SOUTH BY SOUTHWEST FESTIVAL (SXSW) 2020 (Amazon Prme)

[Chris Knipp]

TRISTANT AUROUET, THOMAS BIDEGAIN, MARC FITOUSSI, CYRIL GELBLAT, VIANNAY LEBASQUE: SELFIE (2019)


SÉBASTIEN CHASSAGNE IN SELFIE

Digital whirl

The subtitle is "Of the influence of digital technology on decent people." It's a French linked anthology film by a group of writers and in six stories with different directors. The episodes bog down at times in their dogged efforts to make specific points and jokes about every trivial detail of YouTube, social media, dating ratings, trolls and hackers, but the actors save many scenes, which for the most part are cute and fast-paced and benefit from being very neatly interwoven. The directors have solid writing, TV, and comedy backgrounds. France is a bit behind America (one might hope!) in its digital obsessions and addictions, but by the same token this film therefore speaks to both newcomers and more advanced cases of the disease.

1 - is "Vlog," directed by A Prophet writer Thomas Bidegain. A well off couple, Stephanie (Blanche Gardin) and her husband Fred (Maxence Tual) score a gazillion hits vlogging about their younger son with cancer, and staying popular becomes their obsession. The little boy is declared cured of cancer. Now what? They're not interesting anymore, and must find another gimmick to regain those millions of hits that nourished their egos. This family will reappear later. Spoiler: nothing works till their teenage son runs off and joins Syrian terrorists and becomes a YouTube star in his own right.

2 - "The Troll" (epistolary novel), directed by Marc Fitossi, is focused on a prissy lycée French teacher (Elsa Zylberstein) disdainful toward her digital-obsessed students who don't read and YouTube stars who're semi-literate, particularly one known as Toon (Max Boublil) whom everyone in her class is following. Using an expensive new smart phone, she (somewhat implausibly) trolls Toon herself, and becomes deeply enmeshed with him as they develop a virtually epistolary connection. He likes her and promotes her unpublished novel. Who's complaining now?

3 - In "2.6/5" (directed by Tristan Auroulet) Finnegan Oldfield is appealing as Florian Delamare, an eager but gauche young man whose life is governed by an online dating site's rating system. He's in love with a girl who won't date him unless he gets a "5" rating, but he keeps messing up and getting at best a 2.6 or 2.8 and sometimes a zero. Things end badly in this segment that's a more comedic but still dark version of a classic "Black Mirror" episode.

4 - At this point the family with the cancer kid reappears and in their effort to depict themselves as a reality show they are reminiscent of the early Seventies version on PBS, "An American Family," about the Louds. They among others consult a specialist (Esteban) who can upgrade one's online popularity rating for a fee. He will reappear later as a wedding guest.

5 - "Recommended for You" (directed by Cyril Gelblat) focuses on an office worker, Romain (Manu Payet), who believes his Amazon-style algorithm understands him better than he does and consequently buys anything it recommends, even a fishing rod. Only later he realizes he fished with his deceased father as a young boy and this reunites him with his memory. But when the algorithm recommends Viagra, he balks. Then it recommends rope. What will that mean? An ingenious tale that recasts its hero as a blasphemer and idolater. The priest he sees will reappear later in. . .

6 - "Smileaks" (directed by Vianney Lebasque) seems the most like a traditional comedy and focuses on a crowd of guests at a wedding staged on an island that has no or minimal internet. You have to go down to the water to get reception. This gets tricky when the tide comes in and Fabrice (Sébastien Chassagne) must nearly drown to check the bride's personal secrets on a website called Smileaks that has published the fruits of a giant hack into everybody in the world's private data. Then internet access moves onto the island and mayhem ensues. A couple pledge a troth - not to be faithful man and wife, but never to search each other's private data.

Finally the parents of the cancer kid become stars on Smileaks by admitting they're the parents of a young terrorist. They gain dozens, perhaps millions, of likes from sympathetic viewers. "We were a happy family," intones the mom.

