Episode 1,981 aka "Finding Chemo."

As expected, chemotherapy is kinda a big drag. Not only do I have to take it, I have to jump through serious hoops. As I don't have the mad ca$hmoney to re-up my phone all the time to deal with automated machines, my mom takes the brunt of these hassles. I'll never know the true amount of time she spent sifting through all the bullshit that it takes just to make one change, and no amount of times she hears my gratitude will equal how much I owe her. It's very much like 2pac's "Dear Mama," except that she never was a crack fiend, mama. I have to stay alive, only if to pay her a gojillion dollars and Make It Rain. I also got a plane ticket to anywhere in the continental 48 (I think), and I'm really wanting to go out west to hang out with Paul when he has time. If anybody else wants to put in a bid for me visiting their cit-ay, just give a shout. Perhaps a travel brochure...Lord knows I love a good pamphlet!!!

"Work" on the magazine is going well. We're always looking for new talent, and the thing I'm looking for right now is a decent photographer. Apparently, that takes gear. Maybe I'll look up some low-budget lighting techniques, or pair a crewless pro with an art school student's access to lights. We've got some exciting writers and some really cool stuff on the horizon, for sure. I think our slogan should be "Edge Magazine: What do you want for nothin'?"

I saw Once yesterday, and I really liked it. I'm not really big on musicals, but I really liked the way the songs came from the song writing/singing process and the emotion that each performance contained. Highly Recommended, unless you don't like heartfelt music*. My only regret is that the Miracle 5's soundsystem is wiggity-wack.
I also saw the return of Harry Potter and crew, and I enjoyed it very much. This is the first time I felt an emotional connection to the material, aside from Azkaban. I'm looking forward to the next, especially since the same director is doing it. And she's in it, which helps.

Last week I watched a 70's flick called Silent Running, an early outing by some dudes who worked on Blade Runner and Star Wars. Douglas Trumbull--definitely an early innovator of special FX and the things we take for granted today. Anyway, Silent Running's about this space station that's home to a lot of shipping containers and three large, organic forests--the last ones in existence, I believe. In charge of the forests is Bruce Dern, an actor that's been in many a classic film, mostly playing the conceited, smarmy jerk. He's so good at it! Anyway, he's pretty much a jerk in this movie, a hippie-type who is all smug about winning at space-poker** and being able to grow stuff well. The other 3 dudes, all shippers don't suffer him lightly and zip around his gardens in their sweet go-karts when they get a chance.
Anyway, Home Base gives word that the shippers and everybody can come back to Earth (which is apparently some sort of super-regulated place where all temperature is the same and everything is made from synthetics), and they can also get rid of those forests, while they're at it, too. Everybody's all about going home, except for our man Bruce, who is obviously Not Having It. Upset over the decision, he argues with one of his shipping friends, and ends up killing him in self-defense. Unable to morally turn back, he sends two of the forests out to be nuked, along with the other shippers. From there, he gets the drone robots to fix the injuries he sustained. He also renames the robots Huey, Louie, and Dewey...and they rock.

They're all played by multiple amputee little people - a pre-cursor for r2-D2. He teaches them to play poker and tend to the gardens--most of the movie is him hanging out. **

The whole thing is a tough posit--do you side with a bunch of cargo-carrying dudes who just want to get back to a crappy homogeneous Earth, or what could possibly be the Biggest Hippie Jerkass in the Entire Universe? I still don't know. Even he can't get over how much of a jerk he's been, so he sends Dewey to tend to the last remaining forest as he waits for home base to pick him up. He destroys the space station with him inside via nuclear detonation-a very 70's ending, I might add.

Now why did I write all that just then? Hm. It's a pretty good social commentary for sure (two of the songs in the movie are sung by Joan Baez, go fig) and it's got a good (if overbearing) message. However, what really struck me as odd is that 1972-Era Bruce Dern...


looks uncannily like Michael Bay!!!



Don't tell me you don't see it. I think it's odd that Jerky Bruce Dern pretty much does the exact opposite of what Mr. Bay does with his latest movie, which is take pretty great care of the robots and only blows up himself. If only the reverse had been true for ol' Mike...


