The Screengrab : crawford

The Crawford, Texas Mofo Party Plan

Phil Nugent — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

David Modigliani's documentary Crawford (which played at last spring's South by South West Festival to much acclaim) is about the little Texas town where George W. Bush bought himself a ranch when he needed a stage set where he could strut and clear brush and generally establish his down-home bonafides. Reviewing the movie here, Scott Von Doviak wrote that its subject is both "media complicity in Bush’s myth-making" and the regular folks who are trying to continue living their lives in the same old place they were in before the circus came to town. (The President has delicately suggested that, because he "owes it" to his wife, now that his political career is coming to an end, Crawford may have seen the last of him.) Now comes word that B-Side Entertainment is announcing "a nationwide grassroots exhibition program for this exceptional film - 'Host Your Own Farewell to W. - CRAWFORD’s 50-State Screening Party'. From January 1-19, leading up to inauguration day on Jan. 20, we will be coordinating grassroots screening events in all 50 states - red, blue, and everything in between." Sounding just a little like Amway salesmen on the ganja, the company is peddling %50 "Screening Party kits" that include 5 double-sided DVDs that can shown on your home entertainment system, screened at theaters you might want to rent for the occasion, projected on the walls of abandoned buildings, you, know, get creative! As the company says, it's your party. (They also note that you can sell the discs themselves after you're done. You can check out the full details here. Me, I'd be all over this myself, except I'm not sure that I'll be out of jail before January 21st for what I'll get up to tomorrow night.

The Screengrab Election Day Online Viewing Guide

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:30:00 GMT

So you’ve cast your vote and now all you can do is wait until tonight to watch the returns roll in. Sure, you could spend your day obsessively clicking on the political sites and following the exit polls, but you know those are notoriously unreliable. Fortunately, you have a number of free viewing options only a mouse click or two away. We’ve already told you about Crawford, the documentary about George W. Bush’s adopted hometown, which is available on Hulu. (And if you really want to relive the entire election season, Hulu has all four debates, all of the relevant SNL skits and Daily Shows, and even a selection of campaign speeches, if you’re a real masochist.)

We also told you about the Iraq War documentary No End in Sight, still available on YouTube, and Michael Moore’s Slacker Uprising, which you can download from his website as long as you aren’t Canadian. (His rules, not ours.) And of course there’s Nerve’s contribution, courtesy of the Screengrab’s own Phil Nugent: The 20 Greatest Campaign Ads of All Time.

The mother lode of free online documentaries can be found at (duh) freedocumentaries.org. Here you can watch HBO’s terrific and terrifying expose of voter fraud Hacking Democracy, and then spend the rest of the day wondering if your vote ended up being erased by a giant magnet. Take a nostalgic look back at the fun-filled 2000 presidential election with Unprecedented, or examine the not-at-all-relevant-this-year issue of African-American voter suppression in American Blackout. By the time you’re done with all that, why, you may never vote again!

Related:
Top Thirteen Greatest Fictional Movie Presidents
Will Barack Obama Be America's Next Great Black President?

Watch It For Free: Crawford

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Oliver Stone’s W. is due in theaters a week from Friday, and those of you who want to do a little homework ahead of time have a golden opportunity today. The documentary Crawford, which I reviewed during SXSW this year (and Andrew Osborne also chimed in on) is streaming for free online for your cubicle-viewing pleasure. It’s the story of George W. Bush’s hometown – but not really of course, because he just moved there before the 2000 election to secure his Texas good ol’ boy image. For everyone crossing days off the calendar until the end of the Bush era, it’s a must-see. Hit the jump for the linkage.

Hulu has your free Crawford today.

The Halfway House: Von Doviak’s Unwatchables of 2008 (So Far)

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:00:00 GMT

My, my, my, isn’t this a lovely thing! The sun is shining, the birdies are singing, and my fellow Screengrabbers are raving about their favorite movies from the first half of 2008. So far, Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark and Leonard Pierce have all weighed in with their rainbows and pretty, pretty ponies, so I guess it’s up to me to poop in the punchbowl.