Selfie, 102 mins., 148 mins., debuted at Toulouse Sept. 2019, then opened to mediocre reviews - AlloCiné press rating 3.2 (64%). It was to be in the cancelled SXSW Festival and was screened for this review as part of the Amazon Prime presentation of some of the SXSW films Apr. 27-May 7.

[Chris Knipp]

KAREN BERNSTEIN: I'M GONNA MAKE YOU LOVE ME (2019)


"TISH" DOES A MARILYN IMPRESSION AS SEEN IN AN OLD PHOTO IN I'M GONNA MAKE YOU LOVE ME

Crossing genders and back again

At first Brian Belovitch was a chubby, not-very-attractive effeminate gay kid of the sixties with a sister, five very straight rather Neanderthal brothers and a mean mom and dad in a "barely-working-class first-generation immigrant family in Fall River, Massachusetts," as the blurb for his memoir, Trans Figured: My Journey from Boy to Girl to Woman to Man puts it. Later his mother took the six kids and moved by herself to Providence, Rhode Island. Brian came out as gay. He had no choice, having been mocked as queer or faggot or sissy all his young life. It's like he was saying, "I'll show you effeminate!" He was escaping into a beautiful fantasy, which he, now she, carried off remarkably well, without going the full monty and having a sex change.

But it was not satisfying. He felt women were better treated. He embarked on the difficult process of physically changing gender. Through hormones and a series of operations, from his late teens till his early thirties he changed into a big-haired, big-boobed, big-butt trans women called Natalia or Tish Gervais. It's like he was saying, "I'll show you effeminate!" He was escaping into a beautiful fantasy, which he, now she, carried off remarkably well, without going the full monty and having a sex change. Tish became pals with trendy Voice and Interview gossip and style writer Michael Musto, who is heard from in this perhaps intentionally somewhat sleazily shot doc whose main narrator is Brian, now a gay man in his sixties, which is what Tish decided to transition back into after a tough life first as the wife of a handsome but dull straight man who joined the Army and was sent to Germany. There, Natalia played military wife and, imagine, girl! Sold Tupperware.

The marriage ended and Natalia came into her own in the East Village as a would-be entertainer, an eighties Lower Manhattan hustler and trans party "girl with something extra," as Tish liked to call herself instead of a "chick with a dick" (I get these tidbits from chapter one of Trans Figured). She disco-danced at Studio 54 and performed as Trish at the Palladium, Limelight, and Danceteria, perhaps not a hit, but trying hard and looking the part. Along the way he/she became an addict and HIV positive.

Now Brian is married to a very nice, somewhat younger gay man, a botanist. They live in New York, and Brian is an addiction counselor. It looks like it's going to last. When he first met "Brian" in the late eighties after knowing him only as a trans women, Michael Musto says he encountered someone much more calm and sure of himself and less self-centered. Evidently being "Natalia" or "Tish" was very exciting and in some ways fulfilling, but also nerve-wracking and ultimately, for Brian, came to feel terribly wrong.

Most of the meat of this film is period footage showing Brian in his trans woman phase in stills or old videos after his early life and looks have been established, overlaid with so-so footage of him with his current husband and talking about his life. What makes this marginally more worth watching than any standard issue doc about gay fringe trans life is that though he may not be very educated, Brian is intelligent, candid, articulate - and calm. His memoir might be more interesting, but his narration of certain phases here is enough in itself. Somebody should make this into a movie.

I'm Gonna Make You Love Me, 82 mins. Debuted Nov. 2019 at DOC NYC, and it was going to be shown Apr. 27, 2020 at SXSW, but due to the covid-19 pandemic shutdown it is instead being shown for a time on Amazon Prime, where it was screened for this review.