_____

Everybody's leaving town and growing up/doing something, it seems. I'm cool with having a job here and all, but it's gonna come time for me to find some new hangout buddies and I'll be on the lookout, so hit me up!
Also, next week marks a big blow-out housecooling party at John's. It's also a My/Paul's birthday celebration, and should be great. Also, The Lookout is playing at SLB this weekend. If anybody has a wad of money lying around, I'll ask that you please check out my and see if you'd like to hook me up. Might I add that my birthday is also my Cancerversary? I think this will be the last time to milk this coincidence of ailment and birthday. *coughguilttripcough*


*or, Irish people.

**It's really just regular poker, in space.

***Has anybody ever seen a movie where people in space pretty much just hang out? I'd love to see that. A lot of my favorite sci-fi movies involve people doing ordinary stuff, just in space--then some alien/entity/disaster breaks out. Let's write something!

Joost Invites

Joost is a new free tv internet service. You have to get invites to get on it, so i'm gonna try and link to This guy's site to get an invite, and if that happens, I'll spread the word! I don't have a tv in my room/office area so this should be pretty neat.

Once again, I felt the need to travel out west, sit around all day and watch a multitude of films and perhaps meet some people whose work I respect immensely. Thank goodness for South By Southwest!

This year, my traveling companion was none other than TV's Nick. He came into Tally a few days early. During the spring break (woo) week, a few of us went up to Fun Station, where several miraculous events occurred:
1) The coin-catching games were totally full of tokens, which meant dollars and dollars of free play, just for arriving when no one had come early enough to care/check out the tokens, and
2) I actually won two rounds of mini-golf in a row, a first time for me (though Nick got the true miracle hole-in-one for the day, a wild bank off a hill that went straight into the cup). In addition to all this fun, the speakers blasted the hottest of 80's jamz (Head Over Heels, Get Down On It*, Africa, Kiss, Human, etc).

Anyway, on to the trip. We got to the airport wayyyy early, and the emptiness of the Continental section combined with the robotic airport voice reminding me that "Any luggage left unattended is subject to being seized and/or destroyed" immediately made me put on my headphones and play the score to Escape From New York. Has anybody thought about some sort of airport horror movie?

Tally to Houston, Houston to Austin. I get in touch with a friend of my mother's, a courier with TX connections. He talks a lot about Everything and gives us a tour of the town. We eat at the oldest tex-mex restaurant in the city, and we all have the Most Fried Thing We Have Ever Eaten, this super fried tostada, which has to be dipped in the velveeta-ey queso dip. It's fantastic, and I don't even care if I die early for having tasted its splendid glory.

Later on, we register and all that jazz, meet up with the SLB folk (a mostly new batch of folks than last year, many of them super cool) and later on, Moises. I also got to catch up with Crystal, a friend I met last year--sadly, I was never able to get her my picks for music shows...curse that Platinum Badge!

We watched like 16 or so movies, 2 of them were pretty bad. I'll have the mini-reviews posted in Edge, and the UNRATED EXTREME reviews up here later on. I got to hang at my most Favorite Theater In The World, and it was there that I found a new love: Italian Soda. Orange-Vanilla and Raspberry-Vanilla were my favorite flavors. Who could ask for more?

I have a crappy headcold right now, so I'll just get to the pictures that I took. There are no landscapes this time, and I didn't get to take a picture of Lori with a rematch with Godzilla, cause I'm lazy. However, there was a demolished parking lot that looks like the Incredible Hulk did an atomic elbow-drop on it, and it looked Awesome. Here are some people that I saw/met:


That's Bill Paxton. He's a pretty cool dude. I touched somebody who was killed by an Alien, and a Predator(too/Two). Not many people can claim that.


That's David Wain. If you are at least partially cool, you'll know him from the State, and Stella, two awesome comedies. He's edited The State, and he's directed both Wet Hot American Summer and this year's The Ten, a comedy about the Ten Commandments that is freakin' hilarious. Due to time/line restraints, I was not able to snag a picture with Paul Rudd or Jonah Hill, but some other folks I know were cool enough to do such a thing.


