South by Southwest

The festival in Austin, Texas, offers an opportunity to see films before anyone else – including one by a Princeton Junction native.

By: Elise Nakhnikian
   The fun of a film festival is seeing good movies that you won’t be able to see anywhere else for a while, if at all, and seeing the work of directors you’d never heard of before. So when a friendly, enthusiastic young woman with a fistful of flyers worked a line I was in at Austin’s South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival last week, inviting people to a screening of her first feature, her enthusiasm and the "great stories" she promised convinced me to give it a try.
   The curly-haired young woman is 29-year-old Naomi Greenfield. Her co-director, another first-time filmmaker — and, as it turns out, a native of Princeton Junction — is 27-year-old Sara Taksler. And their movie, which they call a "balloonamentary," is Twisted, a thoroughly charming, warmhearted, surefooted, often funny and sometimes deeply moving look at a close-knit community of balloon-twisters — the people who twist and tie balloons into animals and other shapes.
   Nominated for an Emerging Visions award, South by Southwest’s prize for first-time directors, Twisted isn’t about balloons per se, though it does show some amazing latex creations made and displayed at an annual balloon-twisting conference. It’s really about the collaborative culture of the balloon-twisting "family," and how balloons helped several of the convention regulars transform their lives.
   "We wanted it to be stories about people," says Ms. Taksler. "And we lucked out, because it’s about life and love and death and race and all of those big themes. For us, it’s really a movie about finding your life — following your passion."
   The movie also includes a short animated sequence on the history of balloon making narrated by Jon Stewart, who the filmmakers were able to book because Ms. Taksler’s day job is helping to produce the "field" segments on The Daily Show. "We were trying to find somebody who would have a familiar voice and who would let people know right off the bat that it would be a funny movie," she says, "so I asked if he’d do it. He said as long as there were no anti-Semitic balloons he was fine with it."
   Another excellent documentary that was looking for a distributor at the festival and seemed likely to find one (the Film Forum in Manhattan had already agreed to show it) was Manufacturing Dissent, an investigation of filmmaker Michael Moore by documentarians Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine. The filmmakers decided to make a film about Moore because they admired his work, but they developed a warier stance after being given the runaround by Moore, getting harassed by the handlers who surround him at public appearances, and hearing disturbing stories about how he distorts the truth in his films and how he can be, according even to a remaining self-professed friend, "a little bit megalomaniac at times, with a tinge of paranoia."
   Ms. Melnyk and Mr. Caine practice what they preach, generally avoiding cheap shots and innuendo and giving Moore his due at the same time that they question his methods. In the end, they say, the most disturbing thing about Moore’s often glib, self- focused, rabble-rousing style is what its popularity says about the rest of us. "If there were a vibrant political left in the United States, Michael Moore’s milquetoast populism would be laughed at rather than laughed with," says political journalist and critic David Marsh.
   The documentary category is usually the strongest at SXSW, but a lot of my favorites this year were fiction films. The best was Exiled, a 2006 Hong Kong movie scheduled for release in the U.S. this June. Director Johnny To is huge in his own country, but here he’s known only by film buffs and fans of Asian action movies. A taut, clever cat-and-mouse game between a tight-knit group of gangsters and the boss they are trying to outwit and outrun, Exiled is studded with Mr. To’s expertly choreographed trademark gunfights, which are usually held at perilously close range.
   Another fine fiction film was Knocked Up, the latest from director Judd Apatow. Like its older sibling, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up starts with a plot that’s exaggerated for comic effect and then stuffs it full of perfectly pitched set pieces about contemporary life that leave you humming like a tuning fork. Also like its older sibling, it radiates a genuine — and winning — affection for every one of its characters. I don’t want to spoil it, since it will be in theaters this June. Just go see it, and tell me if Ben’s "dice move" and the exchange between Debbie and the bouncer don’t make you inordinately happy.
   Another movie by an established writer-director was Reign Over Me, which stars Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle and was written and directed by Mike Binder. As in The Upside of Anger, Mr. Binder dresses up a melodramatic screenplay with big-name actors, pairing a gifted artist (Joan Allen in Anger and Cheadle in Reign) with a star who can act if he tries, but doesn’t always bother. Mr. Binder, an actor himself, coaxed fine performances out of both Kevin Costner in Anger and Sandler, but his overwritten scripts squeeze the life out of his films despite the casts’ best efforts. To be fair, this was a real crowd-pleaser at SXSW, but I think people may have been reacting to Sandler’s presence (he, Cheadle and Mr. Binder did a Q&A after the screening) as much as they were to the movie itself. Reign Over Me opens today, probably in way too many theaters.
   Other directors to watch for include Ry Russo-Young, whose Orphans is a smart, sad story of a difficult relationship between two sisters. It conveys an impressive amount of emotionally complex material through action and camerawork, without a word of excessive or unnatural-sounding dialogue.
   And then, of course, there’s Ms. Taksler and Ms. Greenfield. When filmmakers do work that good right out of the chute, you want to know what they’re planning next. "That’s what everyone’s asking us," says Ms. Greenfield, "but right now we just want to do right by this film, since we spent so long on it. We don’t want to abandon it, to cheat on it with a new idea."