DALLAS 2011: Critic's Notebook
by Steve Dollar 
Nothing really says Texas like Jerry Jeff Walker. Even though he was born (as Wikipedia informs us) Ronald Clyde Crosby in Oneonta, New York, his troubadour path led him from Greenwich Village to New Orleans and then to Austin, where he became supreme commander of The Lost Gonzo Band, inventing an intoxicated post-hippie vision of honky-tonk epitomized in songs like "Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother" and "London Homesick Blues"?with its immortal and besotted wish upon a Lone Star to "go home with the armadillo." Funny enough, Walker didn't write some of his most famous hits, which speaks to the collaborative nature of the 1970s Texas songwriter scene, but he did pen "Mr. Bojangles," the uber-sentimental portrait of a New Orleans street performer he met in a jail cell for which millions across the globe can either love him or hate him.
OK, Buckaroos, the Walker bio that was the centerpiece of the
Dallas International Film Festival (which concludes Sunday), is the kind of documentary that assumes no critical ironies. It's a love-in all the way. And Walker, seen in vintage fuzzy video clips as he shimmies around the stage in gym shorts, white socks and sneakers, is the kind of natural raconteur whose loquacious charms would be hard to resist. "Anything worth doing is worth overdoing," he allows, and the anecdotes about gambling binges, abandoned rental cars, and flying high on a private jet throughout most of the '70s as Jerry Jeff took cosmic cowboy music to the masses are thoroughly entertaining, but the story never goes much deeper. Thanks to the love (and business savvy) of a good woman, his wife Susan, the singer reinvents himself as a solo act after the music industry turns its back on him, and now stands as a Texas legend. He's still in terrific form, too, taking the stage to entertain moviegoers at the Dallas franchise of Gilley's (the bar made famous by
Urban Cowboy, whose phenomenal success is cited in the film for deflating Walker's fortunes in the music business). With copious pours of McCallan's 12-year-old single malt, cowgirls busting mechanical broncos, and local couples showing the out-of-towners how to two-step, there was the Texas flavor you might have expected at South by Southwest in Austin three weeks earlier?but this was downtown Dallas.
[see also: Steve Dollar's SXSW wrap-up.] 
In its fifth year flying solo after its partnership ended with the American Film Institute, the festival feels like a significant part of ongoing efforts to revitalize the city's urban core. There wasn't too much glitz this year?
Ann-Margret was the big opening night guest of honor. The best bets, not unlike SXSW, were micro rather than macro. The Canadian drama
Small Town Murder Songs was exemplary. Written and directed by Ed Gass-Donnelly, this frosty noir has a whiff of
Twin Peaks about it: A local police chief in a remote Mennonite community in Ontario revisits his own dark places after the body of a young woman is found by a rural lake.
Peter Stormare (who stuffed
Steve Buscemi in the wood chopper in
Fargo, another related film) is Walter, the cop whose struggle to end his history of violence has him on the edge of implosion. When a skeezy suspect is hauled in, his alibi is supplied by Rita (
Jill Hennessy, aces), a local hard-knock gal with whom Walter, as he says, "has a history." Gass-Donnelly lights a slow-burning fuse of suspense, complicated by flashbacks that hint at some unexplained horror. The ambiguities are such that you suspect Walter committed the murder as a set up. But his sins are more existential, set against a stark folk-gospel soundtrack by the band Bruce Peninsula and chapter titles that evoke Biblical pronouncements.
The film is also about landscape, in this case a raw, half-desolate beauty that's meant to reflect the hard-scrabble souls of the characters. Clay Jeter's
Jess + Moss all but loses itself in the wide open spaces of rural Western Kentucky. Teenage Jess (played by 26-year-old
Buffy the Vampire Slayer regular Sarah Hagan) and 12-year-old Moss (newcomer Austin Vickers) are strangely isolated companions on what seems like an endless summer idyll. The film's breathtaking Super-16 cinematography and experimental approach to narrative keep you guessing, as a mystery partially unravels through the cassette tapes the kids replay, almost ritualistically, in a bid to hang onto whatever their lives used to be. Abandoned houses, rusting silos, and neglected tobacco fields suggest the depopulated terrain and slowly disintegrating milieu of a zombie movie lensed by
William Christenberry?or a kinder, gentler
Tideland.
The pair's investigations of the natural world mingle with memories real and imagined and, amid much child-like roleplaying, Jess' growing sexual overtures to Moss, whose relationship to the older girl is unclear (sibling? cousin? next-door neighbor?). Ultimately, this Eden is a limbo, from which Jess has to navigate her way to childhood's end, its visual poetry limned in melancholy and anticipation.
Likewise enigmatic, as in to the freaking max, is
The Oregonian. A young woman (Lindsay Pulsipher) survives a bloody car crash only to emerge into a waking nightmare as she seeks help on a lonely country road. There's a crazy old woman whose laughter is a malignant echo, and a bearded fat dude who scrambles his eggs with gasoline, and all kinds of dead bodies that keep coming back to life, and some freak in a fuzzy green monster outfit, and everyone drools black goo out of their mouths. Shock cuts, slow (and fast!) zooms, whacked-out flashbacks, a disorienting electronic soundtrack, gallons of fake blood, dead leaves and the dirty ground, and it ... goes ... on ... forever. Calvin Reeder's feature debut has its own crackhead logic, but overlooks that what may be mind-blowing at 15 minutes feels torturous at 75. The garish, transgressive feel achieved for probably a nickel is nonetheless admirable, and hellishly fucked-up.
I wish I could say as much for
The Ward, genre legend
John Carpenter's first feature since 2001's
Ghosts of Mars. Maybe he just needed to get back in the groove, in which case this saga of a ghoul-stalked, all-girl mental institution makes a passable warm-up?if decidedly minor Carpenter. Hollywood hottie
Amber Heard is Kristen, the newbie in the nuthouse, committed after burning her house down. Just like
Sucker Punch, there's a comely cast of young ladies who each have their own unique attributes, and who all warn the antsy Kristen that escape is impossible. Slowly, horribly, the girls begin to die, one by one, as the ghost of a murdered patient named Alice takes her revenge?and Kristen tries in vain to convince Dr. Stringer (
Jared Harris), although a mean nurse usually injects her with knockout juice before she can get very far. The movie's strong on gothic trappings, and Carpenter cold rocks the jump scares, yet the screenplay doesn't reach for much psychological depth. It's a scary movie, for sure, but not a memorable one. Fingers crossed that Carpenter settles development issues with the proposed
Fangland or one of his other projects in the works, because this is one director who deserves an autumnal triumph.
Posted by ahillis at April 8, 2011 11:19 AM
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