For the Austin Film Festival’s second day, a morning full of torrential rains and flash flooding put a severe damper (pun intended [editor’s note: ugh]) on getting easily around Austin. However, tried and true cinephiles braved the elements and made the best of it, eager to take part in Friday’s events. More venues and showtimes meant an increased number of options for attendees, which ranged from from coffee house documentaries to star-studded premieres and everything in between. Here’s how some films from the second day of “The Writer’s Festival” stacked up.
In Transit
[rating=9.00]
In Transit opens on a conversation between two twenty-somethings, one nervously bragging about boarding the train, having quit his job and carrying only “the last paycheck I got.” The other acknowledges the fear of traveling into the unknown, but the greater fear of staying in one place. This is a sampling of the conversations that take place throughout In Transit, a documentary set on The Empire Builder, the country’s busiest long distance train route.
While the camera revisits the two sporadically through its all-too-brief runtime, it perfectly captures the project’s spirit, told through snippets of conversations and interviews, framed into neat little vignettes as they slowly unfold along with the train’s three-day journey. Featuring a young girl traveling alone, pregnant and three days overdue, a woman who’d left China after 23 years, an amateur photographer, oil field workers, and scores of others, all of whom are nameless, and all of whom have their own unique reason for being on that train.
It’s this kind of slice-of-life approach that, when put together, you start to see it vaguely resemble a long-standing interpretation of the American Dream. While it effortlessly builds its narrative as it goes, pulling the audience along from car-to-car, passenger-to-passenger, the second unit shots of the snow-covered towns the train passes through prove to be downright stunning compositions on their own. Along the way, the more stories get told, the more they overlap, and the more the differences between these passengers starts to blur.
Baby, Baby, Baby
[rating=5.00]
Written, directed, starring, and narrated by Brian Klugman, this thinly-veiled autobiography about an actor who wants to become a writer over the course of his relationship with Sunny (Adrianne Palicki) is never as good as it wants to be. While it’s nearly impossible to not be charmed by Palicki, who even had a hand in making the GI Joe sequel watchable, the rest of the film comes off as trite, with an occasionally clever or funny moment to keep it afloat.
Even the title, which is not only referred to in the film, but becomes an eye-rolling meta-plot discussion as the two share a paddleboat ride, comes across as a bit hackneyed. It’s the cinematic equivalent to someone getting lost in their own reflection, succinctly illustrated when the two begin an incredibly personal conversation while in a crowded movie theater for several minutes, without so much as a fleeting “SHHH!” from one of the many background extras. Doing so would have served as some kind of acknowledgment that there is an audience to consider, which here seems pushed aside in favor of self-serving banality.
BBB TRAILER 10.26.15 from Stamper Lumber Company on Vimeo.
Booger Red
[rating=6.00]
This is one of those projects that would be better served if it could receive two ratings, one of the documentary, the other for its dramatic narrative. The subject matter looks at an alleged real-life case child pornography ring in east Texas, complete with interviews from lawyers and defendants who were directly involved. In addition, the documentary is framed within a narrative of a fictional journalist from Austin, going to cover the story
While the documentary aspect is solid in structure and compellingly told, the latter part is where it falls flat. Tacking on a narrative story, complete with a bizarre subplot about his dead brother’s wife visiting him, who ends up accompanying him to east Texas and involving herself directly, is clumsily acted, executed, and completely unnecessary.
It could even be argued it goes so far as to cheapen the years of tragedy endured by several people, many of whom have their lives ruined as a result. Director Burndt Mader explained after the screening that his intentions started as a traditional documentary about the case, but with a prosecution that refused to participate, they went with this fusion technique as a way to avoid an unbiased documentary. While making a one-sided documentary focusing on the defendants certainly seems plausible (Michael Moore has built a career on it, after all), what results here comes off an embellishment of a reporter inserting themselves into their story.
Booger Red Trailer from Johnny McAllister on Vimeo.
