Tag: Indie Memphis

The Indie Memphis Film Festival continues today at Malco’s Studio on the Square. Our picks for the day’s highlights:

Pick of the Day: The Book of Noah

Imagine The Book of Noah‘s Paul and Noah as alternate-reality, less zany, more real-world versions of Jay and Silent Bob. Then imagine the pair as mostly antagonistic to each other, rivals for the same girl, and caught in the morass of late-twentysomething unrealized potential.

Noah (Patrick Cox, who undoubtedly has the best beard in this year’s Indie Memphis Film Fest), the Silent Bob in this analogy, is too crafty for his own good. Rather than dedicating himself to a steady job, Noah hatches a plan to dognap loved pets and then return them for the reward. Paul (Drew Smith) berates Noah for his shortcomings but can’t face his own. Angela (Corie Ventura) is Paul’s once and — he hopes — future flame. (Unless Noah has something to say about it.) Of course, Angela has her own rapids to navigate, among them Roberto (Andy Mathes), a shady strong-arm type trying to go legit, whom she’s dating.

It sounds like a lot, but the threads unspool in orderly fashion and with a comic touch that’ll leave you engaged and entertained. Shot in Memphis, The Book of Noah will look plenty familiar to locals, including scenes with Kudzu’s and Hollywood Pet Star as backdrops. With loads of local music, including Lucero, the Glass, Andy Grooms, Twin Pilot, the Coach and Four, Effingham and Wheatstraw, Jeffrey James and the Haul, and Snowglobe, it’ll sound familiar too.

In a strong performance, Drew Smith gives off a slight Dane Cook vibe — and he also clocks in as the writer and director of The Book of Noah. Ryan Parker does sharp work as the film’s cinematographer.

Playing in tandem with The Book of Noah is the Hometowner short The Professionals, written, directed, and edited by Adam Remsen with a cast that includes local filmmakers C. Scott McCoy and Laura Hocking (Automusik Can Do No Wrong, Eat), among others. The Professionals is just fun. Ironically titled, the five-minute short is a one-camera gag about inept filmmaking as a cast and crew try to get a scene in the can. Murphy’s Law is in effect. — Greg Akers

Screening at 3:20 p.m.

Doc Pick: Greensboro: Closer to the Truth

In a dramatic, tragic event that slipped through history’s tracks, five people were shot and killed in Greensboro, North Carolina, at a 1979 anti-Klan rally staged by the local Communist Workers’ Party. The victims were unarmed protesters. The assailants were Klansmen and members of the local Nazi organization, who drove through the rally and, after one of their cars was hit with a piece of wood, got out and started shooting.

Greensboro: Closer to the Truth captures surviving figures from every side of the incident — including racist leaders from the time — 25 years later at the staging of a “truth and reconciliation conference” to discuss the event. The story that emerges is one of a tragedy forged out of widespread mistakes: The anti-Klan protesters, while undoubtedly in the right, look naïve and needlessly inflammatory in retrospect. The racist thugs were guilty of a grotesque over-reaction to a mild provocation. But the real culprit may have been the Greensboro police, who declined to place officers on the scene despite the potential for violence.

Showing in concert with Greensboro: Closer to the Truth is Dick-George, Tenn-Tom, a sharp little doc that also peels back a layer of recent regional history in taking a wry, twisty look at the relationship between Richard Nixon and George Wallace.

Screening at 5:55 p.m.

Feature Pick: Broke Sky

A well-shot feature about a couple of carcass-removal technicians from rural Texas whose lives are complicated when a hitchhiker they’d picked up turns up dead, Broke Sky won the Soul of Southern Film award for best narrative feature at this year’s festival. It wouldn’t have gotten my vote, but it is a reasonably well-filmed, well-acted feature that gives a funny, detailed procedural account of a particularly odd job. It falls apart for me when if morphs into a psychological thriller down the stretch. Previously a winner at the Dances with Films festival in Los Angeles.– Chris Herrington

Screens at 8:40 p.m.

