It's over. The actual film screenings continue into the wee hours of Sunday. But we resigned after seeing one last documentary this morning at 11.Yesterday I constructed a plan to get some of our real life under control (yeah, right) and still see two movies. Oh, and stay away from downtown, too!
Someone had pressed a little trinket on us when we were standing in line at the Paramount one night. It was a washer with a heart punched through and the words "Love.Blessing Ring" on one side and "Always in my Heart" on the other. The packaging was a promo for the documentary Lost In Woonsocket. That had made me look up the film again and it looked really interesting. The film was born from a reality TV show called Random 1 that picked people at random and tried to match them with donated help. The film focused on two alcoholics and their journey on and off the street. The film is powerful. Heck, the TV series was powerful but I apparently missed it while watching stupid crime shows a couple of years ago. I must admit four things: One: I think people should get direct help when they need it. Food, shelter, detox, substance abuse programs. Two: I never give money to people on the street. (Never is too strong. Very rarely then.) Three: I don't like dealing directly with such people. They frighten me. This does not mean I don't see their humanity. Four: I know that some people will always exist in the margins, begging for money for the fuel of their addiction. This movie reinforced all these things I just admitted. A program that succeeds with even twenty percent is worth the money. Money given to the people in this film would not go for food. Know that it will go for booze or drugs for these guys. If you understand that and still give, I'm OK with it. I'll give money to Mobile Loaves and Fishes or some other group that is really giving out food. I was glad to see this movie and get to know these guys at the safe distance of the movie theater, drinking my glass of Guinness a bit guiltily. So sue me. And when one of the guys slid back it didn't surprise me. The success is what surprised me. Beating an addiction is hard to do.
The movie could have been exploitative. Maybe it even was. It's hard to intervene in other people's lives while filming it without exploiting the people. Still it's a thought-provoking movie. It reminded me of one of the many projects I never did. (See admission three.) I was going to offer people a notebook and tell them I would come back and if they had written their life story in it then I would pay them $20 for it if they would sign something that I could publish their story on the WEB. (And yes I knew that the money would go for a substance to abuse, most likely.) After I thought of that idea I would never implement, I heard about some singer songwriter who paid beggars for their cardboard signs. One refused to part with his work for $20! But I digress. This is a great movie. And apparently you can watch a lot of the TV show on the WEB now which I plan to do. We saw the last screening of this world Premiere. But John and Andre were there to answer questions. One of the guys they'd helped had been at a previous screening.
To follow that up, we saw Fay Grim. It was our third narrative. And we liked it so two outta three isn't bad. It ran a bit long, but otherwise it was a delight. It is a total send up of all the thrillers you have ever been subjected to. It is a follow-up to a movie from 1998 by Hal Hartley. I was still earning a living then instead of being a dilettante blogger and film watcher and such. So I never heard of Henry Fool. It sounds like it was a send-up of the literary world, however. I just added it at the top of my Netflix list. I kept wanting to laugh out loud during this one when no one else was even laughing.
So. We drug home around midnight. FFP flipped through the Texas basketball game off the DVR. I thought Texas had lost since I thought that I saw the top of the tower decidedly un-orange on the way home. But they won.
This morning we drug out of bed all tousle-haired and sleepy. We got to the Alamo South way too early and wandered on down South Lamar. We discovered an amazing Mexican restaurant (imagine that? on South Lamar?!) called Sazon (season?). I had a Tavo's breakfast taco and coffee. This is an amazing place. The dishes being delivered all around looked great. They had linen napkins and put those little paper doilies on the coffee cup saucers. I must go back and try some other things. Anyway, we made it to the theater to see the lightly-attended last showing of 638 Ways to Kill Castro. In order to make the movie move, they used old random movie or TV footage that was not of Castro or his potential assassins. But it is a very interesting and informative show. I remember once thinking that Castro would be overthrown. This was long ago before the fall of the Soviet Union and the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and the rise of a that peculiar Chinese openness. And still he stands. Amazing. This movie was made by a Brit and this was the North American premier. It doesn't strike me as something that is going to get a wide distribution. In fact, most of the docs we saw don't strike me as ones that will get the reach of a Supersize Me or a Michael Moore or Al Gore piece. But you never know. One we saw at a fest (Maxed Out) has now reached theaters, as they say, near you. And it didn't think it had the legs for that when I saw it.
Well, it was quite a festival. Now it's back to 'real' life instead of 'reel' life. I think we saw 18 feature length films, fifteen of them docs. We saw one short. I wish I could have seen the short reels and I probably missed a couple of movies I would have liked to have seen. We are back to spring chores, the business of serious downsizing and our usual tasks of entertaining friends and chasing around for this charity or that. I managed a little exercise and tennis while immersed in film, but it wouldn't hurt to step that up and get rid of some of the girth from movie beers and pizza and popcorn.
And that, my friends, was my SXSW.
