Beyond the Multiplex

4) Charles Nelson Reilly is still alive, dammit, and boy does he have a story to tell. You'd have to be a Broadway devotee of a certain age to remember Reilly as anything but the queeny, captain-hatted wisecracker on "Match Game," plus just maybe a comic character actor on various '60s TV series. But as his solo show "The Life of Reilly" (documented in a film of the same name) demonstrates, Reilly is an actor of tremendous natural range with an extraordinary life story. Now in his mid-70s, Reilly cuts a commanding figure, spinning stories of his impoverished childhood in the Bronx and Hartford, Conn., his extraordinary career in New York theater, and his friendships with Steve McQueen, Burt Reynolds, Hal Holbrook, Jack Lemmon, Jerry Stiller and other classmates in the glory days of Herbert Bergdof and Uta Hagen's acting studio. He's too much a man of his generation and background to discuss his personal life, but along the way "The Life of Reilly" lets us know how much the world has changed. When Reilly first auditioned for NBC in the '50s, he tells us, he was dismissed: "They don't let queers on television." By the end of the next decade, he was one of the medium's most recognizable faces.

5) Great things come in odd little packages. I don't suppose this film has much hope of finding American distribution, but "Bata-ville: We Are Not Afraid of the Future," by the British duo Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope -- I'm afraid you'd have to call them conceptual artists -- was the most unexpected, and perhaps most undiscovered, delight at SXSW. Guthrie and Pope dress in matching outfits that suggest mid-'60s airline hostesses, with all the suggestions of calm helpfulness and repressed, packaged sexuality they imply. In "Bata-ville," they lead a group of downsized shoe-factory employees from a depressed English town on a bus tour of the Czech Republic, partly to visit the headquarters of the shoe company that fired them, and partly just because. It's drily funny, sad, deeply weird and British to the very core of its being. If I owned a TV network, I'd keep playing this until people started to like it. But that's why I don't own a TV network.

6) And speaking of getting fired, it's a great career move. Actress Annabelle Gurwitch has been pretty much making a living off it. She got canned from a Woody Allen play a few years ago, she says after Allen called her acting "retarded." Then she wrote a book in which she interviewed other showbiz types about their humiliating job-loss experiences, whether in Hollywood or at the mall. Then she turned it into a theater piece, a long-running L.A. hit. For the film version of "Fired!" Gurwitch and directors Chris Bradley and Kyle Labrache have followed a broader, Michael Moore-esque trajectory, exploring fired-ness as a distinctive economic experience shared by many, and the result is generous-spirited, often funny and occasionally striking. This is presumably the one and only time that Tim Allen, Robert Reich and Ben Stein will all appear in the same film.

7) "Vertical integration" of the movie business makes sense. Still, it gives me the whim-whams. This one's pretty wonky. At an SXSW panel discussion, various representatives of the new Indiewood mini-colossus that comprises 2929 Entertainment, HDNet, Magnolia Pictures and the Landmark theater chain (along with other brand names and subgroupings I've forgotten) convened to discuss their business model. Whatever it's actually called, this company headed by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner has brought us "day-and-date" release, meaning that an increasing number of independent films will be released simultaneously, or nearly so, in theaters, on DVD and on some form of pay-cable TV. Wagner was very reassuring here, telling the assembled film geeks that he wasn't trying to kill the movie-theater business: "My God! We want people to go to the movies, just the way they always have." He's also one of those guys who could sell ice cubes in Greenland, and he talks about films as "product" and audience members as "consumers," apparently unaware how that is likely to affect film-festival-type people. Everything these guys said about the current illogic of the business was 100 percent true, but I still came away feeling highly uncomfortable.

8) Hey, that Parker Posey? She's pretty good. I don't have a lot to say about "The Oh in Ohio," a sweet, undercooked sex comedy that premiered at SXSW. It has a decent chance of reaching and pleasing audiences, given its oddball cast (cameo by Liza Minnelli! Danny DeVito playing sexy!) and its female-friendly empowerment message, but it's a very tame bit of business indeed. Still, Posey is absolutely terrific as Priscilla, a married career woman in Cleveland who has never -- and apparently never means never -- had an orgasm. Posey's hipster affect has disappeared completely; this woman is a repressed mid-American beauty, all big teeth, angular elbows and brunet locks. Even playing ludicrous goofball scenes -- Priscilla leads a meeting with visiting Scandinavian executives, apparently forgetting that she has a vibrating cellphone wedged in her undergarments -- Posey totally overpowers this weak material.

9) Some movies were just passing through. SXSW audiences also got sneak previews of various films already on their way to wide distribution. Director Mary Harron was here to present "The Notorious Bettie Page," a biopic of the pinup queen that, like all of Harron's movies, is going to divide audiences. I loved it, and we had an interesting talk about morality, psychology and sexuality in the movies, as well as Harron's upcoming film about the early days of punk. (Much more on that in a future column.) Then there was Wim Wenders' and Sam Shepard's fractured western "Don't Come Knocking" (I'll tackle that next week) and the opening-night film from Sundance, Nicole Holofcener's "Friends With Money," which will be released nationwide in early April.

10) I have an early flight back to New York tomorrow, and I don't really have a No. 10. If I'd seen the Tommy Chong movie, or the one about the Wendy's guy, I wouldn't have this problem.

Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)

Search terms:

Salon the Web

Salon Directory (browse by topic)