The Indie Memphis Film Festival continues today at Malco’s Studio on the Square. Our picks for the day’s highlights:

Pick of the Day: For the Bible Tells Me So

Earnest documentaries about coming out are become an indie-film-fest cliche. Earnest documentaries that seek to resolve perceived tensions between homosexuality and Christian faith might be a Southern indie-film-festival cliche.

But, happily, For the Bible Tells Me So — which chronicles four religious families coping with a son or daughter’s homosexuality — isn’t a film to be appreciated solely for its good intentions. Rather, it’s a well-made, effective piece of movie-making that begins with a sharply assembled collection of pertinent archival footage: See anti-gay activist Anita Bryant get a pie in the face at a Des Moine press conference, then immediately bow her head in tearful prayer. See an odious Jimmy Swaggart, circa 2004, tell a congregation: “I’ve never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. If one ever looks at me like that, I’m gonna kill him and tell God he died.”

From there, For the Bible Tells Me So introduces its families, all of whom end up having some significance within the gay-rights movement and one of whom happens to be the Gephardts of Missouri, with the former congressman and presidential candidate and current father of out-lesbian daughter Chrissy sitting down for a family interview just like everyone else. Screening at 6:05 p.m.

Feature Pick: Swedish Auto

I haven’t had time to fully pre-screen this debut feature from writer-director Derek Sieg, which stars Lukas Haas (Brick, Alpha Dog) as a socially awkward, voyeuristic mechanic and January Jones (We Are Marshall, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada) as one of his objects of contemplation, but on first contact it looks and feels like one of the better unheralded narrative features to screen at the festival in any year. Screens at 8 p.m.

Shorts Pick: First Amendment: Cancelled

This winner of this year’s Hometowner Award for best local narrative short screens today as part of “Shorts Program 2.” The four-minute film from Angel Ortiz, previously a winner at Live From Memphis’ Lil Film Fest, is an uncomfortable but visually impressive take on the subject of torture. Another local short of note in the program is Jon Sparks’ Happy Artistic Freedom Day, another Lil Film Fest grad that boasts a strong lead performance from Amber O’Daniels. Screening at 3:05 p.m.

— Chris Herrington

The Indie Memphis Film Festival continues today at Malco’s Studio on the Square. Our picks from today’s slate of screenings:

Pick of the Day: I Was a Zombie for the FBI

This updated take on the mid-century creature feature was locally shot in the early 1980s and has built a reputation as a minor cult classic over the years. It screens at Indie Memphis as part of the festival’s “Back in the Day” selection of local filmmaking that predates the festival. See our story in this week’s paper for the backstory on I Was a Zombie for the FBI.

Screens at 9:40 p.m.

Local Pick: Tricks

Pittstop Productions had a good showing at last year’s Indie Memphis Film Festival with What Goes Around … . This year, the production company is back with Tricks, written and directed by and starring DeAara Lewis. (Rod Pitts, Pittstop’s titular captain, serves as the film’s director of photography.)

Tricks is a return to that Bluff City cinematic touchstone: the prostitution industry. Where this movie separates itself, though, is that it is set in an almost completely female world, and, better yet, mostly succeeds in trading lurid details for naturalism. It’s a cousin of cinema verité, but not in the skuzzy, exploitation-as-an-ulterior-motive way. (The film’s soundtrack appropriately opens with the ambience of birds chirping.)

The film kicks in motion as Tina (April Hale) is referred for work at Healing Touch Massage, a euphemistically named brothel. There she encounters the madam (Deneka Lashea), the old-school prostie Jean (Joanne Brown), the territorial Natalie (Tracee Lashea), and the hooker with a heart of gold Michelle (DeAara Lewis).

