Indie Memphis Film Festival 2011: Day Three Preview for Saturday, Nov. 5

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Saturday, Nov. 5:

“Southern Teen Filmmaking Showcase” (10:45 a.m., Playhouse on the Square): A collection of seven shorts by young filmmakers, who will attend the screening. Could this be – to paraphrase Claude Rains in “Casablanca” – the beginning of a beautiful friendship with moviegoers? Could be, if some of these incipient auteurs continue to respond to the motion-picture muse.

“TAXI DRIVER” (11 a.m., Studio on the Square): See Day One.

“PARADISE LOST 2: REVELATIONS” (11 a.m., Brooks Museum of Art): From 2000, this is the second movie in the trilogy about the controversially convicted child murderers known as the “West Memphis Three.” Almost a detective story in documentary form, this film more fully exposes the weakness of the evidence presented in court, and invites viewers to develop their own theories.

“STEPPING: BEYOND THE LINE” (11:15 a.m., Studio on the Square): Dee Garceau’s Memphis-made 46-minute documentary examines the history and significance of the African-American choreographed group dance form known as “stepping.” The film screens with Memphian Suzannah Herbert’s 37-minute “HOME GAME,” a documentary about a New York soccer team of homeless men. Read about Herbert here.

“ELEANOR’S SECRET” (11:30 a.m., Studio on the Square): This traditionally animated French feature film from Dominique Monféry is a “visually sumptuous… delight for the eyes” (according to Britain’s “Eye for Film” journal) about a 7-year-old boy who can’t read who enters a perhaps literally magical world when he inherits his eccentric aunt’s library.

“WOMAN’S PICTURE” (1:15 p.m., Playhouse on the Square): Brian Pera’s made-in-Memphis drama — inspired by Sirk, Minnelli, and the wonderful era of Hollywood’s “women’s” movies — is one of the best films at the festival. Read about it here. I hope to have a full review up soon.

“Short Films #3: Documentaries” (1:30 p.m., Studio on the Square): Blind Mississippi Morris, the kudzu vine and a former world champion of women’s professional wrestling are among the subjects that inspired these seven short films.

“FIVE TIME CHAMPION” (1:45 p.m., Studio on the Square): Written and directed by Berndt Mader, with native Memphian (and White Station High School Class of 1996 alum) Jimmy Lee Phelan as cinematographer, this is a quintessential meandering smalltown Southern ensemble piece (shot in Smithville,Texas) that views a somewhat dysfunctional yet ultimately loving family through the eyes, primarily, of a young teenage boy (Ryan Akin), who experiences such highs as outdoor kissing while lying in a field with a young girl near a very picturesque tree, and science-fair praise for a project about “asexual reproduction in worms.” (We realize there’s a metaphor at work when it’s pointed out that worms self-amputate their injured parts.) The authenticity is marred when a red-eared slider is misidentified by these rural kids as a snapping turtle, but the movie is elevated by its scenic/gritty photography and the fine performances, especially that of Dana Wheeler-Nicholson as the boy’s mother.

“TO BE HEARD” (2 p.m., Memphis Brooks Museum of Art): This film — “one of the best documentaries of the year,” according to the New York Times — examines the liberating power of poetry on a group of hardship-case South Bronx teenagers.

“HEAVEN + EARTH + JOE DAVIS” (2 p.m., Studio on the Square): According to the Internet Movie Database, this is “the story of a peg-legged artist and philosopher who broadcasts vaginal contractions into deep space to communicate with aliens.” Frankly, I can’t think of a more concise synopsis of this documentary about Davis: He’s a 60-year-old rogue genius who resembles a homeless pirate, and a Harvard/MIT original and Mississippi native whose work erases the line between conceptual art and scientific discovery — he’s like William S. Burroughs, with a deep knowledge of DNA nucleotides. (When Davis covers a naked girl in honey and a dusting of gold leaf, for example it’s not just to be kinky, but to create a human radio receiver without traditional radio components, for example.) Directed by Peter Sasowksy, this is one documentary from the let’s-follow-the-guy-around cinéma vérité school that could use some talking heads or narration to put some of Davis’ mindblowing theories into context, and to better explain some of the science. Even so, the movie, like Davis, is certainly one of a kind.

“THE PRUITT-IGOE MYTH: AN URBAN HISTORY” (4:15 p.m., Playhouse on the Square): This documentary explores the social, economic and legislative issues that led to the decline of conventional public housing in America, with a focus on the rise and literal fall of the Pruitt-Igoe complex in St. Louis. Could any movie be more relevant to Memphis?

“BLACK ROCK REVIVAL: MISSION CONTROL” (4:30 p.m., Studio on the Square): Antoine Beane and Larry McKinney directed this documentary about aMemphis band that creates a type of rock-and-roll not typically associated with African-American musicians.

