This review was originally published during the 2009 SXSW Film Festival. Died Young, Stayed Pretty opens in New York today at the IFC Center. There is also an opening party tonight at the 92Y Tribeca.

I’ve hung out with enough graphic design nerds to know how tedious their fetish can be to the unconverted, and the options for a documentary about rock posters seemed to be either that kind of geekery or hipster hagiography. “Culture is that thing you shovel out of your window in the evening,” interviewee Mike King wisely announces in Died Young, Stayed Pretty; “otherwise, it will drown you.” The danger in such a project is obviously that kind of self-valorizing mythology, when your clique’s self-evident importance is inaccessible (or just stupid-looking) to outsiders. But Eileen Yaghoobian’s documentary is unexpectedly excellent, a bracingly free-form group portrait of people who only recently discovered each other’s existence when the founding of GigPosters.com showed isolated artists they weren’t just working alone in the dark. I’ll have to take Yaghoobian’s word for it that eminently quotable interviewees like Art Charney and Tom Hazelmyer are actually luminaries of the poster world, but this is one entertaining film regardless of how its profiled community receives it .

Yaghoobian lives for tangents, by-ways, one-offs, weird interview interruptions and non sequiturs; this is the most-edited documentary I’ve seen in a while, and one of the best-edited too. She’s amped up the non-linear, multi-dialectical logic of Fast, Cheap & Out Of Control to a faster tempo (if not as strangely affecting, it has an equally eccentric score by Mark Greenberg). Sometimes it’s easy to tell what she’s thinking — a fairly banal comment from one person about how selling your art is like getting fucked goes over random footage of gorillas humping in a zoo cage. Most of the time, blissfully, I don’t know what she’s getting at. I heard a lot in this movie, but I learned almost nothing worth repeating, and that’s a good thing; this works minute-to-minute more than enough.

The presiding spirit of the film might be Charney. Everyone’s met someone like him: a fearsomely auto-didactic aging punk who talks obnoxiously at a ridiculous WPM rate but knows it, and most everything he says is interesting. “I make cultural artifacts,” he announces early on, rejecting any claim to artistry. Over the course of the film, he’ll display a poster for a band called the Von Zippers featuring zippers over the mouths of everyone who annoys him (”David Byrne…such a twit”), announce the smiley face is the finest piece of graphic art of the last 50 years (”the American version of the swastika”) and generally provide excellent copy. Perpetually dyspeptic, hanging on to his coffee cup and proposing with a minimum of irony that everyone should smoke from birth, he’s genially apocalyptic and angrily recondite.

There’s a few real through-lines. A lot of people appear deeply concerned that the spirit of punk is dead; most proclaim it’s already stiff and worry what will “push music forward,” which basically means nothing has changed since 1981. There’s a great deal of breast-beating and concern about whether or not “the scene” is “underground” or has “sold out.” (Austin’s Jay Ryan is unambiguous: the answer has to be underground, because if not, “we’d all be getting sued.”) Dialectics emerge: Tom Hazelmyer complains that anti-Bush posters are no substitute for punk’s true spirit (”‘Oh, Bush is so stupid!’ Jesus, shut up!”), only for Yaghoobian to move on shortly to one Noel Waggener pontificating in Austin’s Sam’s BBQ about oppression; fortunately, everyone soon loses interest and Yaghoobian follows the restaurant’s owner pointing out the autographed posters on the wall.