The movie is largely interested in the home lives and family dealings of its cast of characters. Tricks is not a preachy film. It is morally ambiguous, but, again, in an au naturale way. And just because it isn’t seedy, it doesn’t mean it paints a rosy picture of these women’s lives, either. For one, the madam has to bribe Jon W. Sparks — I mean, the police — to stay in business. Call it monetizing law enforcement. — Greg Akers

Screens at 9:55 p.m.

Doc Pick: Run, Granny, Run

Filmmaker Marlo Poras graced Indie Memphis with the documentary Mai’s America (the story of a Vietnamese exchange student in rural Mississippi) a few years ago. This year, Poras is back with her second film, Run Granny Run, which chronicles the failed 2004 Senate run by the then-94-year-old Doris Haddock, who ran as the democratic Senate nominee against powerful Republican incumbent Judd Gregg. Haddock, who had four years earlier walked across the country to campaign against the influence of big money on American democracy, makes for a captivating subject — lucid, funny, grounded, and unusually self-critical. Haddock’s campaign was meant to “be a model for regular people running for office without raising money for special interests,” but Poras’ film suggests her campaign may have been just the opposite: A testament to hard difficult it is for someone like Haddock to run for prominent office while facing not being taken seriously, not being able to raise sufficient funds, and the prospect of going into personal debt that can’t be erased with being a successful career politician. — Chris Herrington

Screens at 1:05 p.m.

The Indie Memphis Film Festival continues today at Malco’s Studio on the Square. Some of the highlights…

Pick of the Day: Team Picture

Local filmmaker Kentucker Audley (aka Andrew Nenninger, a product of the fertile local film scene that grew up around Cooper-Young’s Memphis Digital Arts Cooperative), rose to prominence at Indie Memphis a couple of years ago, with his award-winning short Bright Sunny South, which went on to screen at the Slamdance Film Festival. Tonight, Audley unveils his debut feature, Team Picture, which has already screened as part of “emerging filmmaker” series in New York and Boston. For more on Audley and his movie, see our feature story in this week’s paper. — Chris Herrington

Screens at 8:05 p.m.

Local Pick: The Delta

Before there was Craig Brewer, there was Ira Sachs. The Memphis-bred filmmaker, who shared Sundance glory with Brewer with his grand-jury-prize winning Forty Shades of Blue, shot his first feature in Memphis more than a decade ago. The Delta, about the relationship between an affluent white teenager and the immigrant son of a poor Vietnamese woman and black GI, became a film-festival hit upon its 1996 release. It screens here as part of Indie Memphis’ “Back in the Day” selection of local filmmaking that predates the beginning of the festival. Sachs is scheduled to attend the screening. — CH

Screens at 5:55 p.m.

Doc Pick: Hell on Wheels

The renaissance of roller derby — its latest, at least — began in Austin in 2000. The league that would one day become TXRD, founded as Bad Girl, Good Woman Productions, initially split into four teams: the Hellcats, the Putas Del Fuego, the Rhinestone Cowgirls, and the Holy Rollers.

For fans of A&E’s reality show Rollergirls, it’s a familiar narrative, and Hell on Wheels might be considered the backstory. There are certainly some familiar faces: Sister Mary Jane, Veruca Assault, Luna, and Cha Cha. But Hell on Wheels tells the story of all of the Texas rollergirls from the very beginning.

As roller derby has spread across the county, the mantra of many flat-track leagues is “for the skaters, by the skaters.” Instead of having a benefactor or an owner, the leagues strive to be skater-owned and operated. And Hell on Wheels explains exactly why that is.

Two years into its existence, 65 of BGGW’s 80 skaters left the organization en masse. The league’s four managers, calling themselves She-E-Os, held control of the league. The skaters wanted more input in league decisions. And like the rollergirls they are, neither side would back down.
The result of the derby divorce was two leagues: TXRD with its banked track and the Texas Rollergirls, identified in the film as TXRG, on the flat track.

