Five festival films available on demand

Paper Covers Rock

For those without the money or vacation time to spend a week in Austin, Texas, though, the Independent Film Channel has brought a taste of SXSW into your living room. Beginning this weekend, five of the films showing at this year’s festival will be available via the IFC On Demand service, available through Time Warner’s digital cable for $5.99 per title.

One of the big events at this year’s SXSW is Alexander the Last by Joe Swanberg (Nights and Weekends, Hannah Takes The Stairs), one of the leading lights in the so-called “mumblecore” movement. (I say “so-called” because a good number of the filmmakers classed under the name hate it.) Indie to the extreme, mumblecore films are no-budget efforts made with a cast and crew comprised of the filmmaker and some friends, in which they play characters at least partly based on themselves. (They’re not cult movies so much as clique movies.)

Alexander the Last breaks from this template in using a cast of professional actors. The lead character is an actress preparing for a sexually explicit scene in an experimental theater production. With her musician husband away on tour, she has trouble maintaining a professional distance from the actor she is performing with. I would describe more of what happens, but as I understand the genre mumblecore movies distain anything so “Hollywood” as plot. In other words, I’m not a fan of the movement, and Alexander did nothing to convert me.

Alexander the Last

Fortunately, I enjoyed all of the other offerings. Three Blind Mice is Australian drama about three naval officers enjoying a night on the town in Sydney before returning to active duty. At least two of them are returning: one of them is planning to go AWOL rather than return to the abusive conditions under which he had to serve. The fact that the three are serving in Iraq is misleading to the degree that it might lead you to expect something lime any of the American films that have been made about that conflict. The problems here are more generally those of young men chafing under the kind of restrictive authority represented by the military. As written and directed by Matthew Newton (who also plays one of the lead roles), Three Blind Mice initially radiated a bit too much déjà vu in its contrast of rowdy activity and inward turmoil. But the characterizations grew on me to the point where, when the film ended, I was ready to watch it all over again.

The Bulgarian entry to the Oscars for Best Foreign Language film of 2008, Zift is a stylishly filmed neo-noir that works in homages to such classics of the genre as DOA and Gilda while telling its one-of-a-kind tale about a prisoner released from jail after spending most of his life there for a crime he didn’t commit. Warning: Not for the sensitive or easily offended, as is clear from the opening scene.

The Daily Show’s Wyatt Cenac gives a more than capable dramatic performance in Medicine For Melancholy, a poignant romance between two African-Americans living in San Francisco, a city depicted both with great tenderness and with bitterness for the relentless gentrification that is pushing so many of its residents away. With its moody cinematography, excellent score and strong sense of place, it recalls Spike Lee’s feature debut She’s Gotta Have It, albeit with the satire replaced by a sense of resignation.

Paper Covers Rock is reputedly the first in a series of 10 films inspired by Krystof Kieszlowski’s monumental The Decalogue. I didn’t see the direct connection between Kieszlowski’s explorations of modern morality based on the 10 Commandments and director Joe Maggio’s compelling look at a young woman’s struggle to put her life back together after a failed suicide attempt. But as a character study of someone in a difficult situation, it’s first-rate stuff that gives a good name to no-budget filmmaking—I won’t tell you how little he made it for, but if he can do this quality work for so little then Maggio may well complete the other nine films, and I look forward to seeing them.