LIVE FROM MEMPHIS

When we last left our blogger-hero (which is to say me) he (meaning I) had survived the first three days of Indie Memphis with a head full of great films. But little did he know that there were six more days of festival to go!

Actually, he was fully aware of five of those days, and figured (rightly) that the sixth would get tacked on because of the rainout of the Shell program on Friday evening. Cut me some slack, OK? I'm working on a transition here! 

Children of Invention

I've long been an advocate for some kind of acting award at Indie Memphis, whether it's just a single "Best Performance" award, a "Best Actor/Actress" award, or a full-on slate of awards for hometown and general competition actors and actresses in shorts and features. Having been on the screening committee twice now, I understand the logistical problems of setting up such an award. But what actor wouldn't like having "Best Actor: 2009 Indie Memphis Film Festival" on their resume? And I think the prospect of qualifying for an acting award would encourage some of our excellent local actors to sign on to productions. 

If there was an acting award this year, and if I was the guy who awarded it, I would have given it to Children of Invention's Tina Chen, who steals the show in Tze Chun's very strong, traditionally told movie about the Chinese immigrant experience in the current econo-cataclysm. Chen, who is all of about 8 years old, gives a totally natural, pitch perfect performance as a daughter of a single mother (Cindy Cheung) who, along with the also-excellent Micheal Chen as her brother, finds herself inadvertently abandoned when their mother is left holding the bag by some multi-level marketing scammers and thrown into the legal system. Because of the uniformly good level of acting throughout the movie, director Chun is no doubt responsible for much of Chen's performance. But as we learned at Joe Swanberg's seminar on directing amateur actors, if you don't come by it naturally, you're probably not going to get it, and much of the director's job is finding and identifying those who do have it. 

Easier With Practice

While I'm awarding pretend prizes, I'll give the Best Cinematography Award to David R. Morrison for his work on Kyle Patrick Alvarez's Easier With Practice. Based on a story that ran in GQ about a writer who becomes obsessed with having phone sex with a woman he has never even seen, the film might move too slowly for some tastes, but that just allows the viewer time to relish some really great shots that reveal the beauty we might miss in everyday life. This superbly crafted movie violates one of my rules of film: that movies about writers always suck.

Li'l Film Fest 11

When LFM did Li'l Film Fest 10, we chose "Family" as the theme, hoping to get some entries that were a little less...shall we say, dark. Well, it didn't work. We got movies about cannibalism ("Dinner with the Olsens") and a Manson Family reunion. Halfway through that program, an older couple stormed out of the theater, threw their ballots onto the merchandise table, and declared the whole affair "an assault on the senses."

My suggestion to make the theme of Li'l Film Fest 11 "An Assault on the Senses" was wisely shot down by Sarah Flemming ("If we got that for 'Family', imagine what we would get with 'An Assault on the Senses!'") but we did decide to go with the the whole horror thing, since it was October and the filmmakers are going to make horror movies anyway. The "Musical Horror" theme inspired some great work, such as Anupam "Al" Lahari's "Thriller" (which came with matching cast and crew shirts), Kris Stewart and Hunter Deusing's Poe-butchery "The Tell-Tale Shitty Music", Harmony Stewart's "Dark Fountain", and Joe Frangle's "OCD". Donald Myers seemed to be the only one who remembered the "secret ingredient", which was orange, in his fruit-snuff-film "Orange Delight", which many, myself included, believe may be his best effort yet. The fest also gave two directors opportunity to revisit older material, with Jon W. Spark's conceptually minimal "Threnody" and Geoffrey Brent Shrewsbury's organ-thieving video to The Oblivians "You Better Behave". The jury winner was H. G. Ray's computer animation spectacular "Spacecrane 2010", while the audience award winner was "Frankenstein vs. Dracula: The Opera", directed by Adam Remsen and starring John Pickle as the put-upon suburban Frankie and yours truly as the campy Dracula who lives next door. I was very excited about the win, especially considering that I put all of two hours work into it. Maybe I should ditch the directing thing and take up acting. Anybody need an award-winning, borderline gay Dracula?  

Didn't think so.

Alloy Orchestra: The General and Man With a Movie Camera

Memphis Flyer critic Chris Herrington called these two performances some of the best moviegoing experiences of his entire life, and I am inclined to agree with him. I didn't know how they could top their 2007 appearance, when they played along to the 1925 Phantom of the Opera, but with the perfect choice of two incredible and rarely seen films, top it they did. The General was Buster Keaton's masterpiece, a story about a hapless engineer who was, if not the first, then close to the first, clueless comedy hero in American film. It's running time is mostly taken up by two epic chase sequences that are among the best ever conceived for film. When I pointed out to Mission of Burma founder and Alloy Orchestra keyboardist Roger Miller that The General pretty much presaged the entire run of The Dukes of Hazzard, he said "Well, yeah, but that's not really Buster Keaton's fault. That's like blaming Led Zepplin for hair metal."

Man with a Movie Camera is a 1929 experimental Soviet film whose density of image the Alloy boys made grand use of. Here's an example of how far this film, rarely seen outside of film schools, was ahead of its time: After the performance, I popped over to Hometown Shorts program 1 in the adjacent theater, where I saw the last 10 minutes of Craig Maners and Charles Metz's "Project D." The ambitious short concerned an editor who was haunted by a character who was cut out of a horror movie, which become indistinguishable from the editor's reality. Naturally, it includes scenes of the editor working on scenes from the movie in Final Cut Pro. This is, of course, a totally post-modern, metafiction gambit. Man with a Movie Camera, created 80 years earlier, included shots of a female editor working on a 1929-era flatbed film editing table. The editor was the film's editor, and the footage being edited was footage from the movie itself.