Yaghoobian gives the fervantly — if often incoherently — liberal artists a chance to wax political way too much, but otherwise most prove to be good company, hard workers minimally possessed by delusions of theoretical grandeur and/or being the cultural movers-and-shakers of the moment. A surprisingly hardheaded thread is how artists choose bands — trading drinks and admission for posters with venues, doing posters for already-sold-out shows because they’ll sell better, worrying about selling their posters at the show because they don’t want to siphon off the band’s merchandise table customers. The wealthier, older ones worry less and have less attachment to any kind of “scene”; all of them are united less by proximity to an alluring music scene than their artistic compulsion and trying to figure out how to make money off it, or if they even should. But it’s really just a blast of a movie, tying together the absolutely most entertaining bits from what appears to be a very conscientious and overwhelming amoun of footage. Yaghoobian ends not with any of her ostensible subjects, but with an angry ice-cream-truck driver talking about how kids these days are no good and when they get together there’s trouble. Yaghoobian shows not just that these kids are good when they get together, but better yet, that you don’t have to drown in culture. You can float on it, and that goes for her movie too, which is as far removed from its subjects’ aesthetic as their posters are from the music.

Youssou N’dour: I Bring What I Love was shown at SXSW in a 35mm print. Director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi announced she’d brought it with her having last shown it in Burkina Faso three weeks ago, and it showed the wear-and-tear of having only one print to go around for a year: it was scratchy during the reel changes. But it was worth it: the doc had slow-burning visual texture and a sense of contextual place I don’t really look for in documentaries anymore. I expect this to be the last time in my life I see a documentary screened in a print at a festival, and it was a good note to go out on. As the story of a controversy, N’Dour takes its time: the first half gives you Senegalese musician superstar N’Dour’s normal routine, the second the fracas around his 2004 album Egypt. Vasarhelyi’s obviously a fan, and she has enough concert footage to show why she was drawn to N’Dour before the drama started, but N’Dour morphs into one of the more nuanced documentaries on modern Islam around.

Not that Vasarhelyi isn’t very clear on what the stakes are, or might initially appear to be: she throws in footage of the Twin Towers on fire to get that out of the way. But part of what’s refreshing about this film is how the whole issue of Islamic terrorism is completely avoided: this is a story about negotiating the norms of Islam in a country where 94% of the population is Sufi Muslim, arguably the most peaceable form. N’Dour is devout, but — until Egypt — his songs were politically didactic, bluntly instructing his listeners to work hard and follow the path of Stephen Biko. (He’s less than revelatory in interviews. Sample quote: “If we save the planet, all of us will benefit.” Yes.) Vasarhelyi has the live concert footage: musically, it’s not precisely my thing, but N’Dour’s a riveting performer, and you get a sense for why he has such a following, even where audiences can’t understand Wolof (hilariously, Robert Christgau shows up to tell him how awesome he is). Then the trouble starts: N’Dour records a series of devotional songs, confusing those who think a political singer shouldn’t come anywhere near devout matters. Worse yet, he releases it during Ramadan.

There’s no riots or violence, but N’Dour’s sales, for once, flatline. He goes abroad and receives passionate approval; he comes home and is torn apart in the papers. Nationalism trumps religion, though: when Egypt wins a Grammy, suddenly he’s a national hero once more, meeting with the president and lecturing schoolchildren. Vasarhelyi mostly avoids all the cliches of filming Africa. No dusty villages or impoverished rural people –– this is the urban Senegal. What Vasarhelyi gets bang-on is the way N’Dour adjusts his self-presentation wherever he is. Visiting his family, he’s in traditional garb, and the same goes when he represents Senegal at foreign concerts; when it doesn’t count, he wears globalized jeans. He contemplates what it means to be Muslim, and what it takes to represent it: is Sufism a recognizable form of Islam to the outside world? Is his devoutness communicated to his audience, and does he have the right to speak on behalf of his religion?

Vasarhelyi’s film is fascinating because it’s not really about N’Dour as a musician; it’s about negotiating internal religious schisms that make the Vatican look like a joke. While N’Dour presents religious songs to a religious country, in Europe and America he presents them to appreciative white audiences who have zero emotional connection or historical attachment to his songs of praise; they’re there for secular musical kicks. On tour, audiences have to meet the devout musicians halfway: remarkably, a pub in Dublin cheerfully ceases drinking so that they can play in an alcohol-free room. So I Bring What I Love is ultimately heartening, showing not just Muslims reconciling with themselves, but with the outside world. Seeing that in action, frankly, is more interesting than anything the film’s ostensible subject has to say, which is just fine.