[Chris Knipp]

MATT RIDDLEHOOVER: MY DARLING VIVIAN (2019)


VIVIAN LIBERTO AND JOHNNY CASH IN MY DARLING VIVIAN

Vivian and Johnny's daughters tell her forgotten story

It's a pretty good bet that Vivian Liberto and Johnny Cash were the loves of each other's lives, even though after their 12-year marriage both wound up married to other people for much longer - Vivian to Dick Distin for 37 years, Johnny to June Carter for 35. This film is a tribute to Vivian and a righting of wrongs. She has been forgotten and written out of the picture, Cash's second wife, singer June Carter, kept claiming, in effect, that his four daughters with Vivian were hers, even though she had nothing to do with raising them. Vivian did it all, and loved Johnny every day till she died. The story is told exclusively by Vivian and Johnny's four daughters, Rosanne, Kathy, Cindy, and Tara, who were all born close together.

The film explains Vivian's background. She is of Sicilian ancestry and was brought up in a strict Catholic family. Her mother was alcoholic and she used to cover for her. She was 16 and Johnny Cash 18 when they met in 1950 at a roller skating rink. He fell for her immediately and as the story goes, deliberately bumped into her and knocked her down to get acquainted. He was soon in the Air Force sent to Germany for three years. During that time they exchanged "thousands" of letters, which she saved later. They married in 1954 soon after he came home and moved to Memphis with no money. He joined up with Marshall Grant, they learned the guitar, and he persuaded Sam Phillips to record him one month after Rosanne was born. "I Walk the Line" - composed for Vivian - was his first hit. He soon became a country music star, and later of course a genre-crossing legend.

The films tells the story of their life together - and, largely, apart. In the early years it was all love. One daughter says she thought her mother's name was "Honey" and "Baby" was her nickname, because Johnny called her only those names. When she heard her mother called "Vivian" it sounded strange.

Soon he was a star, and after living in Johnnie Carson's former house in Encino, he built a big house on top of a hill in remote Casitas Springs, California, with rattlesnakes and tarantulas. He brought home odd animals all the time, including a monkey, a parrot, and an Irish Setter that she had to take care of with the growing brood while he was away on tour much of the time. Somehow, Rosanne says, Vivian "metabolized that [fame] as humiliation." A very private person, though active and sociable, she was not comfortable with notoriety.

One day he came home on drugs, and he was a different person. And his drug of choice of course was amphetamines, combined with downers to balance them. He started not coming home when he said he would. They began to fight whenever he was there. When Vivian saw Johnny with June Carter at a big show, she realized what was going on, why he was away longer and wouldn't say "I love you" on the telephone. He missed the kid's birthdays, their wedding anniversary, then Christmas.

The film becomes the story of Vivian's unvoiced complaints. There is plenty of footage of these early years, and early stills. (The film uses a new device to me - adding moving cigarette smoke to a still black and white photo. It's weird.) There is some use of stock footage to illustrate things, but much of the focus is on the sisters. When they speak, we see them. Rosanne does more of the talking and is a bit more skeptical about unsubstantiated anecdotes.

When Kathy got seriously ill with a mysterious bacterial infection, that brought Johnny home. But unlike today, where you've got people's cell phone number, it was often hard for Vivian to track her husband down when he was on the road.

Around 1964 Johnny was away for an extended period and they think he was hanging out with Bob Dylan "in SoHo or the Village" (maybe, but of course they collaborated on "Nashville Skyline" in 1969).

A shocking event was that when Vivian joined Johnny after his arrest in El Paso in 1965 for trying to import amphetamines and Equanil over the border from Mexico and they were photographed and it went in all the papers, Vivian, who had a dark, Sicilian complexion, looked almost like a black person. The rumor went out that Johnny Cash was in a biracial marriage and all his performance dates in the racist 1960's South were cancelled. They had to get a raft of affidavits and letters certifying that Vivian was white before Johnny could get booked in the South again.

"Another, lasting shock for Vivian was learning that in public appearances, when June Carter and Johnny were together, and the press was more happy with this new "tabloid romance," June made it sound as if she was raising the girls, as well as the three children she had with him. It was a lie. June Carter became known as the one who saved Johnny Cash from drugs. Vivian was demonized falsely, the sisters say, and later forgotten. Vivian did all the work of raising her four daughters.

Things were going so badly that Vivian took out papers to divorce Johnny "to shock him" but "he let it go through. Johnny went to Tennessee and lived with Waylon Jennings, who they say had "a thousand-dollar-a-day cocaine habit," while he was addicted to amphetamines.

