February 22, 2008

Anticipating SXSW, 2/22.

Crawford Crawford [site] is a smart and absorbing documentary about the changes within the small Texas town George W Bush moved to while running for President in 2000," writes Flickhead Ray Young. "No one since Richard Nixon has divided the American people as sharply, and Bush extended his bulldozing effect to neighbors he never knew in a remote corner far beyond his station. Director David Modigliani, here making his feature debut, captures roughly six years' worth of the heat and heartbreak in Crawford in the President's chaotic wake."

"First a traveling museum exhibition and book, Beautiful Losers [site], is now an unique documentary celebrating the independent and DIY spirit that unified a loose-knit group of American artists who emerged from the underground worlds of skateboarding, graffiti, punk and hip hop," notes the Hype Wire.

Hollywood Bitchslap's series of interviews conducted in anticipation of SXSW rushes onward:

David Redmon and Ashley Sabin are following up Kamp Katrina with Intimidad (site), a doc about a couple living on the border between Texas and Mexico. Karina Longworth interviews them at the SpoutBlog.

And this just in: More from Karina Longworth, who talks with Barry Jenkins about Medicine for Melancholy (site), a "beautifully shot examination of 24 hours in the lives of a boy and girl who hook up at a party in San Francisco, Jenkins's film has already been compared to certain other handmade movies about the personal dramas of lost urban youth. But Melancholy is politically engaged and formally ambitious in ways that films of this budget level often are not. More than a relationship drama, it's a portrait of the city in which its set, a grafting of tentative romance onto the city's very real, very rocky terrain of race, class and cultural conflict." Earlier: Michael Guillén.



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Posted by dwhudson at February 22, 2008 9:18 AM