Macon Film Festival dispatch: "Passenger Pigeons"

I had to feel for writer/director Martha Stephens as she introduced her movie, "Passenger Pigeons," to about six people (including me) at the Macon Film Festival, but what those select few witnessed was a genuinely entertaining and often moving debut feature film that takes a hard but heartfelt look at life in Appalachia.

"Passenger Pigeons" opens with a scene familiar to all, a roadside memorial, but this one isn't for a highway crash. Instead, we soon learn its for a man who died in a mining accident in Eastern Kentucky, and it's there we meet Elva (Caroline White), who's being interviewed by a newspaper reporter. She is part of one of four stories that Stephens weaves together to find some hope but few easy answers in the wake of this tragedy.

The best of these, and the one that's at the movie's center, is that of Moses (Bryan Marshall), who returns home to Kentucky to bury his brother. Unable to face it directly at first, he goes to smoke pot with some old acquaintances before visiting his brother's widow Annie (Karrie Crouse) and bonding with the nephew, Benny (Will Casse), he hardly knows at all.

The other characters we meet are Buck (Earl Lynn Nelson) and Nolan (Brendan McFadden), an odd couple of coal industry suits sent to do put the best face possible on this for the company, one about to retire and the other his replacement. Much of the movie's humor comes from what happens when they're forced to camp out for the night.

Also in this tableau are Elva and her boyfriend Jesse (Kentucker Audley), who works in the mines and, despite Elva's wishes otherwise, can't see himself doing anything else. And finally, Stephens herself plays the young activist Robin, who comes to town with the unfortunately timed task of protesting against the coal companies but instead finds friendship with retired miner Valentine (Jim Johnstone) in one of the movie's best moments of grace.

Its in the skill with which Stephens loosely ties these stories together that I was reminded of the work of Robert Altman and John Sayles. They never quite collide and are never forced to unfold at anything but a natural pace, and together they weave a portrait of a community that's running low on hope that still tries to find it wherever they can.

As for Stephens, she's raising money now to shoot another story set in Kentucky, "Pilgrim Song," so here's hoping she makes it. As for "Passenger Pigeons," catch this one if you can, because it certainly deserves to be seen by more than the few people who joined me for it in Macon.

Macon Film Festival dispatch: "Beijing Punk"

There really isn't a better way to wind down after a very long Friday, at least if you're me, then with a documentary about Chinese punk music. Yes, really.

I went into Shaun Jefford's "Beijing Punk" expecting a blast of loud, fast fun, and that's exactly what it delivers, along with a little about to think about along the way. For a little background, Jefford explains at the outset that he took his camera to the Chinese capital in the year of the Olympics looking for an interesting story behind the big one, and finds his centered around the punk club D-22.

He loses a little focus in the beginning with kids who certainly look like punks, but only give him quizzical looks when he asks if they like punk music. Before it slips too far into mockery, though, he finds his groove by wisely focusing on three bands and their stories.

The first, and by far the most interesting (and often frightening) is Misandao, a Chinese skinhead band (let that sink in for a second before continuing), and its frontman Lei Jun. Rather than trying to explain just what a Chinese skinhead would be angry about, Jefford just lets Lei Jun and his bandmates show it as they swig cough syrup by the bottle and eventually talk about Hitler in chillingly neutral terms.

Less scary but more entertaining are Demerit and Hedgehog. The fun in learning about these two young bands is in seeing how the language of punk music is universal and how much it gets filtered through the unique state of trying to express it in a communist state.

The kids of Demerit delight in explaining that they don't have jobs because "working" in China means putting in 12-hour days, and as they show off their squalid living conditions and declare their absolutely filthy bathroom "punk," it's hard to argue with them. The trio Hedgehog is the most musically entertaining of the three groups (but then, I've always been a bit of a shoegazer when it comes to indie rock, and they are too), and it's a hoot to hear the two male members explain the appeal of having a female drummer (who, as almost all female drummers do , kicks all kinds of ass).

All in all, it's an interesting look at a scene that's still fresh and on the rise, and a world well worth visiting for an hour or so.

In musical offerings, Macon Film Festival moves to its own beat

The beauty of any film festival, and thankfully the one that opens Thursday here in Macon, is the opportunity to see a variety of things you've never experienced before.

And, appropriately enough for this city with a rich musical past and present, the Macon Film Festival has sprinkled through its many offerings some musical documentaries that will expose you to some genuine characters. Here are three that should be well worth checking out.

If you were to tell me a "rappin' cowboy" was performing on stage, I'd probably run in the opposite direction, but a movie about the life of one? I'm in.

Director Elizabeth Lawrence's "Roll Out Cowboy" spends some time on tour with Chris "Sandman" Sand, who, according to the movie Web site's own description, "looks like Woody Guthrie but sings like LL Cool J." Again, not my thing in the least, but the fun in this should come in seeing what the audience thinks of this in his ultra-small town of Dunn Center, N.D., and elsewhere as Lawrence and her crew follow him on tour in 2008. You can check out the trailer below and the movie itself Friday at noon at the Cox Capitol Theatre.

Roll Out Cowboy from Roll Out, Cowboy on Vimeo.

Later Friday and also at the Cox (at 6 p.m.) comes something about as different from that as you can get, "Beijing Punk." And with the tagline, "What happens when 1.3 billion Chinese discover punk?", how can you not want to find out?

Director Shaun Jefford dives into this odd scene in 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics, and as you'll see from the trailer below, it's the definition of chaos, but if your ears can take it, I'm betting on a lot of fun, too.



And finally, "Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone," is the one movie I'm most looking forward to at this year's Macon Film Festival.