Rosanne says "not all divorces are bad." Divorced, Vivian nonetheless lived well. She finally moved to a better house in Ventura, and in a couple of years married a local cop, Dick Distin, who went through several other jobs and then settled into just being supported. They remained together for the rest of her life, 37 years, as Johnny remained with June Carter. They remained connected, and on friendly terms, even to the end. Johnny and Vivian had a meeting with three of the four sisters there when he was in his last days, a time that meant a lot to her, because, the sisters say, she never stopped loving him, and Dick knew that.

She was social, and artistic, though not many details are given of her art but a quick shot of a flower painting. This isn't a film abut Johnny Cash's career; it's only of peripheral interest - even though two of the sisters, Rosanne and Cindy, became singer-songwriters themselves.
Rosanne is shown in a TV appearance with Johnny, but only the introduction is shown. We also see the gracefully aging Vivian and hear what a great grandmother she was. Not always so supportive to the daughters, since when Rosanne appeared on TV and asked her mother for reaction, all she got was "I did not know that person."

Vivian wrote a memoir called I Walked the Line. The book was little read. This film may be more seen. Even when Johnny Cash died, two years before Vivian, she was was overlooked, they say, at his memorial. She had to sit there, attending it, and see June lionized and her unmentioned. A very interesting picture of how fame can mess up lives. But Vivian was a tough person, a survivor. This is an effort to set the record straight.

My Darling Vivian, 90 mins., was to have debuted at the 2020 SXSW festival, cancelled due to the pandemic. It was screened for this review when offered for a time free to Amazon Prime subscribers. Metascore 80%.

[Chris Knipp]

ALEX LEE MOYER: TFW NO GF (2020)



The lonely, connected ones

There is a new subculture in America of young, disaffected and angry white men. They're guys going nowhere who, though a minority, may symbolize a trend and say something key about where we are now. They feel isolated, alienated, and rejected. But they are not disconnected or inarticulate. This interesting documentary aims to bring them to light through sympathetic focus on a tiny group of them.

The "TFW NO GF" guys are children of the internet who though perhaps articulate and intelligent, did poorly in, and often didn't finish, school. They are reclusive emo "losers" isolated from most of their contemporaries, often living at home, without jobs, at the expense of their parents. They have no girlfriends, thus the title. This is not a voluntary state, hence their self-identification as "incel," involuntarily celibate.

The texting abbreviations of the title "TFW NO GF", which have become an iconic meme referring to this group, signal a reaching out for sympathy. "TFW," though it can mean other things, often stands for "that feeling when," and is used to seek understanding for a shared experience like the state of "NGF," having no girlfriend. Actually "emo losers" doesn't quite fit, because the cute, sad, spiky-haired youths the title "emo" refers to are highly desirable to some, as indicated in the "Emo Boy Song" ("Emo boy, emo boy, come on and be my love toy") or "Cute Emo Bbys [I'm with you]" - there is a sad, winsome emo girl longing to be united to him. Neither are these guys as extreme or hopeless as Japan's notorious hermits, the hikikomori, who live lives of extreme seclusion. Not, at least, unless the hikikomori secretly have iPhones and fast internet connections and vast online talk outlets like 4chan.

4chan is an online place where TFW NO GF guys, or incels, as they're often called, come to pour out their souls. 4chan is the source of many screen grabs here. It's a place worth researching to understand them (see Caitlin Dewey's little intro in the Washington Post). Special attention should be given to r9k/, a special board of 4chan where sad loners gather, or gathered. All 4chan, which is believed to have been started by Christopher Poole in 2003 when he was around 15, is an English language, all-anonymous imageboard website, with "avis" (avatars) rather than names, and threads are only up for a limited time.

