasn’t getting it. It sounds like a hopelessly square thing to say, but Hesher is a bad influence on T.J. He needed to kick his dad’s ass in gear, not the kid’s.

Natalie Portman has a role in the film as T.J.’s prepubescent crush, and does well with what she’s been given. She goes frump for the part, wearing oversize glasses and a low-rent grocery clerk’s outfit.

After premiering at Sundance in early 2010, “Hesher” will finally see wide release in May, 2011.

Inside America

I don’t feel quite right giving this film a review since I had to duck out about 15 minutes before its conclusion to get to a scheduled interview. But I was interested in seeing "Inside America" because its director, Barbara Eder, was born in Austria and spent much of 1994 as an exchange student in Brownsville, Texas. She based much of "Inside America" on her observations of Rio Grande Valley life, and the film was shot on location at Hanna High School.

There’s some nice cinema verité slice-of-life filmmaking going on here, but "Inside America" brings little new to the table dramatically. At the high school, there are the rival gangs, the ROTC kids, the popular girl that hides a drug problem, the good girl mixed up with the wrong group that we’re supposed to identify with, the meek white kid that buys a gun one day...

Like I said, I had to leave the film early. I hope it turned a corner in the last 15 minutes, but for the most part, "Inside America" feels like something we've seen before.

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More to come!

--Nathan Cone