Beyond the Multiplex

The best of South by Southwest: An extraordinary look at Kurt Cobain's life and an absorbing film about a forgotten pop legend. Plus: A chat with a Cannes winner.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Music, Movies, Kurt Cobain, Indie Rock, Austin, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Documentaries, Independent Film, Reviews, South by Southwest, Beyond the Multiplex, Salon Conversations

"Kurt Cobain: About a Son"

March 15, 2007 | AUSTIN, Texas -- Two of the best films at the 2007 South by Southwest Film Festival are movies about musicians, one of them the dead godhead of indie rock and the other an almost forgotten (but still living) pop legend. That certainly befits this festival in the self-professed live music capital of America. But if this year's edition of SXSW's movie bash will be remembered for the Genesis-scale downpours that have washed out patio parties (in between the gorgeous days) and maxed out this city's modest fleet of taxicabs, it will also be remembered as a festival of surprises.

Austin always offers a strong showcase for quirky documentaries and low-budget genre movies (especially horror films), but the field in both categories seems especially broad and deep here this year. I could stay another week and not catch everything I want to see. Many of the most-discussed movies here have been low-budget affairs that arrived with little advance publicity. Meanwhile, some of the most anticipated premieres, including critical biopics about Michael Moore ("Manufacturing Dissent") and Arnold Schwarzenegger ("Running With Arnold"), along with the farcical New Zealand horror picture "Black Sheep" (from the special-effects workshop behind "Lord of the Rings") are widely seen as disappointments.

Nobody's saying that about unanticipated delights like "King Corn," the unlikely true story of two college buddies who plant and grow an acre of Iowa corn and follow it into the food chain, or the fearless personal documentary "Crazy Sexy Cancer," or "Fish Kill Flea," about a flea market that's revived a dead shopping mall in New York's Hudson Valley, or "Audience of One," which chronicles a Pentecostal preacher's quest to make an action-adventure epic for the Lord.

Similarly, the narrative features that have left audiences buzzing are all over the map. There are certainly horror films, from the hipster-slapstick slasher farce "Murder Party" to the gruesome New York rat-attack saga "Mulberry Street" and the grainy, grim French-Romanian nightmare simply called "Them." There are also artier, less classifiable pictures like "Frownland," the willfully strange first feature directed by a projectionist at the Museum of Modern Art, "Monkey Warfare," an anarchist quasi-remake of Godard's revolutionary manifesto "Les Chinoises," and "Orphans," a striking (if unevenly crafted) first film that simultaneously summons the spirits of Bergman's "Cries and Whispers" and Brian De Palma's "Sisters." (There's also an actual remake of "Sisters," starring Chloë Sevigny and Stephen Rea, at SXSW this year.)

To listen to a podcast of the interview, click here.

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Before we delve deeper into the SXSW catalog, let me call your attention briefly to Ken Loach's lovely and haunting picture "The Wind That Shakes the Barley," last year's Palme d'Or winner at Cannes, which opens commercially this week in New York, Los Angeles and other major cities. Starring Cillian Murphy as a young Irish medical student drawn into the revolutionary "Troubles" of the early 1920s, "Wind" depicts the brutal backcountry guerrilla warfare that drove the British from Ireland (or most of it, anyway) and then the fratricidal civil war that followed, whose baleful influence on subsequent Irish politics and history remains unresolved.

This is a classic example of Loach's work with his longtime screenwriting partner Paul Laverty, meaning that it blends colorful scenery -- in this case, the damp, green lushness of County Cork, on Ireland's southwestern coast -- with meticulously rendered sociology, straightforward family drama and tendentious political debate. Having grown up with an extended family that told and retold anecdotes from those years (some of them apocryphal), I couldn't resist the film's emotional appeal and didn't try. I wouldn't mind Loach and Laverty's old-line Marxist convictions either if they didn't tend to create scenes where characters suddenly stand off against each other like ideological positions rather than people.

Click here to hear my interview with Loach in Salon Conversations, which may help illuminate the film's appeal, along with its contradictions, in more depth than I can offer here. He denies any conscious attempt to remind viewers of the Iraq war with this fable of occupying forces and resistance fighters, these images of soldiers smashing down doors in a hunt for "terrorists" and "bandits." I suppose that, like a good Marxist, he means that the parallel lies within history itself. For Loach, Ireland's early moment of anti-imperialist rebellion, with its clash between nationalism and international socialism, marks a crucial turning point in 20th century history -- when the wrong path was taken.

Next page: Kurt Cobain, in his own words