The word "unique" is thrown around far too often in both movies and music, but with Fishbone, it actually applies. A band of black musicians who played an intoxicating mix of funk, punk and ska, no one really knew what to do with them when they first appeared in the late '80s, and as you'll see from the movie, they really don't know what to do with each other, either.

With members who are genuinely crazy, and one who was charged with kidnapping after trying to rescue another from what he considered a "cult" (yes, really), this really should be an oddly inspiring portrait of failure, and with great music to boot. Directors Lev Anderson and Chris Metzler chart the band's rise, fall and attempt to rise again, with narration by Laurence Fishburne. Check out the trailer below, and the movie itself at 4:30 p.m. Sunday at the Douglass Theatre.

And of course, those are just three of the many offerings. Look for a more complete schedule at the festival's Web site, and please, go see at least one Macon Film Festival movie.

See the best movie of 2010 (so far) and much more at the Macon Film Festival this weekend

The fifth annual Macon Film Festival kicked off yesterday and gets into a real groove starting today, so if you're gonna be in town this weekend, there's really no excuse not to turn out for a few events (you can find the full schedule here.)

The fun things on the menu today include a special screening of "The Candidate" (my single favorite political film, by the way), hosted by Illeana Douglas, granddaughter of one of the movie's stars, Melvyn Douglas. Illeana Douglas will then host a screening of her own latest project, the Web-based series "Easy to Assemble."

That's going on at the Cox Capitol Theatre, while also downtown today at the historic Douglass Theatre, Richmond Riedel's "Target Practice" will be among the movies screened (around 7 p.m. or so, if I got the message he sent me right.) Though you could never call it high art, this debut feature from Riedel about a group of outdoorsmen who encounter a band of terrorists on a camping trip (yes, really) plays out as an updated "Deliverance" of sorts and is just a heck of a lot of fun.

Saturday's Marquee event will certainly be the Q&A session with Macon native Jack McBrayer. It's unfortunate that he can't bring a better movie than "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" to screen, but in the "30 Rock" star's defense, I suppose he really hasn't appeared in that many movies yet (and at least he didn't bring "Talladega Nights"!) The movie isn't awful, though, and the Q&A should be a blast, so if you turn out for this at the Cox Capitol, you'll certainly run into me.

But the real highlight of this year's fest will be Sunday's closing night feature, Scott Teems' debut feature "That Evening Sun," easily the best movie I've seen so far this year. This movie has a number of connections to Macon, with the great Ray McKinnon having visited a previous Macon Film Festival to present his Oscar-winning short film "The Accountant" (a spectacular work) and Macon native and "True Blood" star Carrie Preston also appearing in a key role in "That Evening Sun" as the wife of McKinnon's character.

In fact, the greatest strength (among many) of "That Evening Sun" is its genuinely (and welcomely) Southern ensemble cast led by national treasure (and I mean that wholeheartedly) Hal Holbrook, who, believe it or not, gives a performance even better than his work in "Into the Wild."

He stars as Abner Meecham, who as the movie opens is slowly dying of boredom in a nursing home his son shunted him into. Seemingly on a whim, Meechan decides to seek out the farm that until recently had been his, and as is the fact with many Southerners, was his greatest point of pride.

After somehow making it back there, however, he finds his son has rented it out to a truly mean class of redneck played by McKinnon (the kind of character he revels in playing.) The movie evolves from there as a battle of wills between the two as Holbrook's Meecham takes up residence in a shack once intended for servants and refuses to leave until McKinnon and his family do (living as I do in a cottage - not, note, a shack - that surely once housed servants, that hit home with me.)

I'm probably not doing this great little movie justice with my description of it, but it's just a genuinely Southern tale, the likes of which we haven't seen since "Sling Blade," although "Junebug" came close too. The story, adapted by Teems from a short story by William Gay, just unfolds at a naturally entertaining pace, and I guarantee you'll be riveted as this slowly evolves from extremely quotable (Holbrook is a hoot) to something much more intense. Do yourself a favor and turn out for this Sunday night at the Cox Capitol Theatre.

OK, after all that today, all I have is a trio of clips. First up comes a short bit from the animated "Ricky Gervais Show," which just hit the air on HBO. As you'll see, it's essentially an animated version of the podcasts he shares with partner in crime Stephen Merchant and sidekick Karl Pilkington. Pilkington is a seriously funny dude, but as you'll see from this clip, it doesn't really translate all that well to animation, so I'll be HBO-free until David Simon's "Treme" hits the air, hopefully by April (a quick visit to the IMDB confirms April 11 - huzzah!) Enjoy.



Next up is a featurette of sorts for Noah Baumbach's "Greenberg," set to open with Ben Stiller as its main star April 1. I simply adored "The Squid and the Whale" and even stuck with Baumbach (unlike anyone else I know) through "Margot at the Wedding," but I have a feeling this one is just going to test my patience with the angst of white dudes (I get enough of that from myself, thank you very much.) Anyways, here's hoping I'm wrong and this turns out to be worth turning out for. Enjoy the clip.



OK, with this last one, you certainly can't say I didn't warn you, because it's a sure case of saving the worst for last. Of all the pre-release items that have been spit out to promote Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland" (finally coming March 5), this video for "Underground" by Avril Lavigne is easily the most distressing. I suppose I'm just far too old to enjoy this, but if you dare, click on the clip to see Avril go down the rabbit hole and encounter Johnny Depp. Enjoy, have a great weekend, and if you happen to live anywhere near Macon, please do come out for at least a few Macon Film Festival events. Peace out.

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