Documentaries about musicians gravitate towards dysfunction, because that’s how you get drama into documentaries and most musicians — especially in bands, where too much time spent together yields unnatural tensions — seem to be pretty dramatic anyway. So it’s curious that both Anvil!: The Story Of Anvil and Iron Maiden: Flight 666 played at SXSW, because they’re about as diametrically opposed as movies about metal bands that’ve lasted over 30 years could be. They’re both love letters, but one has to convince the audience to care; the other is pre-sold.

As for which is better, that’d be Anvil. This is made out of love as much as any sense of “what a story”; the last shot (a post-credits photo of director Sacha Gervasi as 1985’s best-coiffed teen metalhead with his then-favorite band) confirms that it’s a gift from a former teen fan, when music matters most. In the early ’80s Anvil was on track to join Metallica and Anthrax in the upper echelons of commercial success; their hit “Metal on Metal” led to them playing alongside Bon Jovi in 1984 in Japan. But something stopped them, and though Slash, Lemmy, Scott Ian and Lars Ulrich all turn up at the start to testify to Anvil’s lasting importance to metal, none of them have any clue what happened to them or why.

Much of Anvil plays like a companion piece to The Wrestler, with very anachronistic looking dudes trying to do the same thing they loved 30 years ago, when the commercial moment was still there, and still get the same recognition. Instead of one Mickey Rourke, there’s two: Steve “Lips” Kudlow and Robb Reiner. They were nice Toronto boys, both Jewish (Reiner the son of a Holocaust survivor no less) from different worlds: Reiner’s dad encouraged his musical ambitions, Kudlow’s didn’t. But they got together and started rocking out; 35 or so years later, they’re still the best of friends. They’re the only core members left; new members come and go, many of them thrilled to be playing with their childhood idols. Anvil want to bring the rock globally, but it’s hard when Kudlow drives a van for a catering firm and Reiner’s a sandblaster. They have a small, devoted Canadian cult and the inevitable fan strongholds in Japan and Scandinavia, but their worldwide presence is otherwise non-existent. They want to be worldwide touring stars; instead, they’re superstars for a small group of people and schmucks everywhere else. Gervasi follows a European tour (full of elated crowds in the strongholds, disastrous elsewhere), Anvil’s recording sessions with metal legend Chris Tsangarides (their producer for a brief shining moment in the ’80s) and their general failure to return back to the life they had briefly and want again.

There’s a few things to point out right from the top: this is not a movie about the business of being a musician. If you go around the internet, you’ll find vague allusions to “bad business decisions” that stopped Anvil dead in the ’80s; no one in the movie specifies what those might’ve been. Anvil claimed they were badly handled by rapacious indie labels that never paid them, and so now they feel like they have to get signed to a major or stick to self-distribution; clearly no one’s told them about what’s happened in the record business in the last, oh, 15 years or so, or how tiny the chances are of a proudly out-of-step metal band making a major dent in the shrinking market. Speaking of which: Gervasi may love this band, but he’s smart enough to know most people won’t. “Metal on Metal” is a ridiculously catchy song (all together now: “METAL ON METAL/IT’S WHAT I CRAVE/THE LOUDER THE BETTER”), but these are uncompromising metal jams, and I’d imagine that about as many viewers will care for them as care about, say, Yngwie Malmsteen. Hardly any are heard in their entirety; this is about the personalities. Audiences may root for Anvil to regain their touring status, but they probably won’t want to personally be there.

