There have been so many decent and pretty good movies at this year’s Dallas International Film Festival (though I haven’t scene any really great films so far) that a 10:30 screening of the Midnight Shorts program at the Angelika – in all its goofy, sloopy, outsider glory – felt like fresh air. I mean, where else but a film festival can you see a story about a young man who wants to have sex with his male roommate’s luscious red hair? Or a unabashed narcissist humping the sunglass rack at a convenience store? Or a zombie film about two walking corpses who fall in love and then one eats the other’s brains? This is filmmaking for the pure fun of it – highly visual and immediate. With so many attempts at high drama and deep feeling throughout the rest of the fest, it felt nice to see an eyeball stuck on a twig before it popped off.
It is hard not to be a fan of Steve James, the documentary filmmaker who re-invented the sports film genre with Hoop Dreams (1994). Subsequently he became known as a patient watcher of life, who can edit out of thousands of hours of footage a story that feels close to life, but with the emotional punch of a feature film. No Crossover: the Trial of Allen Iverson (repeats Monday, April 12 at 1 p.m.), however, is a different kind of documentary for James. Produced by ESPN, the film recounts the arrest and trial of then high school superstar Allen Iverson after a brawl in a bowling alley in Hampton, VA. The story is retold through a combination of archive clips and current day interviews, including James’ curious choice to turn the camera on his own parents who live in Iverson’s hometown. It is not the first time James has put himself in one of his stories. In Stevie (2002), James finds the boy from rural Illinois who he mentored through a big brother program, and the two reconnect in a story that is as much about the Stevie as it is about the uncomfortable relationship between documentary filmmaker and subject. No Crossover deals with a far less intimate subject, and James’ personal intrusion adds less to the story than you might think. The film is a well-made – if conventional – retelling of an event that culls two powerful American forces – sports and race – into a single storyline. The problem is when you have a resume like Steve James’, you expect more.
Mexican filmmaker Jorge Colon’s first time out as a writer and director, Sin Ella (repeats Tuesday, April 13 at 4 p.m.), is a family drama about how our busy, contemporary lives leave little room for love and family. The film opens with the death of Carmen (Lola Dueñas), successful television director Gaston’s ex-wife and the mother of his two children. Carmen had remarried and had a third child with Fabian (Francisco Gattorno), but after Carmen’s death, Gaston (Luis Guzman) takes his kids back and into his busy life, despite Fabian’s pleas for him not to break up the new family. Gaston slowly realizes that it will be more than difficult to balance family and work. He begins having visions of his deceased wife, and she helps him rediscover his capacity to love. “Sometimes single events teach you how to live,” an intrusive voiceover tells, and later on summing it up by asking: “Is it better to loose a person or loose a love?”
The voiceover and the flashy, polished production style lend much melodrama and sentimentality to the movie, and a last-minute twist of an ending feels a little cheap. Sin Ella’s musings on life and love have a Vanilla Sky feel. But the emotions here are real and relatable. What helps the film succeed is that little touch of magic added through Colon’s ghosts – neither real phantasms nor psychotic delusions – just effective metaphors for how loss can teach us just how much we really have.
Arlington-born filmmaker Frank Mosley shows no shortage of ambition with his latest film, Hold (repeats Tuesday, April 13 at 4 p.m.), a story about a couple cooping with the aftermath of a home invasion and sexual assault. Films about trauma are tricky – they can come off overblown or underplayed, and you need to win your audience to your characters quickly in order to begin the task of making us feel their pain. Mosley focuses on his leading man, Alan March (Robby Storey), whose wife is beaten and raped while his is at work. Alan becomes paranoid, self-loathing, shut off, and aggressively misanthropic. He and his wife can no longer communicate, let alone be physical, and for the greater part of the film we watch Alan grimace and grunt as his emotional life unravels. It is satisfying to see this film set in a McMansion in suburban Dallas – dressed up in all its unsexy pragmatism. The large, echo-y living spaces, the rudimentary streets, the extra rooms and places to hide in the house underline the dissociation of the films main characters. And while I felt less than completely engaged with Robby’s plight, the film does get at that ineffable feeling that after certain kinds of suffering, there is no returning to the person you were before.
Talk about a bad few weeks. Judith (Rebecca Spence) was just a regular high school teacher when she suddenly starts having strange visions and dreams, gets into a car wreck, discovers little knobby antennae growing out of her scalp, and finds ugly green slugs slithering through the grass out by the lake. What’s going on, we wonder. And wonder. And wonder. Clay Liford’s Earthling (repeats Wednesday, April 14 at 4:15 p.m.) is one of those sci-fi films that doesn’t bother holding up the plot to let the audience in on all the convoluted, geeky story details. We chase after this movie, and in the end it turns out to be about aliens who have been living on earth in host bodies, but are now ready to return to space since their spiky seed pod-space ship has implanted itself in an astronaut’s stomach.
Liford isn’t exclusively a sci-fi director, and Earthling’s slimy weirdness accents a larger story about aliens conflicted between human love and an existence floating around an empty space. At its heart is a love story between Judith and her high school student Abby (Amelia Turner), whose arguments about made up science and real life emotions feel like a mix between Donnie Darco and My So Called Life. But Earthling pays attention to its characters in a way many sci-fi flicks don’t. That makes it fun to watch (even if you get the sense it takes itself more seriously than it should), and may give the filmmakers hope of blasting-off into an afterlife on the midnight circuit.
What to look for today:
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child – Dallas Museum of Art, 7 p.m. – Documentary filmmaker and Basquiat friend Tamra Davis tells the story of the pop star- artist whose short career managed to reach the stratospheres of artistic success, but whose popular acclaim muddied the artist and his intention. Davis has crafted her film from interviews and archival footage, including a good deal of commentary from Basquiat himself.
The Good, the Bad, and the Weird – Magnolia 4, 7 p.m. – Director Kim Jee-woon serves up a goofy western homage to Sergio Leone in this shoot-em-up outlaw film set in Korea. Do you really need any more reason to see this one?
Brotherhood – Magnolia 5, 7:30 p.m. – A popular hit at this year’s SXSW, locally-made drama deals with fraternity hazing gone wrong.
Main image: (left to right) The Good, the Weird, and the Bad