“JEFF, WHO LIVES AT HOME” (4:45 p.m., Studio on the Square): Jason Segel, Judy Greer, Ed Helms, Susan Sarandon and Rae Dawn Chong appear in this — yes, we’ll say it — all-star comedy from writers-directors Jay and Mark Duplass, who have remained somewhat true to the mumblecore esthetic of their early films (“The Puffy Chair,” “Baghead”) even as they’ve graduated to bigger budgets and name casts. (Their previous movie was “Cyrus,” with John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill and Marisa Tomei.)

“BAD FEVER” (5 p.m., Studio on the Square): The cross-country esprit de corps demonstrated by pratcitoners of the so-called mumblecore style of no-budget DIY filmmaking may be unprecedented in movie history. In the past, film “scenes” typically coalesced within cities and campuses and genres, but the new generation of relatively young, frequently self-taught and — this is important — social network-connected moviemakers seems happy to tote its lightweigt digital cameras and rock-star skinny carcasses from city to city, to collaborate with other like-minded explorers of post-millennial anxiety and ennui, just as their fellow travelers on the musical side of the equation have done for decades. Thus, Chicago’s Joe Swanberg and Dallas’ David Lowery come to Memphis to help Kentucker Audley shoot “Open Five,” while Audley travels to other locations to participate in such projects as “Passenger Pigeons” (Easter Kentucky) and now “Bad Fever,” set in Salt Lake City. Written and directedy Dustin Guy Defa (no doubt with much collaboration from the cast), the movie gives the lie to the notion that these young auteurs, who frequently appear in their own movies, always play themselves: Here, Audley is lank-haired Eddie Coopersmith, a painfully awkward and somewhat infantile (there are dinosaurs on the dashboard of his car) wannbe standup comic; he’s like an autistic version of Rupert Pupkin, but instead of yearning to be onstage with Johnny Carson, his ambition is to play the local Burt’s Tiki Comedy Club. Eddie’s loneliness is mitigated somewhat after he meets Irene (Eleonore Hendricks), a drifter currently squatting in an empty school building. From her indie Pippi Longstockings dress (cut-off jeans shorts, green tights) to her potentially sexually liberating boldness, Eleanor at first seems to be the first mumblecore Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but such an opportunity would be too easy for Eddie, whose constant Rain Man mumbling might almost be a comment on the label affixed to this type of filmmaking. (“Does anybody even want to know that my life might not be as great as you think it is?” is an example of one of Eddie’s confessional “jokes”; and should we point out that the movie usually identified as the first example of “mumblecore” is titled “Funny Ha Ha”?) The movie builds to a surprisingly powerful climax (so to speak), involving a pretty young working woman named Yoko (Allison Baar). “I would not normally be engaged in this except for the possibility that my life has become very terrible,” Eddie says; he finally earns a laugh, just when perhaps he doesn’t want one.

 “DRAGONSLAYER” (7 p.m., Studio on the Square): Such Goner Records favorites as Thee Oh Sees and Eddy Current and the Suppression Ring appear on the soundtrack of this well-reviewed documentary “punk-rock manifesto” that tries to determine what happens when hazy suburban SoCal skate-punk culture crashes against the rocks of adult responsibility and economic lack of opportunity.

“LOSERS TAKE ALL” (7 p.m., Playhouse on the Square): Shot in Memphis, this 1980s punk-rock period comedy-drama features contributions from great Memphis musicians. Full review coming soon.

“GIVE UP TOMORROW” (7:15 p.m., Studio on the Square): Director Michael Collins’ documentary about Filipino injustice functions at Indie Memphis as a sort of companion piece to the “West Memphis Three” trilogy: This, too, is a story about a young man (a shy, gentle giant type) arrested for a murder he apparently didn’t commit, and convicted despite a lack of any real evidence, due to a corrupt political system more interested in closing the book on a sensational crime (in this case, the 1997 kidnapping, rape and murder of a pair of young Filipino girls) than in finding out the truth. The film includes gruesome crime scene and morgue photos, and footage shot by cameras smuggled into the Philippines’ New Bilibid Prison, built to house 8,700 men but now crowded with 20,546 inmates, who live by their own rules, with little interference from the guards. Especially fascinating are the glimpses into Filipino popular culture: From the evidence here, TV news in the Philippines is even less sophisticated than in the U.S., pandering to the bloodlust of the audience with tacky reenactments of grisly crimes. The religious superstation also is surprising: At the trial, when the judge sentences the convicted murderers to life in prison instead of death, the mother of the one of the victims goes into a screaming trance: “She’s channeling Jackie!” shouts a friend, referring to the murdered daughter. “It’s Jackie’s spirit!” And what “Jackie’s spirit” says through her mother is a repudiation of the judge’s relative leniency: “We want death!”