What's interesting is not, per se, the pathetic young men who gather on 4chan's r9k/ or Twitter, or maybe Tumblr, but that they represent, as one of those interviewed calls it, a "subculture," with its own codes and language. Basic givens of this world are "the Feel GUy" or "Wojak" and Pepe the Frog memes. Pepe is an anthropomorphic green cartoon frog representing different feelings that was appropriated by Trump and the Alt-Right and white racists, but also by the Hong Kong anti-government protesters. Wojak or the Feel Guy is represented by a simple, black-outlined cartoon drawing of a bald, wistful-looking man, and it used to stand for emotions like "melancholy, regret, or loneliness" (Wikipedia). Wojak is associated with "TFW" - feelings, and on 4chan an image of two Wojaks hugging each other under the caption "I know that feel bro" gained popularity. (See image above)

The film, though, only focuses on five dudes and doesn't go into traditional documentary film context-building from the outside; perhaps advisedly (it gives a better sense of their isolation) it doesn't interview their families or former classmates.

A smart, healthy looking young man named Sean lives in Thornton, Colorado in a one-bedroom apartment with his mom. He works out with weights. (He also commutes to work but it doesn't say at what.) He found the internet was where "most was offered" to him when young. His tidy black desk has a huge computer and big speakers with 22-inch screen. He did well enough in school through eighth grade, he says, then stopped caring, and failed ninth grade. "Since then," he says, "I've just been a fuckin' neet." (Neet= no education, employment or training.) That's the first visit. He has changed later.

"Charels" lives with his childhood friend (or is it his brother?) "Widdy" in Kent, Washington and it's all snowy and desolate when we visit them. They share a house with somebody else. Charels has talked online about being suicidal a lot and has a license plate bracket on his red Civic saying "I HATE MYSELF...I WANT TO DIE." He has written online "I can't wait to jump into a loveless marriage and destroy the rest of my life with a horrible divorce and then shoot myself." But he likes to talk to the filmmaker. He has clearly studied Japanese.

Charels and Widdy say their parents were alcoholics, so they were on their own. They live in a nowhere place, but the snow makes it black-and-white dramatic and Widdy says, though desolate, it's "really beautiful in a way." They have guns - automatic weapons. We go with them far out of town where they do some shooting. But Widdy, who discovered 4chan when he was 11 or 12, says all incels are not terrorists. He says nowadays the internet and real life are no longer separable, and young kids "won't even understand the difference between the two." (Herein lies danger.) Charels' and Widdy's weapons are seized later by police after Charels poses with two rifles and the caption "One ticket for Joker please." But though banned from weapons for a year, they get them back because Charels' post was judged to be satire, and protected under the First Amendment. Charels has a girlfriend he met on r9k/.

The restoration of the guns doesn't seem like the wisest defense of civil liberties: automatic weapons ought to be banned. However, it's important to note that incels' rampant indulgence is misogyny, racism, and violence online is mostly heavily ironic.

Kyle has lived all his life in El Paso. He dresses in tight jeans outfits and a cowboy ht. He is not seen on the internet as much, but he's an angry white incel too. He says school was half in Spanish. He never learned it, so he did poorly and was taken out to be home schooled, but they just gave up on that. He laces every other phrase with "fuckin'" and sounds angriest of the group. He is always alone, but goes out to drink and to a karaoke bar. He is always drinking and smoking.. But he describes himself as less negative about the ugliness of the city than he used to be. Negative as he is, he is always out and about.

The most articulate, or at least theory-spouting, among them is the bearded, bespectacled New York City resident "Kringe Kantbot." We see him scamming a poll taker at first. He later says now he has interests and women are more interested in him because he can talk about the books he's read. A 4chan screen grab of his goes: "You're all a bunch of fuckups addicted to vaping, liquor, prescription drugs, and monster sips. You're all fucked up, depressed, unmotivated, anxious, insecure. You're all losers, incels, virgins, weebs, weirdos. But it's all okay. You're all going to be okay. It's okay." He wants to help. Maybe these healthy young men are simply addicted to a drug, online and in-life self-annihilation, and with help they could recover, as Kantbot seems to be doing, and he can give back by counseling others.