From its premiere at last year’s Sundance, Anvil has been extensively hailed as a real-life Spinal Tap, but it’s sadder than that. Kudlow and Reiner are both family men in every sense, and Kudlow at one point borrows some £13,000 from his sister so that Anvil can record an album “properly” with Tsangarides. The fact that Kudlow announces “Family is important shit, man!’ is apparently an endless source of one-liner hilarity to some people, presumably because the juxtaposition of rote sentiment and blurted profanity is incongruous, but I’m personally kind of touched by Kudlow’s unvarying vernacular; it just makes everything more deeply felt. Anvil is occasionally funny, but it’s mostly sad; it’s also a little slick, but it’s not dishonest. Kudlow and Reiner fight, but at the end of the day they’re family and stand-up guys, trapped by ambitions they don’t really understand how to realize. Someone should give them a crash course in how the industry works now.

As for Iron Maiden: Flight 666: it’s not very surprising it won the Audience Award for best film in the 24 Beats Per Second music category. The world premiere screening had regular attendees way outnumbered by very dedicated dudes (and they were nearly all dudes) in their best Iron Maiden t-shirts — though no one could top the two dudes sitting in the front row, who rocked out like Wayne and Garth to every number, until one of them took off his shirt and twirled it. These guys should be at every screening. The movie itself is 113 minutes long, and probably about 70 of that is concert footage; Maiden fans will get their fix, though I remain unconverted. Iron Maiden is fun for a while: they’re game performers who put on a good show, I have some sympathy for bombastic metal, and I was amused that they even played their infamous musical version of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Still, 70 minutes of Iron Maiden all blurs together and will wear you down.

But what’s fascinating about Flight 666 is how utterly conflict free it is. It’s kind of a cliche that metal bands generally consist of smiley, genial, well-adjusted guys, but Iron Maiden are also clearly a major business: the big hook is that they built a custom plane to tour, and it’s no gimmick. The back half of the plane is for gear, the front for a crew that totals 70 people (!), and having their own plane allows them to do things that would normally be logistically impossible, like tour Australia with ease. In other words, Iron Maiden is a very well-run corporation in everything but name, and watching them genially negotiate their tour with no problems or personality conflicts whatsoever is pretty refreshing. (It was especially apposite since two days later, Metallica hit the music fest, and journalists interviewing them spent more time staring in wonder at Metallica’s huge organization of handlers than actually getting anything worthwhile from the interviews.) Mildly funny and very sympathetic, Flight 666 is, as weird as this sounds, soothingly boring: it’s nice to see a band get along so well and make their money without any fuss.

Peter Gibson is a modest guy in Montreal who didn’t think of himself as an artist when he started spray-painting stencils on the street; he just had inchoate notions about public space and was fueled by a post-9/11 desire to enter what seemed like a new era of discussion — about, seemingly, everything, but never mind; now seemed like the time to get serious. So he took his cardboard stencils out at night, laid them down on the road and spray-painted mischievous additions to Montreal’s roads: turning cross-walks into gigantic shoe-prints or adding zippers to them, even a mysterious “On” button with no obvious function. Non sequiturs were his mode of choice, explicit verbal statements pretty much not on the table. Then he got arrested and was forced to think, seriously, about whether or not he was an artist or just a guy with a weird compulsion.

At any rate, that’s how Alan Kohl’s zippy documentary Roadsworth: Crossing The Line approaches Gibson; it’s one of the most modest artist profiles I’ve seen, and precisely modesty makes it exciting. Gibson doesn’t have a manifesto; he’s against cars, but he’s not sure what he has to add to that conversation. He allows that maybe his work is “raising questions,” but qualifies with “I guess.” He doesn’t think of his stencils as significant: “This is closer to cartoons than it is to high art,” he offers. (Cue the sputtering of 1,000 outraged comix nerds.) He’s not going to tackle heady theoretical questions, because he doesn’t feel intellectually qualified: “I’ve never read Heidegger or, uh, Kant.” This makes Gibson the perfect artist for that genre of SXSW movies we can’t label anymore: bright and funny, but self-consciously hedging around what he’s doing. (As it happens, it sold out its first screening in the underattended, underpromoted SXGlobal section — shunted off to the 70-seat-capacity Hideout — and got an additional screening. So a hit of sorts. SXSW should do much more to promote this slate, which had uniformly stronger selections than any of the other ones I hit up.)

