South By Southwest report

In theaters Friday: Drillbit Taylor, Meet the Browns, Shutter
New on DVD: Enchanted, I Am Legend, Love in the Time of Cholera, Southland Tales

I attended a few days of the South By Southwest Film Festival in Austin last week, survived throng after sweaty throng of movie and video game geeks, and saw some pretty good advance screenings, including The Promotion, Where in the World is Osama bin Laden? and Shot in Bombay.

“All I can say is, America we’ve heard your cries for a grocery story comedy with dramatic notes,” writer/director Steve Conrad joked during his brief intro to The Promotion.
Stiffler—aka Seann William Scott—and Conrad (The Pursuit of Happyness) were in attendance at the Paramount Theater in downtown Austin for the premier of their new film, a dry, niche comedy in the vein of Office Space that exposes the ins and outs, highs and lows and corporate conundrums of the chain supermarket world. Scott surprised me here, never once mugging like he has so often in the past. Instead he plays Doug, an introverted average guy who just wants to become manager of the new Donaldson’s Supermarket so he can better provide for his wife, The Office’s always adorable and clever Jenna Fischer. Just when Doug seems like a lock for the promotion, in rolls another candidate: an awkward, self-help-crazed Canadian played by the great John C. Reilly. The veteran character actor really gets to let loose in this role because as it is written his character reveals surprise after surprise about himself as the story unfolds. Of course friendship soon escalates to all-out war as both gun for the big promotion. I won’t spoil anything, but Scott, Reilly and Fischer each had some great one-liners and the supporting cast — including Fred Armisen and Jason Bateman and Lili Taylor — is perfect. The audience was laughing harder than anything I’ve seen since probably Borat, which is remarkable considering the comedy of The Promotion depends largely on tone and mood. It is a subtle but successful film, and I hope it does well. Look for it in theaters June 6.

Though the title is hyperbolic and somewhat misleading, I enjoyed Morgan Spurlock’s new documentary, Where in the World is Osama bin Laden? Spurlock is a fellow former USC film student and used to pal around with one of my old teachers, Frederick Levy. Spurlock of course hit it big in 2004 with Super Size Me, by taking the tenets of Fast Food Nation and turning them inward. Using his body as a test tube for fast food, he ate McDonalds meals three times a day for 30 days and barely lived to tell about it. The film sent shockwaves through the culture, eventually expediting the move to smaller portions at the chain restaurant. You can get a decent McDonald’s salad and apple slices instead of fries now, and you have Spurlock to thank for that.

Heading to the Middle East in search of the FBI’s most wanted man, Spurlock of course doesn’t find him (if he’s even still alive as some question in the film). And I don’t really understand this strange backlash against Spurlock for not discovering bin Laden. The United States has every available resource and all the political power in the world and they can’t find the guy, so why is it an indie filmmaker’s fault? Like Super Size Me was less about the fat content of a Big Mac and more about what fast food dominance means about us as a society, Osama is less about the 9/11 mastermind’s whereabouts and more about foreign policy and the human spirit. If he “fails” at finding bin Laden, what Spurlock does do well is talk to ordinary people from Morocco to Jerusalem to the warlord-infested regions of Pakistan, and collect their thoughts on terrorism, radical Islam, U.S. foreign policy and bin Laden himself. Spurlock put real faces — and smiles — to the war zones we hear on the nightly news. He humanizes people that some in America would want us to dehumanize because of religious or ideological differences. And that is a great service.

Spurlock stayed in the lobby after the screening to take questions, and I got to meet him after a particularly tense question. One couple took serious issue with Spurlock’s portrayal of a group of Hasidic Jews who were hostile towards him and his questions. One of the men repeatedly shoved Spurlock in the documentary, and the police were called to protect Spurlock and his crew. Spurlock’s response was something like. “That’s what happened to me, and we showed another Jewish man apologizing and saying that that group was not the norm.” Well, that answer didn’t seem sufficient for these two, and just as things got really weird, I decided to break the ice: “How many McDonald’s are in the Middle East?” I asked Spurlock, and almost everyone else laughed and the mood lightened. “A lot,” he said. Oh, and during this screening my attitude toward uber-producer Harvey Weinstein changed slightly. After 15 minutes of the movie, a power outage caused a 20-minute delay. This screening was at the Alamo Drafthouse, an awesome theater that serves good food and drinks, and during the delay the Alamo staff handed out an ice-cold Tecate to everyone. I thought SXSW had purchased them to keep fickle bloggers happy, but according to Spurlock, it was Weinstein who made one call and picked up the tab. Well played.

The final feature I saw was Liz Mermin’s Shot in Bombay, an obscure documentary set in the unbelievable world of Bollywood. At the center of the film is India’s most infamous movie star, Sanjay Dutt, a favorite son of a beloved political figure who fell from grace when authorities found an AK-56 in his home and attempted to use his purchase of the weapon to link him to the criminal underworld that funds some of Bollywood’s movies as well as the country’s extensive drug trade. In and out of court appearances as the trial drags on, Dutt is also starring in Shootout at Lokhandwala, a film based on a real showdown between police and gangsters in Mumbai in the early 1990s. Several people — including some innocents — were killed in the raid that shocked the country. Helming Shootout is a young schlock action director named Apoorva Lakhia, who has probably seen Scarface and Pulp Fiction a dozen too many times. But Lakhia is a real character, always saying “Mind-blowing!” after a good take, and he gives us someone to focus on as the documentary switches between narrative threads. The film is not for everyone, but if you want a good look at Bollywood, check it out. Shot in Bombay was interesting enough that Shootout at Lokhandwala is now in my Netflix queue, which is probably the only place you’ll be able to find Bombay later this year.