Alex Lee Moyer says who says she made her "tiny" but she thinks "important" film "on a shoestring budget, a wing and a prayer," also says she is delighted at the opportunity to put it out there on Amazon prime to "an untold, huge audience." She considers her film especially relevant now under the covid-19 shutdown. We're all doing what the boys in the film are often doing, "turning to the modern miracle of the Internet as a surrogate for lost connection."

But do they show that it works?

In the last 20 minutes the film reveals that four of these guys may know each other via Twitter. Sean has read all the books Kantbot recommended to him there, and he mentions Charels and Widdy. Several years after his first appearance, Sean is working at two jobs and commuting an hour each way and looking to compete in power lifting, working at it very hard and looking toward planning a career for himself. He says his mother has cancer, so his plate is full. Women are quite a lot more interested in him. Kantbot has gotten "doxxed" by the media (his personal details revealed) by the media for posting a provocative article, but he is devoting all his time to his online writing and living from his Patreon earnings. He debunks the director's presumed aim to give the film a happy ending, but - well, his flights of intellectual fancy tend to be incoherent, though he gets the last word here.

Rolling Stone writer EJ Dickson, whose article combines a review with an interview with Moyers and revealing additional information, describes TFW NO GF as a "melange of edgelord [tongue in cheek nihilistic] tweets, 4chan screen grabs, definitions of internet vernacular, and discursive interviews with its disaffected subjects." As he says, the film leaves out "expert" talking heads or other more local providers of context. Moyers seeks to take us into these guys' world, of which she is unusually accepting.

This is more a virtual reality visit than a guided tour. Given the incels' nihilistic and hate-filled trolling, this film's indulgence has been and will be provocative to many and Dickson calls it "deeply uncomfortable." It does not pre-digest the material for us. But I found that a fresh and welcome approach.

TFW NO GF, 82 mins., was to debut in the pandemic-cancelled 2020 SXSW Festival (Austin). The director-screenwriter Alex Lee Moyer chose to include it in the SXSW films offered free on Amazon Prime April 27–May 6, 2020. It was screened there for this review.

[Chris Knipp]

PAUL HAIRSTON: LIONS IN THE CORNER (2010) - short film



A rural fight club designed to quell street violence or feuds

I'm not good at reviewing short films but I took a look at a lot of the ones on offer in this Amazon Prime SXSW 2020 selection. I really liked Lions in the Corner, by Paul Hairston, ten minutes distilled from two years of work. It depicts Chris Wilmore, aka Scarface, a former convict turned community leader who runs a fight club in the western part of Virginia in he town young Hairston comes from. It's called "Streetbeefs" and stages hand-to-hand fights to resolve conflicts and combat gun and knife violence in the area. It also provides community for people who need it and is instrumental in keeping him out of jail. Narrated in his authentic, gravely foice by Chris, who knows how street encounters can lead to fatal consequences from his own hardscrabble experience.

Shot in digital and 16mm by dp Gaul Porat, this film maintains a high level of proficiency and a kind of poetic realism that never loses a sense of the roughness of the action.

People may question the assumptions behind this activity, but Chris sounds authentic and the action grabs you. More than that, filmmaking that uses the short form with great economy, that's visually exciting, cinematic, rings true and shows great talent. Hats off to Paul Hairston. I look forward to seeing more of his work in the future. (He is based now in New York, and it looks like he is busy.)

Lions in the Corner, 9 mins. 11 secs., included in the cancelled 2020 SXSW Festival selections shown Apr. 27-May 7, 2020 free on Amazon Prime and watched there. It was a SXSW Staff Pick.

Watch LIONS IN THE CORNER h e r e.

Ceck out his other work on his site https://www.paulhairston.com/ and watch his promotional film for Bernie Sanders.

DIRECTOR Paul Hairston
PRODUCERS Tripp Kramer & Jake Ewald
CINEMATOGRAPHER Gaul Porat
ADDT'L CINEMATOGRAPHY Matt Ballard
EDIT Cavan J. Faucett
COMPOSER Tobias Norberg
COLOR Josh Bohoskey @ The Mill
MIX Geoff Strasser @ Mr. Bronx