I should probably admit I don’t care about art in general and don’t connect to 99% of it; Gibson (or Roadsworth, his artistic nom-de-plume) is said to be Canada’s answer to Banksy, which only matters to me abstractly. But I got a big kick out of Roadsworth, partially because the unassuming Gibson is good company, and partially because Alan Kohl is a jazzy doc director; together, they made me care about stuff out of my normal routine (rut?). I don’t know what they put in Canada’s proverbial water, but whenever I see one of their documentaries (and it’s always at SXSW) it’s a cut above what the American equivalent — talking heads, still shots, blatantly staged meetings, officious titles — would be. Kohl begins at nightfall: the clouds time-lapse away, the streetlights click in sympathy with the score, and then there’s just one man out on the street, laying down his tools while constantly watching for police surveillance. As it happens, the day after Kohl started shooting, Gibson got arrested, and the whole project became a different movie.

Roadsworth tracks Gibson’s progression from compulsive street annotater by night/waiter by day to professional artist: it’s less interested in what Gibson’s art might signify than what it means to become a pro, which remains a mysterious process to those of us on the outside. While the mechanics of Gibson’s trial — some 53 separate charges of mischief, with a financial penalty (ostensibly for clean-up purposes) attached to each — grind away internally, Gibson has to figure out whether he feels he’s worthy of turning himself into a cause celebre or should just suck up whatever punishment he’s given. He’s invited to France and, for the first time, is forced to work on commission with a deadline; he goes to Amsterdam for the hell of it and gets arrested again. By the time the trial comes around, he’s no longer an unlikely amateur thrust into the spotlight; he’s making a living off the things he had to do illegally to get started.

Kohl likes to perk up footage by animating Gibson’s work, though sometimes he doesn’t seem to realize he’s undercutting his own points: when the citizens of England’s Ashford roundly revile a line of birds flying down an asphalt road, Gibson has them fly off the road and into the sky, a moment of “magic” (I presume) that doesn’t really fit. But this isn’t just a filmed New Yorker profile: it’s important to see Gibson working in real time. Kohl gets the dramatic proportions exactly right: Gibson chooses not to fight the city but take their deal and get to work on commissions for them. He’s bored by questions about whether or not he’s “sold out,” which people actually ask him with a straight face. Yet for all his unassuming nature, Gibson does eventually raise the questions he wanted to raise, even if he couldn’t quite formulate them at the outset: if you’re an anti-establishment artist, do you have to get arrested to get credibility? When you’re “reclaiming” public space, are you really starting a conversation with the city or just doing it for yourself? If it has to be cleaned up, who pays? And what does it mean to call yourself an “artist,” assuming you’re not a deluded art school kid? Roadsworth tackles all those questions, but it never announces itself as doing so; show, not tell. More (American) documentaries should trust their audiences this much.

Being a humorless young man, I’m driven crazy by people who actively seek out bad movies for fun; it seems like that’s a way of avoiding engaging with good art, where the correct response isn’t always obvious. So I was nervous about Best Worst Movie, whose title tells it all. Voted worst film of all time by the normally-none-too-discriminating IMDB users, Troll 2 (Scott Tobias has written about its appeal and cult for his New Cult Canon project) has a bizarre story about people being turned into plants that makes no sense literally or metaphorically, godawful acting and general freefloating incompetence. People love it very much.

I get the appeal — it’s sui generis weirdness that never lets up — but sometimes it bothers me that people indulge in the easy pleasure of celebrating something plainly risible. And yet filmmaker Michael Stephenson makes a case not just for the movie’s appeal, but also the downside of cult filmdom. Best Worst Movie is itself an obvious crowdpleaser that’ll probably find a decent-sized audience, but — fun though it is, and even though the stakes are pretty low, and no dramatic events unfold — it’s actually kind of a downbeat film overall. Stephenson isn’t just a documentarian; he was Troll 2’s child actor. By making this movie, he delves into the appeal of something he’s part of, yet was in no way responsible for the enduring afterlife of.