Though it includes its share of derby drama, the film is not just a verbal catfight. Coming in at just under 90 minutes (or the amount of time needed for your average bout), Hell on Wheels jams in as much on-the-track action as off the track. The filmmakers include a fair amount of practices, bout footage, and some really horrifying injuries.

But in the end, it tells the story of how a counter-culture was reborn. — Mary Cashiola

Screens at 7:25 p.m.

Shorts Pick: Help is Coming

The experimental short film Help is Coming tracks three adolescent African-American boys as they walk through the detritus of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the blueish-gray tint enlivened by stray bursts of color. The boys wear masks of Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Ray Nagin as they walk past such surreally unnerving sites as two horses pulling an automobile, a school bus smashed against a wall, a beheaded Christ statue. Shot in the lower 9th Ward over the course of three days in late December, 2005, this 8 minute experimental film seems clearly inspired by Killer of Sheep and/or George Washington (and you could sure do worse for inspiration), but has a weight all its own.

Help is Coming screens as part of the festival’s “Shorts Program 3” alongside a mix of local and non-local shorts. Among the local films of note are No Shades of Gray, Jon Sparks’ musical interpretation of the Commercial Appeal columnist Wendi Thomas’ assault on Memphis in May for inviting Three 6 Mafia to perform, and Conversion Tactics, a sharp little animated consideration of the pagan roots of Christmas from Live From Memphis’ Sarah Fleming and Christopher Reyes. — CH

Screens at 5:15 p.m.

The Indie Memphis Film Festival continues today at Studio on the Square, with the festival’s award winners set to be announced at 5:30 p.m. But there’s plenty more happening on what might be the busiest day of the festival. Our picks for the day:

Pick of the Day: Great World of Sound

We haven’t seen North Carolina director Craig Zobel’s feature, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January, but the critical word of mouth is strong. Zobel, who, along with Memphian Kentucker Audley, was named of the “25 new faces of indie film” by Filmmaker magazine this summer, has made a movie about a couple of men traveling town-to-town working for a company that charges amateur singers and musicians to make records under the guise of being talent scouts. Read what the Village Voice had to say about the film here.

Screening at 6:20 p.m.

Local Picks: Unhinged and Have You Heard of Craig Brewer?

This local feature from filmmakers Kris and Natalie Boyatt boasts strong production values aside from a few poorly lit scenes and has a flashback structure that parcels out information in deliberate, effective ways that enhances the story rather than disrupting it. It’s a psychological thriller about a man coming undone in the aftermath of his daughter’s death. Be sure to get there early for John Pickle’s hysterical short film Have You Heard of Craig Brewer?, a winner at the Lil Film Fest earlier this year. The four-minute film stars Pickle as his redneck Russell Hawker character, invading a house party hosted by the Hustle & Flow auteur.

Screening at 3:10 p.m.

Wildcard Pick: Live From Memphis Music Video Showcase

LiveFromMemphis.com will host its popular showcase of local music videos again this year, showing on two screens simultaneously. Look for videos from local bands such as Lord T. & Eloise, Mr. White, the Central Standards, the Subteens, the Secret Service, and Vending Machine.

Screens at 9 p.m.

— Chris Herrington

The Indie Memphis Film Festival, which runs at Malco’s Studio on the Square through Thursday, October 25th, kicks off tonight with an opening-night screening of The Honeydripper, the newest film from John Sayles, the Oscar-nominated writer/director of such key indie films as Lone Star, Matewan, and The Return of the Secaucus Seven.

The Honeydripper is set in Alabama circa 1950 where the titular juke joint, owned by piano player Tyrone “Pinetop” Purvis (Danny Glover), is in danger of closing. But, as in most of Sayles’ best movies, The Honeydripper is more of an ensemble, its real subject the workings of a very specific community.

Sayles and producer Maggie Renzi are slated to appear at the screenings tonight.

The Honeydripper will be shown on two screens starting at 8 p.m. at Studio on the Square.

