3.11.2008

Spencer's Obnoxious SXSW blog, day 2

So, last night, 2 more movies (with a short film before each of them) for me, Heidi took the night off to get some sleep as well as some time with the kids.
I went to the Dobie and saw, first, The Apology Line, a short documentary about a phone line set up for people to call in and apologize to someone on. Responses ranged from the obvious ("Fuck off! This apology line is stupid!") to the disturbing, like a woman apologizing to an authority figure in her life for being stupid, making it clear that he told her so constantly and harshly. It was very interesting and well done, I thought. There seems to be a longer version in development, so that will probably be very interesting to see.
That preceded Don't Get Me Wrong, a documentary set in a Romanian psychiatric hospital which largely featured two gentlemen who each believed they could influence the weather. Again, really interesting movie, I thought the director did a really good job of staying out of the way throughout the movie, but putting in just a couple of narrative touches that really tied the whole thing together.
The second half of my double feature included the short documentary Ubuntu, which was not in fact about a Linux operating system, but was instead about a guy working with kids in an impoverished area of Johannesburg, South Africa. A very short film, but interesting and enlightening, to some degree.
The last movie I saw was The Ostrich Testimonies, a documentary about D.C. "Rooster" Cogburn, a guy who was instrumental in getting ostrich farming established in the U.S., only to have his growing flock pretty much decimated in 2004 when some balloonists launched from about a half a mile away from his ranch, which (he [and some ballooning experts] claimed) caused his birds to stampede and ended up with him putting down over half his flock (some 800 odd birds) as a result of the injuries they suffered. He sued the balloonists' insurance company for the cost of the birds, his physical infrastructure, and the $3 million contract that he lost out on when he couldn't fulfill it because his birds were mostly dead, but he lost his civil suit and all subsequent appeals.
This one was a little less well made, I thought, because inevitably when you present something like this, people want to judge for themselves by the end of the movie whether the guy got screwed or not, and there wasn't a lot of the hard evidence from the trial presented, it was more just sort of implied, or even stated, that he HAD been screwed over. So even though I left thinking that he probably was, I also sort of felt that the director was definitely trying to make me leave with that thought, so it kind of undermined it.
Anyway, I think Heidi and I are catching one movie tonight, and then tomorrow...well, I'll blog more about that then! ; )

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