Beyond the Multiplex

I've already written about the major premieres at SXSW this year, movies likely to show up in your neighborhood sooner or later. These include Robert Altman's "A Prairie Home Companion," the anti-music industry broadside "Before the Music Dies," and the documentaries "Al Franken: God Spoke" and "loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies." SXSW juries and audiences have handed out their own awards (largely to movies I, ahem, didn't see), but as at any self-respecting film festival, those have little to do with either artistic merit or marketplace feasibility. I thought of giving out my own, but aren't we all sick of that format by this point in the year. Instead, in the slightly cryptic, whimsical indie spirit, here are 10 Things About SXSW 2006.

1) Boy, are we in trouble. As I said above, the best movie I saw at SXSW this year was "OilCrash," a terrific work of investigative journalism-as-film that will scare the living crap out of you. Sure, you've read a little about the "peak oil" hypothesis, you disapprove in some theoretical way of the planet's massive (and rapidly worsening) fossil-fuel addiction, you're in favor of alternative energy sources and all that. You may even have the sense that things will get fairly bumpy as we try to develop cheaper solar power or new hydrogen technologies or whatever. Am I right so far? Well, Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack's film paints a vastly grimmer picture than that, and here's the thing. Their sources are not eco-freaks from Vermont or Berkeley in Peruvian clothing, but scientists, financial insiders and retired oil executives, many of them bedrock conservatives. Their message: The era of oil is nearly at an end, and the social and economic consequences are barely imaginable.

"I've been doing TV news for a long time," Gelpke, a Swiss television journalist, told me after the premiere. "I'm not easily impressed. But as soon as I started researching this I could tell it was the most important story I had ever come across." Does his electrifying film, which combines a history of the oil industry's boom and bust with well-informed (if dire) speculation about what lies ahead, paint too bleak a picture? Is it really possible that gasoline will cost $75 a gallon in two decades, and that air travel will become a luxury available only to the super-rich? "It's a call to arms," says McCormack, Gelpke's Irish-born directing partner. "In order to have an impact you have to simplify and dramatize, and I'm prepared to defend that. It's only a depressing story if you're afraid to change."

"We hope we're wrong," adds Gelpke. "Listen, I've got kids and I love cars. I'd like to keep traveling places. Like almost everybody in the film says, I hope we're wrong. But I don't think we're wrong." Whether or not you buy the doomsday scenario of "OilCrash," it's one of the most important films of the year. A distribution deal should soon be announced.

2) No, I mean real trouble. Then there's "Maxed Out," not quite as much a hammer-blow to the skull but still quite something. When somebody can make a film about credit-card debt, with every expectation that it will reach theaters and ordinary Americans will shell out $8 to $11 to sit and watch it, we've arrived at a peculiar cultural moment. That someone is James Scurlock, and as he observed at the screening I attended, many people think he also made "Super Size Me." (That would be Morgan Spurlock.) Another strong journalistic-style film, this one exposes how unbelievably rapacious the financial industries have become in extending credit to unlikely prospects -- among them college students, nursing-home residents, small children, dogs and dead people -- and how much our entire economy, micro and macro, is driven by vast and unsustainable levels of debt. So which will happen first: American society collapses because it'll cost $800 to fill up the Navigator, or because we all owe more money (at 21 percent interest, compounded daily) to Citibank and MBNA than we'll earn from now until the day we die?

3) Never, ever read your loved ones' private papers. Unless you really, absolutely need to know. Maybe Doug Block hasn't seen enough Ingmar Bergman movies, or maybe he's seen too many. Block has made a sad, delightful and half-accidental movie about his own parents, "51 Birch Street," which was the outstanding personal documentary at this year's festival. When Block's beloved mother died suddenly a few years ago, and within a few months his unemotional, distant dad had passionately reconnected with a woman who had worked for him many years earlier, his filmmaking instincts were awakened: There was a story here. But the story isn't quite what you think. Of course Block wondered whether his dad had had a fling with Kitty (yes, that's her name) way back when, or even a long-running secret affair. But when he finds his mother's diaries -- boxes and boxes of them -- he faces an impossible dilemma: He yearns to know better the mother he is mourning, but doesn't know what he will learn about her and his parents' 54-year marriage. There are certainly surprises in those notebooks, but ultimately this profound and humane film is more autobiographical than Block understands. It's his own way of confronting the tremendous pain and sadness in his own life, which, like most of the rest of us, he's just gotten used to.

Next page: Charles Nelson Reilly found! Annabelle Gurwitch "Fired!"