Don’t get wrong – it’s not that this year’s first half has been completely worthless as far as cinema is concerned. I enjoyed Wall-E as much as the next guy – I’m not made of stone, you know! (Not entirely, anyway.) Iron Man was about as good as it gets with the superhero genre, which still makes it a movie that ends with one guy in a big metal suit beating the crap out of another guy in an even bigger metal suit, but an awful lot of fun up until that point. Like Mr. Pierce, I’ll go to bat for the terrifying first hour of The Strangers, as well as most of Baghead, the offbeat indie Wellness (screened at SXSW) and the documentaries Crawford and The Unforeseen. But let’s be honest – so far 2008 has been overflowing with crap, and as the resident movie janitor, it’s my job to dig through it. Without further ado, here are the five least watchable movies I’ve seen this year.

1. The Love Guru. Everything you’ve heard is true. This isn’t a case of mass hypnosis or the critical brotherhood sticking together – it really is that bad. Mike Myers described this comedy about a self-help guru’s attempts to help a hockey player win a championship as “a delivery system for some wonderful ideas.” Actually, it’s a delivery system for dick jokes, each one dumber than the last.

2. First Sunday. So bad that I’ve already covered it here as part of the Unwatchable series. Nuff said.

3. Step Up 2 The Streets. A movie that raises many questions, not least of which is: “There was a Step Up 1?” A teenage street dancer (Briana Evigan, the next Demi Moore, if we needed one) is forced to enroll in an upscale school for the performing arts, leaving her old crew to accuse her of NOT KEEPING IT REELZ. This can only be settled with a dance-off! A thoroughly unconvincing dance-off that looks like an outtake from Night of the Living Dead: The Musical.

4. The Ruins. Reviewed here at the time of its release. At least, it was in theaters when I started writing the review; I think it had been pulled by the time I posted it. A gripping, intense read becomes a dead teenager movie with laughable CG effects.

5. Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show. You loved The Original Kings of Comedy! You tolerated The Blue Collar Comedy Tour! Now run and hide, because Vince Vaughn’s Indistiguishable Frat Dudes of Comedy are coming to town! Vaughn’s brainstorm was to bring unknown comics from L.A. to heartland cities where folks apparently never get the opportunity to laugh in person at jokes about bumper stickers and apple martinis. And we wonder why middle America hates Hollywood.

Related:
SXSW Review: Wellness
Screengrab Review: The Unforeseen

Independent Film Festival of Boston: Three Things I've Learned About Crawford, Texas

Andrew Osborne — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Crawford, a documentary about (and named for) George W. Bush’s favorite cynically selected folksy backdrop...I mean, uh, vacation spot...was first reviewed here by Scott Von Doviak (at SXSW) and will screen this weekend at the Independent Film Festival of Boston.

The film profiles the titular town and its residents from just before the future commander-in-chief’s arrival (he bought his ranch there around the time of the 2000 presidential campaign, back when he was governor of the state) through the Decider's recent reversals of fortune. The film was a little preachy-to-the-choir but interesting and taught me the following things about Crawford...

1. The town is small, but not really as dusty and rural as the president would have you believe. In fact, in one of the doc’s best moments, the filmmakers reveal how dozens of different TV news crews use the same farm equipment as a backdrop for their reports from the "Western White House," while carefully framing out the modern high school adjacent to the folksy rustic hardware.

2. There’s a pretty wide, purple-state range of opinions in the heart of "Bush country"...and, in fact, a “peace house” was sitting smack dab in the middle of Crawford even before Cindy Sheehan and the Camp Casey crowd showed up.

3. Once the novelty wears off, having your small town crammed with reporters, protesters and secret service agents gets old pretty quick.

The Rep Report (23--May 1)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: One of the strangest and most intriguing new filmmaking talents to emerge in recent years, the Korean writer-director Kim Ki-Duk gets his first complete U.S. retrosepctive, courtesy of the Museum of Modern art, running from April 23 to May 8. Originally typed as a bit of a sickie on the basis of his 2000 film The Isle, with its isolated, watery setting, creepy eroticized atmosphere, and creative use of fishhooks, Kim has continued to turn out deluxe midnight-movie fare (such as Samaritan Girl) while also revealing a more restrained, meditative side in such films as Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring and the weird, mute romance 3-Iron. The MOMA show will be of special interest to old fans eager to get a look at some of his movies that haven't gotten much play here before, including his 1996 debut picture Crocodile.