Stephenson begins with Dr. George Hardy. Hardy is a dentist in the small town of Alexander City, Alabama; he’s on good terms with everyone — even/especially his ex-wife — and is generally a worthy pillar of the community. But in the ’80s, Hardy lived in Salt Lake City and auditioned for Troll 2; he’d always had frustrated dreams of acting. The resulting film was so obviously worthless that Hardy shrugged it off and moved on with his dental life. Years later, New York’s Upright Citizens Brigade got in touch with Hardy and had him attend a projected DVD screening in a room where a big column obstructs the field of vision; no matter, the 300-seat-theater was sold-out many times over, and Hardy discovered, to his fascination, that for a small group of people he was a celebrity. And he began to wonder if there wasn’t some again future for him as an actor.

“Bad food is bad, and bad books are bad,” Cinematical’s Scott Weinberg observes, “but bad movies are not always bad.” Troll 2 fans love it because it’s so staggeringly misconceived that it achieves a weird purity; “you’d have to have a heart of stone not to enjoy it,” Caitlin Crowley (of Boston’s Brattle Theater) says. People’s relationship with Troll 2 is obsessive; no one who’s seen it appears to be just a casual fan. And Hardy grasps the appeal pretty quickly: he understands that this isn’t just another forgettable failed film, and he’s continually gratified when people ask him to re-enact particularly ludicrous moments. Even though people are laughing at the awfulness of his performance, it makes them happier than, perhaps, a good performance would; it hits some kind of pleasure reflex you didn’t know you had. Hardy and Stephenson end up finding their ex-castmates, and almost all are game to re-enact it for others and talk about it; they speak of it in bemused tones, as if they can no more comprehend how they got involved with Troll 2 or how it came about better than anyone else.

But Stephenson also tracks down the film’s Italian director, Claudio Fragasso, who definitely doesn’t get it. He’s proud of his film; it “examines important issues like eating, living and dying,” he explains with infinite complacency. “In Italy we call this a parable.” (What do they call it in other countries?) He knows he’s good; how does he know? “I can direct in all languages.” He’s puzzled that audiences laugh both where he intended they would and even when he didn’t; he’s outright contemptuous of the “actor dogs” who aren’t as proud of the film as he is or take it with the appropriate seriousness. They’re willing to admit they screwed up; he isn’t. He doesn’t understand that the film’s meaning is no longer the one he created for it, and he sours the mood whenever he shows up. The person most responsible for the film is the one with the least understanding of how it works.

Another person who doesn’t really seem to understand what’s going on is actress Margo Prey, who appears seriously deluded about what kind of movie she made and who enjoys it: “You compare our movie to a Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy movie, and it fits right in.” Because it’s “about people.” If Prey (who appears generally troubled) is one kind of depressing, Hardy’s a decent man who eventually burns out on his newly discovered fame: some people may confess that they’ve seen the film 45+ times, but Hardy gets tired of delivering his signature lines after 20 repetitions and goes back to small-town life. And so, if Stephenson doesn’t figure out what the limitations of the so-bad-it’s-great genre are (or the limitations of an overwhelming enthusiasm for that kind of thing), he does a great job of tracing the way culture works where the gap between what was intended and how the public responded grows too large. That he manages to also convey the lives and paint affecting portraits of a half-dozen people unscathed but amused by the movie they were in that one summer — Hardy’s ambivalence is accentuated by aging actor Rombert Ormsby’s confession “Mostly I’ve wasted my life” —  is a bonus. Best Worst Movie is a classically constructed narrative doc, but it doesn’t pump up the drama through editing or even really have a story. Something slightly less than a celebration and more of a group photo, Best Worst Movie does something really compelling out of the basic elements of camp.