That's Paulo Costanzo. You may know him from movies like Road Trip. I put him on the same tier as actors like David Krumholtz, because they're cool and have really good comedic timing, while not coming off as jackasses. In fact, they're in a DTV movie called Scorched and they're quite good together, though the movie is pretty much a saturday afternoon Comedy Central flick, which isn't the worst thing ever. Good to eat lunch to. Anyway, he was in a movie called Everything's Gone Green, a Vancouver-based movie that I really loved. I got to ask Douglas Coupland a question (he wrote an screenplay for it, not based on any story, I don't think), but punked out on taking a picture with him after the show (I had to whiz.) During the Q&A, somebody asked about a sequel to Road Trip, to which Paulo calmly replied, "...I'll kill you." Also, Coupland's never seen or heard of Road Trip. Great times.


That's Richard Linklater. I wish i had a more suitable camera. He's an Austinite who made Slacker, School of Rock, A Scanner Darkly, the "Before" movies (Sunrise/Sunset), and Dazed & Confused. I always end up really digging or at least respecting his points of view and how he came to be in the film business. This was taken at a panel where he talked to John Pierson, a representer of Independent film from way back. I really wanted to get a picture with Linklater, but he had to jet afterwards. Oh well.


That's Robert Rodriguez on the right. If you know me, you know how much I love (most of) his work, and how he does what he does. On the right is the Big Red Monster, Harry Knowles, the "Special Guest" of the Grindhouse 101 panel. I really wished Tarantino would have been the special guest, because if you know Knowles, you know he writes for shit, is highly studio biased (he's now a "producer" that hasn't made one thing, and still does reviews/breaking news), and also has a certain...musk about him. Anyway, Robert showed awesome clips from Grindhouse, and some stuff that will never ever be seen anywhere outside of an Unrated DVD--a trailer from Eli Roth in the Grindhouse fashion entitled "Thanksgiving." Let's just say there's a naked cheerleader doing splits on a trampoline, and there's also a butcher knife. Yeah.
I didn't get to take a picture with Robbie Rod, mainly because I hadn't entered anything into the competition and felt pretty wack for that--I can't step to the man without having a plan!! These were the top 3 trailer Winners:

Maiden of Death


The Dead Won't Die



and the Grand Prize Winner, which I totally agree with:
Hobo With A Shotgun






On the way from our last film, we decided to take a cab home. The cab ended up being a white Cadillac with the words "AUSTIN CAB" printed on the side. In the plush front seat was a driver that can be most accurately described as a Hispanic version of Morris Day from The Time. In the passenger's seat...a small guitar. We sped off into the night. During stops, the driver would regularly swig from a bottle of sparkling water (what was inside, I could not tell you) and alternate between playing his small guitar and wailing on a harmonica. Since I had my headphones on, I was alternating between trying to ignore the blasting music (r&b-tinged gospel, then stadium rock), and wondering exactly when we were going to die inside this cab.

We got monumentally delayed in Austin because of a huge thunderstorm in Houston, and after our arrival there, we also had a long layover with hundreds of disgruntled travelers. A five hour trip became thirteen! I wonder if I could write a romantic comedy/horror story taking place in a nearly abandoned airport. I'd call it "Layover." (copyright!)


Coming up this weekend is the Bruce Campbell talk on campus, the derby, and the mayo clinic on sunday/monday.
I'll post some more stuff later. Head colds totally suck.


*not to be confused with "Jungle Boogie," a common mistake.

all things go.

I got a Brian Wood comic I've been waiting on for about 3 months now to come in stock. I really hate it when I get the second or third in a series of anything and have to wait on the original! Pat: it's Couriers 01. I read Demo, and that shit was awesome. Thanks!

I have been putting this off for a bit.

Memoirs of a Busrider.

