Karina on SpoutBlog

I???ve become fascinated over the past year with the visual tropes of the Hurricane Katrina film. The helicopter shots of the city underwater, borrowed news footage of refuges spilling out of the super dome, and of course, the ultimate post-Katrina New Orleans money shot: the passenger-side tracking shot of a devastated residential street, probably in the Lower Ninth Ward, meant to bowl us over by offering the illusion of an endless loop of devastation.

When that tracking shot appears in Peter Entell???s Shake The Devil Off, which screened for the first time in the U.S. last night at True/False, it plays to a slightly different end. For every three addresses occupied by a pile of rubble, there seems to be one house not only left standing, but apparently without significant external damage. Certainly, such an image speaks to the frustrating randomness of nature, but more than that, it reminds that appearances can be deceiving. The owners of that home may have the advantage of having an intact structure to return to, but that may not mean much when their community has crumbled all around them.

With shots like this, Shake The Devil Off incorporates some of the tropes of Cinema Katrina, but it???s maybe the least dependent on those tropes for its power than any of the many recent films about the storm and the city that I???ve seen. In fact, in that sense, it???s maybe the only truly post-Katrina film on the festival circuit, in that it???s not really at all concerned with the storm itself, but with the social, economic and racial ripple effects of Katrina that really only became apparent in the months thereafter.
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Under discussion:

Untraceable  (2008)

Facebook and Seesmic have banned a promotion for the international rollout of the Diane Lane film Untraceable. The movie basically bombed when it was dumped here in late January, but because people on the internet love nothing better than making fun of mainstream cultural stuff that pretends to understand the internet, it garnered a bit of snarky blog attention for its ridiculous premise alone. Lane stars as some kind of FBI cyberterrorism analyst who is charged with stopping the mastermind behind KillWithMe.com, who pledges to murder captive victims when the site reaches a quota of page views. Totally misguided attempt to plumb the new web culture as dressing for the same old thriller, and thus a sure sign that Web 2.0 is dead? Or a genius satire of the internet publishing industry? Nobody cared either way, I guess??????the film has so far failed to make back its production budget domestically.

Which means its international box office is key. Which explains why Universal, desperate to make some noise, would hire a firm to essentially replicate KillWithMe.com on social networks.

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True/False officially begins tonight, but as is tradition, the festival hosted a special preview screening last night for students at the University of Missouri. The film was ???an Alternative to Slitting Your Wrist, and it was a perfect pick for the young crowd. 25 year-old Owen Lowery, who directed, edited and appears in nearly every frame of the autobiographical doc, doesn’t exactly break new thematic ground or wow with his filmmaking prowess, but that???s part of the point: super-accessible and unencumbered by the constraints of traditional cinematic language, Wrist is pure peer-to-peer catharsis.

The film follows Lowery from 24th birthday to 25th, as he attempts to conquer a list of 52 things that he???s always wanted to do, one for each week of the year. We learn early on that Lowery made the list whilst in a psych ward, where he was recovering from a suicide attempt. At first, Lowery milks some of the less-noble list items for comic relief: he gets shot with a taser, he gets but by a scorpion and, thankfully, we’re spared the footage of him “taking a dump on Mount Rushmore.” But the list eventually settles into a structuring gimmick that gives Lowery license to confront his real demons. It becomes apparent that the project isn???t really about the list at all, but about the personal traumas??????childhood sexual abuse, his father???s drinking problem as well as his own??????that led Lowery to his personal rock bottom.

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