"Creatively Speaking" (April 25-27) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is a series, curated by Michelle Materre and co-curated and produced by Neyda Martinez, that seeks to showcase "realistic, universal portrayals of people of color." It includes documentaries about the culture and political activism of South Africa, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, a concert honoring what would have been Bob Marley's sixtieth birthday, the African-American activist Robert F. Williams, and the roots and spread of hip hop culture, along with a number of dramatic short films. Each screening will be accompanied by a Q & A session afterwards.

FESTIVAL NEWS: In spring, the film geek's heart turns to thoughts of film festivals, where the hardcore faithful can seal themselves up in dark screening rooms to take refuge from all that sunshine and pollen. The Independent Film Festival of Boston, which was founded in 2003 and is already well-established as perhaps the city's premier yearly film event, kicks off on Wednesday, April 23, and runs through the 29th. This year's week-long bash includes new features from Guy Maddin (My Winnipeg, Harmony Korine (Mister Lonely), Werner Herzog (Encounters at the End of the World), and the Hoop Dreams, Steve James and Peter Gilbert (At the Death House Door), as well as documentaries on Joy Division, Harlan Ellison (Dreams with Sharp Teeth), and George W. Bush's home away from home, Crawford, Texas. From April 25 through May 8, Pacific Film Archive will be running standout attractions from the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, including Ermanno Olmi's One Hundred Nails, Bela Tarr's The Man from London, Claude Chabrol's Girl Cut in Two, Roy Andersson's You, the Living, and Mock Up on Mu, the latest "pulp serial-cum-political tract" from Bay Area filmmaker and "culture jammer" Craig Baldwin. Across the border, Toronto's fifteenth annual Hot Docs Candaian International Documentary Film Festival begins on Thursday and spends eleven days showcasing the best in nonfiction filmmaking, including more than a hundred new pictures and retrospectives devoted to the work of Richard Leacock and Canada's own Jennifer Baichwal. And New York's youthful-and-still-growing counterweight to the city's fall festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, begins Wednesday and continues through May 4, with a handsome spread of independent and international films sandwiched in between the premieres of Baby Mama and Speed Racer. We'll have more to come on Tribeca as soon as it lands.

SXSW Review: Crawford

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Why would the president of the United States want to spend the hottest month of the summer in a tiny town in the middle of Texas? When asked, many residents of Crawford, TX are baffled; surely Hawaii would make for a nicer vacation spot. High school teacher Misti Turbeville isn’t mystified, however; when George W. Bush purchased his Crawford ranch while gearing up for his presidential run, it was clear to her that some image-making was on the agenda. The candidate needed a home besides the governor’s mansion in Austin, Texas, just a few short blocks from the Paramount Theater where David Modigliani’s immersive documentary Crawford premiered on Saturday.

No one ever heard of Crawford before the year 2000, and that’s just the way most of the 700 or so residents liked it. In the years since, they have seen media hordes descend on their town in the wake of the Florida election fiasco, souvenir shops crop up along main street, and protesters and counter-protesters swarm and multiply along every roadside. Crawford is about the townspeople, and the effect the “Western White House” has had on their lives.

Some, like conservative shop owner Norma Nelson-Crow, are thrilled to share their hometown with the president. Others, like Turbeville and her student Tom Warlick, grow increasingly disgruntled, particularly in the wake of 9-11 and the ensuing war in Iraq. Once Cindy Sheehan arrives in town and establishes Camp Casey, a haven for war protesters on the outskirts of Bush’s property, many longtime Crawford residents have had enough of tourists and outsiders.

Crawford is about people as much as it is about politics – it wouldn’t be half as interesting without character like folksy rancher Pug Meyers and alienated teen Warlick, who hardly seem like they inhabit the same planet, let alone the same one-light town. It’s also about media complicity in Bush’s myth-making; the townspeople are bemused to see all of the network news correspondents setting up in front of the same ramshackle shed and bale of hay, all the better to enhance the president’s cowboy image. In the end, there’s one thing Bush’s supporters and detractors all seem to agree on: they’ll be happy when it’s over and life gets back to normal.

Greta Gerwig and the SXSW Invasion

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 20:30:00 GMT

In approximately 24 hours, the bars and hotel lobbies of Austin will be crawling with filmmakers, actors, publicists, studio weasels, and, lowest of the low, film bloggers. Yes, your Screengrab pals Leonard Pierce and yours truly will be on the scene to bring you up-to-the-minute news, reviews and free booze. No, wait. The free booze is for us. But you’ll reap the benefits when you get to read our semi-drunken posts.

