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Under discussion:

Full Battle Rattle  (2007)

2008 SXSW Special Jury Prize winning documentary Full Battle Rattle manages to find a unique way to examine the War in Iraq. Rather than bring their cameras into an actual war zone, they decided to look at a simulated war zone, the U.S. Army’s training facility in the Mojave Desert. I talked to directors Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss about finding a way to elicit both outrage and admiration.

See a full review of the film here.

Full Battle Rattle Interview

Under discussion:

A Scanner Darkly  (2006)

Southland Tales  (2007)

Sleep Dealer  (2009)

Half-Life  (2008)

As the first decade of this new millennium ticks towards its conclusion, we find ourselves in the general temporal vicinity of what recent generations have perceived as ‘the future,’ and there’s nary a flying car or replicant in sight. Resultingly, most recent science fiction films - from the relatively successful (A Scanner Darkly) to the utterly ridiculous (Southland Tales) to the annoyingly didactic (Sundance hit Sleep Dealer) - have recast the near future in more immediate and recognizable terms, predicting the throughlines of current socio-economic and political trends to imagine what might be just around the corner. Director Jennifer Phang takes the same approach in Half-Life, but to a more unique end. Her film takes place sometime within the next ten years, after global warming has flooded the world’s coastal regions and parched the land left above sea level. Social disorder is rampant: there are riots in the streets and whispers of endtimes. And amidst all this is the Wu family, dealing with the suburban woes of a million cinematic families before them.

Phang’s science-fiction conceit doesn’t affect the core of her story; indeed, it could be removed entirely without affecting the plot. But what it does do is reflect the plot, giving the characters’ emotional turmoil a greater context to ebb and flow within. This family is a microcosm of the world they live in; but because it’s their story, the circumstances around them become epic extrapolations of their most intimate moments.

The first of those moments occurs on the ground, to which nineteen year-old Pam Wu (Sanoe Lake) has just plummeted in a moment of desperation. She wakes up, bloodied and bruised, and sees her little brother Timothy looking at her, down there amidst the Northern California fauna. She smiles reassuringly; that moment is gone, and she brushes herself off and resumes her role as surrogate mother to her younger sibling. Their actual mother, Saura (Julia Nickson-Soul) is in the midst of a mid-life crisis, and is looking for the fastest possible solution to all the things that are wrong in her life. The answer she’s come up with is a young white jock of a boyfriend named Wendell, who moves into the Wu’s home and innocuously lets Pam know that he wouldn’t mind extending his affections to her as well. Pam’s soulmate, though, is Scott, the gay adopted son of an Evangelical pastor. They meet frequently on the grassy knolls high above the city, talking shop about sex and love and all the nasty details of both. Pam pines for him. He pretends not to notice.

The other central character in this drama is the Wu patriarch, who is defined entirely by his absence from his family’s lives. He was a pilot, whose departure some years prior coincided with the rise of the oceans and the increase in solar flares, occurrences which allow the characters to ignore or make excuses for the sad state of their lives. Likewise, they separates Phang’s film from similar tales of middle-class unhappiness, of absentee dads and clinically depressed children. Indeed, a simple synopsis of Half-Life fails to encapsulate the scope that the film traverses: it jumps from epic to intimate, from the end of the world (conveyed via newscasts and subtle special effects) to the private thoughts and daydreams of its characters, which take place in an animated world of disintegrating airplanes and beached leviathans. These formal shifts are drastic, but they’re bound by a unifying tone that weaves these melodramatic threads and surreal flights of fancy into an elegiac tapestry of unrest.

The film’s slow boil eventually come to a head; everything hits the fan, and those threads spire together and begin to fray as one. Secrets are revealed, accusations are made, true love is requited and the sun burns brighter than ever. There’s an achingly beautiful moment where Pam and Scott lay in each other’s arms and wait for the world to end. “Now,” Pam says, “or now.” Snapping her fingers as the seconds pass by and the world moves on anyway. It’s the sort of scene that is so perfectly irresolute that no actual ending can top it, and indeed, the actual denouement is where the Phang’s ambition finally falters. She attempts to justify the conceit of her film with an awkward step into magical, almost messianic realism. Whether or not anything that happens at the end of the film really happens. Such tropes always work on a superficial level, which is why filmmakers so often use them to wrap up unwieldy narratives; but what happens here is both too subtle to qualify as deux ex machina and too bombastic to work within the literal world the film has established. Considering how much of that world gives way to dreamscapes and reverie, that the ending doesn’t work is actually a tribute to the difficult tonal balancing act Phang has pulled off in the rest of the film.

What the ending does succeed in, though, is offering a different perspective on the standard apocalyptic tones of recent sci-fi, which generally imply that the world is on a fast track to man-made annihilation. Consider the title, which is taken from the scientific term for “the time required for one unstable element to decay and transform into another,” and put it in the context of the film, and we’re left with a vision of the future that has a bit more faith in humanity. Half-Life sees past dissolution, past the end of the world, all the way to something else. What that something is is anyone’s guess; the point is that there’s something there at all.