This is a journal of the events taking place within the confines of my last Tallahassee trip (which went quite well, despite the bookends i'll be focusing on below) The company with which I traveled had a name that rhymed with "Playground" or "Gaypound." ... Okay, it was Greyhound. I was gonna hide the name in case of publishing but whatever.

Departure.
Downtown Atlanta, 9/22, Wayyy early.
An older woman solicits Snickers bars, which I politely decline (contents of carry-on: 1 Apple, 1 green tea, 1 bag of Smartfood). Waiting in queue, I see that they've retired my beloved fighter plane from service, the F-14A Tomcat, aka the Top Gun plane. Farewell, you fighting cat!

5:20 a.m.-- My bus is now Totally Late. I have unintentionally struck up a conversation with a saucier at some schmancy hotel, who has warrants in Tally for an expired license and decides to Greyhound it to the DMV. Regaled with tales of his time at the Cordon Bleu, he also explained the speeding that led to his predicament. Throughout the trip, he also kept calling the hotel about the glaze on the next batch of Chicken Marsala (pronounced "Marsellus" by he). Note to self-- watch Pulp Fiction in the near future.

5:30 a.m. The bus arrives and the trip goes well. The driver is some sort of Bus Driver Diva, though not as bad as the driver from the trip up. She excutes some sort of 15-point turn in Thomasville that practically backs us out of the entire city. The pickup spot in T'Ville is nestled between a thrift store and a pecan factory. I arrive in Tallahassee and have a really great time.

--------

Departure to Atlanta.

"If I Run."

Approx. 12:30 p.m. - First sighting of shirtless toddler/feral child.

12:35- In the waiting line I spot the first appearance of The Power Trio, three ladies who seem to be 3 generations of the same family. The first being an elderly lady with missing teeth and hearing. She is not as consequential to the story as the Mom and Daughter. The mother resembled a tanned version of Amy Poehler, give or give 35 years--perhaps the Poo-Stick lady she portrayed in UCB. Fun Fact: She goes outside no less than three times to smoke in our 15 minutes in line, and complains about not going more, as she is willing to make her daughter wait to use the bathroom while she smokes.
The Daughter is pretty much a less attractive version of Joy from My Name Is Earl, minus the clever writing. She argues with her mother quite frequently, and their faces are both covered in glitter.

12:45-- Mom and Daughter argue about what they did with their checked luggage. Mom has a self-destructive, showy tantrum, knocking over a bag. The bag contains DVDs, most noticeably "Left Behind" (natch) and "Confessions of a Drama Queen*" (also natch.) Several onlookers giggle immediately.

1:19-- We all board the bus. Mom and Daughter hold the late bus longer due to ignorance of bus rules. They aren't sure if they're meant to stop in Macon or Atlanta, which is pretty much a big fucking detail. After a small bit of frustration, a passenger up front interjects with "Hell, just take a bus ride." He is now Bus King to me.

1:23-- A man across from me loses bandage on finger. He indicates to the driver and myself that the cut is to the bone. Fashions impromptu bandage until Poehler Mom provides one.

2:20-- P.Mom asks if small stop in T'Ville is a rest. It is most decidedly not. I text Holly (Message: "This bus is full of Winners.")

2:23--At the intersection of Broad and Luten street. Is funny for some reason.

2:42--Glitterface Daughter moves 2 seats back to sprawl out, in the spot previously occupied by Bonefinger, who has retreated to the back. Five minutes later, her shoe falls off.

4:55--We arrive in Macon, where our trio leaves us, sadly. I get tired of writing this and start reading the Prestige again. It's fucking good.

The Bus Driver was a seemingly nice man with a bunch of rules. Mildly obsessed with scheduling, he advises against stretching and resting until our proper stop. he ALSO advises against looking for the driver near the end of the stop, which i disagree with. I say if there's one GH driver, and he's eating, you're good to go. In fact, I like to keep an eye on him. This guy was totally the opposite of this older fellow, who last time invited us to go to Jimmie's Hot Dogs and enjoy a good chili dog, which I may do next time, given I have time, or even decide to ride the bus again. As it stands, I pray for the decline of airfare.