Hometowner Shorts 1: "Project D" and "Night"

The proceeding was not to suggest that "Project D" was somehow unoriginal. Indeed, it was merely meant to note that what was totally unfathomable in 1929 is still cutting-edge today. The meta-horror "Project D" shows all of the hallmarks of a pair of talented young filmmakers whose next work I am very interested in seeing, and so should you be. 

"Night", directed by Brian Elkins and produced by Waheed AlQawasami, is a well-executed riff on workplace-massacre paranoia. My only real quibble with the beautifully shot and well-acted short was that after setting up the always terrifying Patrick Cox as the unstoppable madman, he is all too easily dispatched by a heroine who goes from terrorized screamer to avenger in an unconvincingly short amount of time. 

The Conversion 

This year's Hometowner Jury Award winner is perhaps most remarkable for the off-the-cuff nature of its origin. Inspired by the digital conversion (and given a merciful deadline extension by the delay in implementation) the web series turned feature is like all of the best parts of Network crossed with a little Tim and Eric's Awesome Show! Great Job! Constantly switching tones between comedy and serious social commentary is extremely difficult to pull off, but The Conversion, perhaps because of the serialized nature of its writing as well as its development and screening, manages it. So, would-be Memphis film producers, Corduroy Wednesday pulled all of this off with practically no money. Imagine what they could do with a pittance, or even a (gasp) adequate budget!

Hometowner Shorts #2

This program was admirably reported on by Prodigal Girl, so I will only mention a couple of things. First, thank everyone for the very enthusiastic reaction to "Scrambled Eggs". Writer/Producer/Actor Adam Remsen, cinematographer Sarah Fleming, editor Laura Jean Hocking  and I worked on the 15-minute short for 14 months. This, for the record, is entirely too long. Thanks also to Chris Reyes for his help with our sound issues and final details. 

Second, "Family Tree" proves that unscripted, mumblecore (there's that word again) type films are very delicate things to pull off, and seem to mostly depend on the quality and chemistry of the actors. The now-expat Tim Morton really makes this one. 

Third, Kenneth Coker's "Iwa" is a stunning piece of animation that deserves a wider audience. I hope to see more stuff from the filmmaker in the future. 

Fourth, I read the script to "Woke Up Ugly" a while back and really didn't see anything special in it. But the excellent acting by Annie Gaia and writer G. B. Shannon, and the decision to make it a period piece set in the 1950s, really pulled it together, earning it both the jury prize and the audience award. I was wrong, and Shannon and director Ryan Parker were right. Just goes to show you that you can't tell from a script how the film's going to come out. 

An Evening with Robyn Hitchcock

More excellent music in the film festival! I feel like somebody got their chocolate in my peanut butter! I had a very intense period of Soft Boys and Robyn Hitchcock fandom that burned me out on the whole thing, but Hitchcock's intimate, irreverent performance really brought back all that is special about his sensibilities. The man call tell a story, and he always knows what he's talking about, even when you don't. 

Lovely By Surprise

The long-awaited Indie Memphis debut of Kirt Gunn's shot-in-Memphis movie from 2006 was as bittersweet as the film's convoluted meta-narrative. John Beifuss compared it to Adaptation, but I think it's really closer to being the good version of a Breakfast of Champions film that the totally awful 1999 Bruce Willis vehicle made impossible. While on the surface it appears to ooze post-Napoleon Dynamite indie quirk, its character's eccentricities are the products of deeply scarred psyches instead of just being freaks that the filmmakers trot out for a laugh. Made only three years ago yet clearly a product of its time, the Audience Choice Award winner had the air of a work that never quite found its home.

Elvis: '68 Comeback and The Big Lebowski at the Levitt Shell

Despite the chill and drizzle, a decent crowd made it out the Shell for what became the festival's free thank-you to the audience. Hopefully, this good turnout in bad conditions was the beginning of a regular outdoor film series in the spring and summer of next year.

I'm going to call the first program the '68 Comeback, because, despite the protestations of Elvis Presley Enterprises, that's what it was. Here in Memphis, we are so inundated with Elvis that we sometimes forget that talent-wise, the man was head and shoulders above...well, just about everybody. The thing that never ceases to amaze me is that incredible voice. Practically all rock vocalists who came after made their livings imitating one element or another of Elvis' bag of tricks, but he's still the only one who can do it all. Even when it's in the service of some piece of film soundtrack cheese, it's always compelling, always tasteful, and always incredibly great.

I saw The Big Lebowski on its opening weekend in 1998, and let me tell you, the audience I was with in the theater that night did not understand that movie. I'm not sure any of us did. But here, 11 years and countless viewings later, the Cohen Brothers' ultimate stoner comedy got all the laughs in all the right places. I really think this movie changed comedy, and the audience reaction proved it. Without The Big Lebowski, there would be no Judd Apatow. But like Led Zepplin, don't blame the Cohens for what came after.

Thanks to everybody, particularly Erik Jambor, Les Edwards and their militia of volunteers, for putting on the best Indie Memphis yet. Stay tuned to LFM for some more commentary from other bloggers, and get cracking on those submissions for next year.