It’s heartening that 45365 won Best Documentary at SXSW; Severe Clear is ultimately stronger, but 45365 is the only doc I saw that took any formal risks. The first five minutes made me think I was looking at the doc of the year, let alone the fest.

First the opening shot, repeated several times, a stream of text and colors passing by illegibly fast. (I finally figured out it was an extreme close-up of a train passing by on the third go-round.) Then we’re in an empty theater with a man playing trumpet for no one, which is downright Lynchian. What comes next is showy but dazzling: using the local radio station as an audio link, we go from the station’s extremely efficient DJ to a cop driving along listening, cuting out of the car to zoom into the valley below where the high school football team is practicing as they’re being discussed on the radio, cuts back to the station, cuts to the fair that’s now being discussed, etc. ad infinitum.

Safe to say there’s a lot of formal control here; for their feature doc debut, Bill and Turner Ross appear to have never put themselves in a situation where they couldn’t figure out the most elegant shot in about five seconds flat (although they’re mostly skeptical of and avoid the outright lyrical). And yet, throughout this aesthetically admirable movie, I couldn’t figure out the thematic point; I kept waiting for something revelatory, something that would get me inside either the people on display or the town’s vibe. Instead, all I can tell you is that Sidney, OH (45365) is a nice, small Midwestern town, where everything that stereotypically implies — and nothing more — is firmly set in place.

In a lot of ways I really admire what the Rosses have done here, which is always err on the side of understatement; no button-pushing interviews where they wait for people to weep, no powerhouse confrontations, no uplifting redemption sagas. They actively seek out fragmented snippets of banality, and they’re not going to push anyone into situations or questions that would yield more dramatic footage. If a gregarious ex-alcoholic wants to freely share tales of his criminal past, that’s cool; if a reticent high school girl can’t offer up anything more than generic teen breakup conversations on her cell phone, they’ll take that too. However much people offer on their own is fine; the only thing they’re interested in imposing themselves on is the structure, which is deliberately counter-narrative. People get arrested and never appear again; story threads are dropped with abandon. (One that isn’t dropped is the re-election of local judge Don Luce, one of the few people who gets a full name assigned to him. Luce treats the election with grim professionalism; hanging out with this taciturn, reserved man really doesn’t prove anything.) While I admired the film’s elegance — pretty much every frame would make a terrific still — I was still waiting for the Rosses to use their understatement to sneak up some kind of point, whether elegiac or dystopian.

They never did. There are some stand-out sequences: Halloween night, with tracking shots down the sidewalks of Sidney, sent an E.T.-esque chill down my spine. I was never bored. But in refusing to force a narrative, the Rosses don’t convey the emotional tenor of what’s happening. Generally, when you make a documentary about small-town America, filmmakers strive mightily to prove to the (inevitably urbanite) festival crowd that life in Middle America is richer, stranger and more complicated than you’d initially assume (see SXSW companion Best Worst Movie’s portrait of Alexander City, Alabama). 45365 seems to want to prove the opposite — that life in one small midwestern town is generically interchangeable with anywhere else in the area, that the people remain static over the years in preordained trajectories — which is perverse, and surely unintentional. But what else can I think about this cast of characters? A blonde high school girl, inoffensively somber and reserved, but still vacantly fixated on the usual high school drama of over-negotiated first relationships whenever she does talk; the men for whom everything inevitably turns to the local high school football team; the bickering couple who steal each other’s pills on a drive around town, bringing tales of small-town addiction to life. None of them are cartoons (OK, except maybe the pill-stealer); they have contours. But they’re such perfectly representative types of a generic small town that it’s hard to know what to learn from this, except maybe that sometimes people and towns really are as boring as they look.

Bizarrely, the movie 45365 reminds me most of is The Straight Story, which I sometimes think is David Lynch’s best, most emotionally expressive movie in lyricizing really simple pleasures. 45365 has the same kind of setting and cast of characters, but it’s all been deliberately flattened; where Lynch drove a helicopter repeatedly into gorgeous flares over crops, the most the Rosses allow themselves are melancholy shots through a car’s windshield driving through town while crappy radio plays. It’s like The Brown Bunny all over again, except instead of Gordon Litefoot and rainy highway drives we get even worse corporate rock and the unidentifiable suburbs. Once more: how in the world should I feel about that?