*Apparently people actually saw this movie. I forgot it ever came out. More like Lindsay Blow-han! Hah!

Should you choose to accept him...

Just saw Mission: Impossible 3, aka "Crazy Like a Fox," aka "Are You Fucking Kidding Me?! I really liked it. In fact...



This is kinda a slantways answer to this review I read over on Time:

I present to you: Tom Cruise, as the postmodern living work of art. I come to you trying to grasp a full knowledge of the P word, because I hate it so very much. I loathe it. I think it's an easy out if you don't know what you're talking about and it sucks to hear people throw it about like so many croutons on the salad of my intellectual livelihood!
You can imagine my grief in having to pull the card right now for it.

From what I gather, it's got something to do with the rejection of preconceived Modern notions, which sprung from 19th and 20th century ideals. Much of it involves a knowledge of what is and what is trying to Be art, and finding ways to deconstruct said art. The fact that many people arguing on what it is and ain't is just extra icing on the cake of frustration.* I'll just use whatever I can from the definition: Irony in the form of self-awareness, a knowledge of what is and has been going on, and the dissection of these things.

Once we get past the wall of Film=Commerce> Film=Art, we can strip it down to essentials. We realize that this is a Summer Movie, and there will be conventions and stuff you've seen before. MI3 is a lean mean motha of a flick. It hits every last note of every spy movie worth a damn, short of downhill skiing with machine guns (a thing that spies pretty much shouldn't do, anyway). Gadgets, Guns, Girls. We've seen it! We know it deeply. And yes, on its base level, it's True Lies: Redux. However, this movie would be like Arnold making a movie about going on the Presidential campaign trail whilst simultaneously fighting members of the press who were sleeper cell ninjas, sent by Dubya, who's hell bent on securing an illegal third term by any means necessary. ** Okay, well it's not that crucial, but maybe you see what i'm getting at. It's a star vehicle packaged as a posit: "Is this motherfucker really crazy?" Shortish answer: "Yes, this motherfucker is really crazy."

The set pieces are totally engineered in a way that immediately recall iconic moments in the Cruise pantheon. these moments include (and are not limited to, see if you can find more):

Top Gun
Missions Impossible 1& 2,
Born on the Fourth of July
Far and Away,
annd I think maybe a touch of Jerry Maguire. Definitely.

Cruise's need to pull of some of his own stunts again blurs the line between what is going on between the film and real life. Jumping on Oprah's couch becomes jumping off of a 20 story building in Taiwan, and it might as well be the same thing. He's gotta do it to save the woman he loves! It's his job-- how else is he gonna pay for that sonogram machine that he's consistently zapping the baby with?! And he loves the wife/character in this movie well beyond the point of insanity. We get tears, rage, all the Cruisey stuff that nobody ever seems to think he does...but looking back on it, this guy is pretty intense. I'm not even talking about liking him as a person--I'm sure that Katie Holmes is heavily drugged and/or hypnotized, no doubt. Michelle Monaghan even looks like Katie Holmes, except she's got a slightly cuter nose and was totally great last year in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (get the dvd when it comes out, you non-movie seeing bastards), and so we break down another reality wall.
There are like 4 Impossible Missions total in the movie, and they're all kinetic and cool, and the pace doesn't lag too much. Everybody brings something to their roles (SIMON PEGG!!!!) and I don't think i've seen a better use of gadgets and trickery. Spy shit! Keri Russell totally tore it up in her limited screen time, and that's hard to do since I can't even watch Felicity. We get Marcellus Wallace in this one and not the "Tore my Versace shirt oh no you DIDN'T!" Ving Rhames that was in MI:Poo. And to top it all off, this movie not once, but twice effectively simulates my personal experience with a brain tumor.

Somewhere in the flick is the coolest lead up to the uttering of a Mother Goose line, possibly ever. I geek out.
Also, I may add that the Hoff is super seriously great in this. I don't want to meet his character, ever. He's the Mattress Man's evil twin! I may be totally reaching in this, but not only is this a Magnolia (ugh) reunion, but it's some sort of revenge on Hoffman for now getting the Oscar that perhaps Tom Cruise wishes he'd gotten years ago, or something. That doesn't even really work since this was made way before Oscar season. I guess I'll end it with that.