Throughout the festival, we’ll be offering a daily critical guide to the screenings. In addition to The Honeydripper, here are a couple of screenings tonight you might want to see:

Doc Pick: Mr. Dial Has Something to Say

Mr. Dial Has Something to Say is a beautifully made documentary with all the intrigue of a grand conspiracy theory and the ability to make you rethink everything you think you know about modern American art. Made for Alabama Public Television, Mr. Dial tells the story of Thornton Dial, an elderly, illiterate African-American artist, the celebrated Gee’s bend quilters, and the artists’ relationship with Bill Arnett, an obsessed and often reviled collector. Buoyed by an incredible soundtrack, it’s a suspenseful, quietly explosive assemblage of interviews exploring issues of American identity, genius, and institutionalized racism in the art world.

What is it that Mr. Dial has to say? The 78-year-old artist believes that art isn’t about paint or canvas, but “ideas.”

“I’ve got 10,000,” Dial says. The prolific artist’s painting and multimedia constructions are visually arresting, politically informed eruptions of color and form that rival masterworks by art-world saints like Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg. It’s not difficult to understand why a massive body of sophisticated work by a poor uneducated folk artist from the blues belt (where “outsider” art is cheap) might be threatening to dealers and critics alike. And the briefest survey of Dial’s work makes expressions like “folk” and “outsider” art sound as brutally archaic as “race music.”

Dial was born in 1928 in rural Alabama. His parents weren’t married and didn’t stay together. He grew up like a weed in and around Bessemer, an industrial town where he built boxcars for Pullman Standard. Because his family teased him, Dial made his artwork secretly, and on the side.

Arnett has been accused of exploiting black artists and manipulating the art market. He’s also been celebrated as a hero, doing for rural art what ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax did for rural music. Arnett befriended Dial in the 1980s, and promptly set out to prove that African-American artists in the rural South were as legitimate as artists in New York, Paris, or anywhere else.

Dial’s work initially stunned critics and it seemed that both the artist and his champion were on their way to fame and glory when 60 Minutes ran a story accusing Arnett of being a combination con man and modern day planter raising art on his farm instead of cotton. Dial was personally shocked and confused by the expose and stood by Arnett. But the damage was done. Big shows fell through. Critics that once praised Dial flip-flopped and called him as an overrated “folk artist.”

After investing all of his personal fortune in his artists, Arnett went broke, and suffered a heart attack and all the afflictions of Job. But he never gave up on his quest to prove that American modernism was inspired to some significant degree by poorly documented post-slave traditions running parallel to gospel, blues, and jazz.

The quilts produced by several families in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, lent further proof to Arnett’s claims that America’s “naive” art was anything but. But Mr. Dial is still just another gifted folk artist. Even if he’s a visionary with 10,000 ideas, and something interesting and important to say. — Chris Davis

Screening at 5:55 p.m.

Feature pick: Blood Car

Blood Car takes place in a world in the grips of an energy crisis. Gas is now $32.21 a gallon. It’s only two weeks in the future, though, so most everything else is still recognizable. The first shot of the film is of a couple having wild sex in a truck in an auto graveyard. Get used to that. This is one naughty film. The best part is the severely perverse humor, which rears its ugly head from time to time but maybe not often enough. The plot is the descent into murder of a mild-mannered vegan, Archie (Mike Brune), who accidentally invents an engine that runs on blood and has to kill to keep his chick-magnet car purring along. Katie Rowlett co-stars as Archie’s sex interest, and she gets the best lines in the show, including “The fact is, I’m in the front seat of a car, tackling a rod like a princess.” Also co-starring Anna Chlumsky, notable for having played the titular pixie in 1991’s My Girl. This role is different. Blood Car is recommended for horror-genre fans and all-around horn dogs who like nudity with their blood and blood with their nudity. — Greg Akers

Screening at 10:45 p.m.