SXSW news, reviews, interviews and discussions

I’ve long been of the opinion that films should not be defined by their running time. Terms like ’short’ and ‘feature’ are handy for categorical purposes but have otherwise become unfairly exclusive, creating betwixt them a no-man’s land in which few filmmakers dare tread. I’ve heard enticing rumors of a theater in Paris that showcases films between forty five and sixty minutes and length, and I always admire those filmmakers that go against the advice of festival programmers who suggest that unless a short film is really, really great it shouldn’t run much longer than 10 minutes - just as I admire the programmers who select the 25 and 30 minute shorts that are, indeed, really really great, just like the 5 minute shorts they might be screening alongside of. It’s quality, not quantity, and I don’t care about the latter when there’s an abundance of the former. Suffice to say, I really love short form filmmaking, and I always make it a point at festivals to catch all of the short programs. I’ll be covering some of my favorite short selections from this year’s 2008 SXSW Film Festival in an upcoming article, but there was one film in particular that I felt warranted its own review.

If you were at SXSW this past week, you may have heard rumors about Glory At Sea, whose production and premiere both are almost as epic as the film itself. Directed by Ben Zeitlin and produced by the same folks behind last year’s festival favorite Death To Tinman, the film is a fable of such exorbitantly epic proportions that it could only be described as Herzogian. “Fitzcarraldo!” shouted one audience member, apparently too bowled over by the film to express himself in the form of a question, during the post-screening Q&A. Given that the film took six months to shoot (many of those spent out on open water), its Sisyphean qualities correlate quite well with Herzog’s effort. At the same time, Zeitlin’s vision seems quite a few degrees more ambitious - and even moreso removed from reality - than anything Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald might have dreamed up.

Set on the coast of an antediluvian New Orleans and narrated from the bottom of the ocean by a dead little girl, the film tells the tale of a group of shellshocked residents who rediscover a sense of hope after a man thought lost to the storm washes ashore and immediately sets about constructing a raft, with which he might return to sea on an Orphic quest to find his waterlogged love. For reasons as elemental as they are inexplicable, the townspeople decide to join him in this effort, and together they turn his driftwood dinghy into a grand patchwork vessel, hewn together out of old memories and keepsakes: a rusty automobile, a janky upright piano. A bathtub and a bed. Hints at former lives laid to waste by the hand of God. A new community forms there on the beach. Everyone brings something, everyone does their part, including the local preacher, who joins the crew after his church is accidentally torched during a rather Dionysian Mardi Gras parade.

At least, I think its the church that burns down; the film is so jam packed with incident that it occasionally steps on its own toes. I’ve seen it twice now and I’m still not sure what’s happening at a few points. That was also a problem in Death To Tinman, whose narrative form viewers may recognize here. Tinman’s director, Ray Tintori, produced this one, and helped write the story (in addition to providing production design). The hyperbolic storytelling, the flatly declarative dialog and madcap pace are the same, as is the ever insistent score, but gone is the absurdist irony and emotional detachment. Zeitlin’s after something bigger. This is a grand romance, an allegory, a story about, yes, post-Katrina New Orleans. Above all, this is a cinematic experience explicitly designed to move audiences, and as such it is explicitly, overtly manipulative; every little detail is designed to evoke a response; the strings always swell at all the right moments. It’ll hardly leave a dry eye in the house, and I’d cry foul if the filmmakers hadn’t achieved something so truly bizarre with their formal choices: because the film is what it is, and because it’s all crammed into a 25 minute running time, being bombastic and grandiose with every emotional gesture isn’t just appropriate but pretty much necessary. This isn’t traditional narrative. It’s an ancient myth racing at breakneck speeds to catch-up with the times.

All of this sound and fury didn’t win Glory At Sea the grand jury prize for short film at SXSW, and I actually think that’s appropriate. Those films that did win (more on them soon) are excellent works, and it’s hard to argue that they aren’t more mature or formally sound. Indeed, they’ve got just as much going on as Zeitlin’s film, but it’s all restrained beneath the surface. But I think Glory At Sea, for sheer ambition, deserved an award all its own, and that’s pretty much what it got: Brent Hoff and Emily Doe presented it with the Wholphin award for Best Short. As they announced the prize, Doe and Hoff stated that it was going to a film that demonstrated everything a short film can be. The key word is can; a short film doesn’t have to go this far to be great, nor should it. But it is possible, and Zeitlin and his cast and crew did it, and I’ll be darned if I’ve ever seen a film of any length with the same scope as this one. It may be less than half an hour, but it’s just as much a feature as anything else at the festival.

Now, I mentioned that the premiere here in Austin last Sunday had its own shares of ups and downs; word trickled out after the screening, and soon the film festival was abuzz with what had happened: it was a massively successful first screening, marred only by the fact that Zeitlin wasn’t actually there for it. He was in transit to the theater when he was involved in a terrible car accident that sent him straight to the hospital with a shattered pelvis. He’s been waylaid there all week, missing both his screenings and the award ceremony. Rooftop Films, which helped finance the picture, has set up a page with information on how to assist Zeitlin with his suddenly mounting medical bills. Benefit screenings are being set up in New York and Austin, and donations are being accepted. Help him out, so he can put that money towards making another film. Of whatever length.