I gave the movie a hard eight until Kanye's new song AND remix came up on the credits, knocking it down a half point. I present to you, Tom Cruise as the Plane-Shootinest, Couch/Building Jumpinest, Baby-makinest, Car-slamminest, Nutty-Ass scientologist of the year, dedicated to you and me and whomever to becoming the World's First Living Summer Action Movie, in real time.
The end credits song should have been Gnarls Barkley's new single, "Crazy."

*Two food references in one review, huh. EDIT: I rectified the situation with some chocolate cake.
**I should get to work writing that!!!

What's goin on.

Maybe I don't like John Woo as much as I used to. Granted Hard Boiled is still the greatest gunplay/action movie of all time--a masterpiece, but I'm beginning to think people are kinda mixed up for calling master director. I watched Bullet In The Head this morning and It. Was. Bad. I forgot how much Woo is hooked on melodrama. This one was pretty hard to stomach, save for two performances: Tony Leung as the main character and Simon Yam as the super CIA agent (who would usually be too cool to live, but he does). The movie's about these ballroom-dancin*' misfits who get in trouble with gangs and run afoul of many people. They escape to Vietnam and everything goes wrong all the time. They shoot like 50 people in order to take over a crime boss's business, then they get mixed up with the VC and kill about 100 of those dudes, only to get captured and shell-shocked. It was pretty grueling and SO melodramatic, and overlong. I'm hoping I can still watch the Killer. I love Chow Yun Fat. He hasn't done anything really good since Hard Boiled, though.
It's been a good day! You'd be surprised how much fun jumping rope, playing video games, making a sandwich and watching Newsradio could be. Or maybe you wouldn't. It's great!
I've been playing Metroid Hunters, too. I rented it from Gamefly, which gave me 10 bucks and ten percent off as part of the new rewards plan, so I decided to buy it for sixteen! If you play videogames all the time, then it's a great deal. Wayy better then paying fifty bucks for a Beatal (beatable rental), and it keeps your shelf space tidy. That game's pretty kickass--the only problem is the screen's not bright enough...which means I'll probably defnitely have to go for the DS Lite when it comes out. Five brightness levels!!!
What else. I've been listening all day long and I've declared today...DOOOMSDAY!!!! That's right, Egg Shen. I got the special herbs box set and the instrumentals are Adult Swim's bump programmer's wet dream (See also Dudley Perkins/Madlib/Yesterday's New Quintet). I'm compiling a megaplaylist and everything.
Have I spent all this time rambling? Oh well. I just finished my application to Austin Studios and will send that in shortly, Pluuuuus, I've rewritten the intro to my Killer Tattoo screenplay, as well as added a few more songs to the Official Motion Picture Soundtrack, heh heh. Ask if you want one! It's pretty dope. I would really like it if everything I wrote not only made people love it, but also very very nauseous.
I mixed some Fruity Pebbles with lucky charms this morning and I think it changed my life.
Also: found one of my Favorite Commercials!
And: The tryouts for the wildcard team for the pop culture world series is online tonite!!

Note: John Woo likes ballroom dancing far more than films or violence. It's on the record.

What's Up, Docs?

Can we rock? Surely we can.

Last week I had the excellent pleasure of attending the South By Southwest Film Festival in Austin, TX. My friends and I clocked about 3 or 4 films per day on the average, and a lot of the interest this year was on documentaries, so here's a few you should definitely be on the lookout for:

Before the Music Dies

Have you ever wondered what's happening to the state of popular music these days? I know I do. Not everyone has the luxury of hitting up the local independently owned music store to find something new, so the general populace has been stuck with a sinking ship: the radio. Most everyone knows how bad it can be--the same ten songs over and over, morning radio stations broadcast nationwide, the lack of a local, personal voice in the community or city in which you live. What's the cause of all of it? What the film sets out to do is answer this question as well as others that involve celebrity making, the quest for passion in music, and what artists and listeners can do to turn it all around.
At first, the film takes a sort of scholarly approach with a history lesson on Clear Channel, the former car-dealership enterprise that found a gold mine in the discovery of airplay selling in the mid 90's. Over the next few years, the company grew, so did their presence across America, leading to a mass homogenization of modern popular radio.
The director and producer team of Andrew Shapter and Joel Rasmussen went on the road to interview all kinds of musicians about where the heart and soul of music is going today. Of course, we get the stock responses about capitalism and the need to change, but there are some truly insightful (not to mention candid) responses from artists such as Eric Clapton, Erykah Badu, ?uestlove from The Roots, Dave Matthews, and Branford Marsalis (who completely floored me with his honesty concerning his music students). The film has a really interesting subplot about creating a pop star from scratch--using a model, getting a press kit of photos together, finding a writer, and digitally tweaking the model's lackluster voice.
The documentary highlights a few artists for their music, but there is an extensive segment on Doyle Bramhall II, an Austin-born musician with the honest-to-God chops to be a bonafide rock star, who would not tailor his art to suit the record labels. Unfortunately, he hasn't received the acclaim that he deserves, but a major event occured while the movie was being made: Doyle, along with musicians Badu, ?uestlove, and several other notables came together to create a band that wishes to create a movement for the artist, separate from the tyranny of record companies. The band, "Funk Sway," had a killer performance at Austin Music Hall the night of the premiere and it was INCREDIBLE. It was taped and should be on the DVD for the documentary.

Check the website at www.beforethemusicdies.com

I thought, surely that must be the most important film of the Festival concerning music, and then I saw my next film...

East of Havana

"Nowadays rap artists/Are comin' half-hearted. Commercial like pop, or underground like black markets./ Where were you the day Hip-hop died?
Is it to early to mourn/Is it too late to ride?"

--Talib Kweli, "Too Late," from the album Reflection Eternal.


One of the SXSW panels concerned the "24 beats per minute" music related documentaries, and on this panel was Charlize Theron, there to promote East of Havana, a documentary about the state of hip hop in Cuba. This was evidently no vanity project, as some of you might know, she lived with a family in Miami for nearly 15 years before becoming an actress. She also put up some of her own money to fund this film, and I can understand why--though it may seem like a trivial thing, the message that this film conveys cannot be subdued or forgotten.
East of Havana is the story of three young Cuban MC's, Soandry, Mikki Flow, and Magyori, who live in the slums of Havana and are a part of the rap group "El Cartel" . The documentary follows them for the days leading up to the annual Cuban Hip Hop festival, apparently the only time when the collective voice of the culture can express themselves. Mikki Flow (Michel) is the outspoken revolutionary type, full of righteous bravado and swagger. Magyori is more of a freeform, spoken word poet MC (a la some of Lauryn Hill's later work), and Soandry had dedicated his ideals and style to the rappers of the early-to-mid nineties, around what many believe is the 'Golden Age' of rap. I don't mean to pigeonhole them, just give a general idea of their style. During the time we spend with them, we see defeat, triumph, anger and eloquence. One scene in which Mikki Flow raps, addressing the camera as a lost love in a freestyle was both amazing and heartbreaking. The year this was being filmed was also the year of Hurricane Charley, which meant that the dozens and dozens of tourists and hip hop fans were unable to partake in the festival because of bureaucratic red tape. What do they do? They have a session on the bus! There's another scene with Soandry's older brother, who lives in New York and hasn't seen his entire family for over ten years. Watching him see pictures of his family for the first time illustrates the pain and struggle of today's post-revolutionary Cubans, young and old. I feel that this film is not only important to hip hop fans, but moreso those who wish to make a change in society by having a dialogue with other countries instead of imposing embargos. As a fan of hip-hop, I was astounded to realize how much of our art form we take for granted. Call me naive but when I see people anywhere, living and fighting for the cause to be heard, I wish for everyone to speak up for those who cannot (or at the very least, try to). I pray that these films get distribution so everyone can have a better understanding of the music and culture that binds us.