In anticipation of SXSW Film 08, this week’s issue of the Austin Chronicle is jam-packed with coverage. The cover girl is Greta Gerwig, which is entirely appropriate as the leading lady of mumblecore is practically the face of SXSW these days. The 2006 festival featured the premiere of LOL, in which Gerwig made her screen debut (granted, it was only her voice on an answering machine, but it was a start). Hannah Takes the Stairs premiered at the following year’s SXSW, which also showcased Gerwig in an amusing series of promos that screened through the festival.

This year she’s everywhere: Sunday night you can see her in both Baghead (the mumblecore horror movie from the Duplass brothers) and Nights and Weekends (which she co-wrote and co-directed). The following night she’s starring in Mary Bronstein’s Yeast as a “maddeningly oblivious, tyrannical and emotionally stunted young woman.” The Chronicle’s Spencer Parsons talked to Gerwig on the eve of her Austin takeover and found that success hasn’t spoiled her yet. “I still haven't figured out how to make money out of this, but it's more of my life, and it's real, and it's great. Now I think, yeah, it's not impossible, but you've also got to be pragmatic. I'm smarter now about how I earn my money in New York, having a job, and even if I can't fully support myself doing this, I can still do it if I want to, and that's great.”

The issue also contains interviews with Elvis Mitchell, who discusses his documentary The Black List, Crawford director David Modigliani, and the ever-popular Zellner Brothers, who sum up the festival’s appeal perfectly: “South by Southwest takes place during the best time of year, which gives visitors an interesting misconception that Austin's always really pleasant and wonderful to live in [laughs]. Sure the weather is perfect today, but in two months it's going to be hell. But they won't ever experience that.”

The Five Most Intriguing SXSW Trailers: Documentaries

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:30:00 GMT

The 2008 SXSW Film Festival kicks off a week from tomorrow, and naturally the Screengrab will be your go-to source for wall-to-wall coverage. We're whetting our appetites by browsing through the trailers for the official selections and making a checklist of can't-miss screenings. Tune in tomorrow for the five most intriguing narrative films; for now, here are the documentaries that have our attention.

Crawford

In 2005, I went to Crawford, Texas for a wedding. This was at the height of "Camp Casey," the makeshift protest community that grew up around Cindy Sheehan and spent the summer heckling the vacationing president. Looking around at the nondescript one-traffic-light town in the ass-end of nowhere, I wondered why Bush would move there on purpose, when he could be spending his considerable leisure time kicking back in Kennebunkport, Maine. Apparently the townspeople of Crawford have wondered the same thing:

Super High Me

They drug test us once a week here at the Screengrab, so I wouldn't know anything about the marijuana or "pot grass" as I believe you kids call it. But apparently comedian Doug Benson knows quite a bit about it; he was named High Times magazine's Stoner of the Year in 2006, and now he's following in the footsteps of Morgan Spurlock by smoking "medical marijuana" for 30 straight days. Sounds like more fun than eating a month's worth of Egg McMuffins. Not that we'd know, of course!

Dreams With Sharp Teeth

Here at the Screengrab, you don't have to tell us that Harlan Ellison still has his edge; we found out firsthand. So we're very much looking forward to this portrait of the world-renowned author, and we're not just saying that to get on his good side! Although we are sort of wondering what Robin Williams is doing in this thing.

Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie

Bigfoot is back, baby! The star of countless cheapo creature features and pseudo-documentaries of the 70s has been spotted in such recent fare as Strange Wilderness, The Sasquatch Dumpling Gang and The Wild Man of Navidad. This documentary from first-time director Jay Delaney follows a pair of amateur Bigfoot hunters whose cryptozoological quest provides "a source of hope and meaning that transcend the harsh realities of life in a dying steel town."

Shine a Light

Next to organized crime, rock and roll is Martin Scorsese's favorite subject – and who's to say there's no overlap between the two? An editor on Woodstock, Scorsese made one of the great rock movies of the 70s in The Last Waltz, and presided over the definitive Bob Dylan bio with No Direction Home. Now he shines his light on the Rolling Stones – although if this trailer is any indication, Marty himself is at least a co-star. Ironically enough, early word indicates this is one Scorsese movie that doesn't feature "Gimme Shelter" on the soundtrack.