“WITHOUT” (7:30 p.m., Studio on the Square): One of the real finds at this year’s festival is this remarkably sustained, almost one-character drama set on rainy and remote Whidbey Island, Washington, where a pretty 19-year-old student named Joslyn (Joslyn Jensen) agrees to house-sit for a vacationing family, and to take care of the family member left behind: “Grandpa Frank” (Ron Carrier), a nonfunctioning near-vegetable of an old man who must be spoon-fed and have his diapers changed. At times, the movie suggest a sort of incipient mumblecore “Repulsion”: Joslyn seems increasingly untrustworthy, as she stares at videos of her Asian girlfriend on her cell phone, loses interest in adhering to the “Bible” of duties left behind by the homeowners, and fiddles with the sacrosanct set-up of the husband’s widescreen 600-channel television, with its three remotes. But writer-director Mark Jackson remains committed to his beautifully photographed location naturalism, even as he hints, obliquely, at the possibility of slightly sinister forces at work outside of Joslyn’s head. Some late dramatics almost wreck the mood, but this is a very fine film, highlighted by Jensen’s surprisingly effective performance of a T-Pain song about “lady lumps,” which she tranforms into a lilting indie-pop song, with breathy Chan Marshall vocals and her own toy guitar accompaniment.

“Short Films #4: Dark Stormy” (9:30 p.m., Studio on the Square): Seven twisty tales of the Southern Gothic, the supernatural and the sinister, including the be-careful-what-you-wish-for fable “The Thaumaturge” by Memphis’ own Bevan Bell.

“MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE” (9:45 p.m., Studio on the Square): With the exception of “Melancholia,” which screens Sunday, this is the “biggest” feature at the Indie Memphis Film Festival, in terms of critical attention (Anthony Lane absolutely raved about it in a recent issue of The New Yorker), likely awards honors and national distribution. It’s certain to be booked at a Malco theater later this year, and could even be a minor hit, especially if star Elizabeth Olson — yes, the younger sister of the Olsen Twins — starts earning “Best Actress” mentions from various critics’ groups. (She’s also a likely — and deserving — Best Actress Oscar nominee.) A sort of arthouse psychological horror movie stripped of almost every ”horror” moment, this extraordinarily impressive feature debut from writer-director Sean Durkin hops back and forth in time to tell the reveal the recent history its multiple-M’ed title character, whose confusing makeshift name is representative of her fractured identity. Part of the story takes place in the “present,” at a lovely and remote vacation lake home in Connecticut, where the apparently damaged young MMMM — if we may call her that – is recuperating with her sister (Sarah Paulson) and her sister’s increasingly impatient husband (Hugh Dancy); these scenes alternate with sequences at a rural upstate New York farm, where the woman finds herself an increasingly willing member of a sinister would-be self-supporting cult led by a sinewy yet charismatic figure named Patrick, who says things like “death is pure love.”  (Patrick is John Hawkes, who was born to play a cult leader like Bela Lugosi was born to be a vampire). As the film removes layers of mystery, it suggests — not entirely persuasively — that both these alternate lifestyles represent cults, of a type: On the farm, MMMM is encouraged to “cleanse” herself of “toxins”; at the lake house, she’s plied with protein bars and kale-and-ginseng juice. I have my doubts about Durkin’s methods, but the movie casts an uneasy and unnerving spell.

“SNOW ON THA BLUFF” (10 p.m., Studio on the Square): Described as a sort of gangsta “Blair Witch Project,” this promises to be one of the more interesting films at the festival, a “raw and vivid, hybrid documentary/narrative film that cuts through the hype and mythology to deliver a clear-eyed, uncensored look at gangsta life — and death — in the inner city” of Atlanta, according to the CinemATL website. According to the site, “director/writer Damon Russell teams up with co-writer and lead actor Curtis Snow, a charismatic, self-described dope dealer and robbery boy, to tell a story based on Snow’s actual experiences in the Bluff, the violent, poverty-stricken neighborhood of Atlanta. Far from bleak, it’s by turns funny, scary, warm and thoughtful, and Snow carries it with megawatts of star power.”

“BETTER THAN SOMETHING: JAY REATARD” (10 p.m., Playhouse on the Square): First screened here in April at the On Location: Memphis International Film Music Fest, this documentary by New York filmmakers Alex Hammond and Ian Markiewicz offers an intimate portrait of the late Memphis punk-rock musician, mostly in his own words: The concert footage is outweighed by the often self-deprecatingly or wryly humorous and sometimes confessional on-camera interviews with Reatard. Read this story to learn more.

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