Sweethearts Of The Prison Rodeo is precisely the kind of documentary SXSW must stop showing. In the dark, pre-mumblecore days, when the festival’s mission was pretty amorphous, SXSW premiered Spellbound. Maybe the most financially successful film ever to launch at SXSW, it came with a dark price: any number of soul-sucking, would-be uplifting documentaries in the “quirky,” “humanist” vein. These pre-fab triumphs of the human spirit find hope and humor in the unlikeliest places, hitting the same tedious narrative beats as the Hollywood narratives they’re theoretically the alternative to, showing that the expected emotions of everyday human life soldier on pretty much everywhere. This is surprising, I guess.

Now: I wouldn’t want to suggest Bradley Beesley is a cynical director or operates in bad faith, because I’ve seen some of his other work and it doesn’t suggest anything of the kind. (Nor am I crazy about slagging on the premieres of small documentaries, but Beesley, if not Morgan Spurlock, has established himself just enough that I think one negative review isn’t going to completely screw things up.) There’s something pleasing about his unlikely desire to document every facet of Oklahoma life; David Gordon Green brought South Carolina to the world, and it would be nice if every state has its champion. Beesley began with 2001’s Okie Noodling, which examined the culture of catching catfish with bare hands, and continued with 2005’s The Fearless Freaks, a surprisingly candid and absorbing biography of Oklahoma City’s favorite musical sons, The Flaming Lips. That didn’t have any real structure and lagged, but it had amazingly candid, revelatory footage of Steven Drodz shooting up heroin, going a long way to explain why the Lips’ optimism was a hard-earned reaction to hard times, not the fun-but-unvaryhing be-in they’ve kind of become. So fine, OK: here’s Oklahoma trilogy, part three.

Sweethearts of the Prison Radio (the title a too-cute Byrds homage) focuses on the prisoners of McAlester, Oklahoma. Darkly mirroring border neighbor Texas (which leads the nation in executions), Oklahoma leads America in incarceration; recidivism rates, unsurprisingly, remain high. It’s also home to one of only two prison rodeos in the world, where inmates compete annually in bizarre and deadly bull-centric competitions. Women were allowed into the competition in 2006, and that’s presumably all it took to get Beesley going. Who needs to probe when you have women with nicknames like Foxie trying to snatch cash off a bull’s horns?

Sweethearts is baseline competent in a way more dispiriting than true failure. When you see low-grade video and hear inaudible sound, you know to walk out: when it looks like someone knows what they’re doing, it takes a little longer to figure out they’re not actually doing anything at all. Beesley’s got the “characters”: women mostly in on drug trafficking charges (Oklahoma’s been hit hard by meth), and good-ol’-boy wardens and supervisors out of another era. He’s got one man and woman for pathos: the woman ran away from her family at 12 and tracks them down with a private detective. Their reunion is predictably tearjerking, but there’s nothing in it you couldn’t predict; watching it made me feel kind of dirty, leaching off years of other people’s pent-up emotions for a quick moment of making the audience bawl. (They did.) There’s also Danny Liles, the only male profiled in depth, up for parole for the first time in some 25 years. Will the salty but lovably candid inmate give us a happy ending with his return to the world or a sad one with his return, once more, behind the walls? Does it make a difference?

Sweethearts is, as they say, a crowd-pleaser. It’s also tedious and finally exasperating. It shouldn’t be news to anyone that the incarcerated are people too, but Beesley (this time, anyway) isn’t into anything not tried, trite and true: he wants women showing off the photos of their kids, who they haven’t seen in years and miss, and that takes care of the tears. Comedy comes easy when you’ve got amateur competitors trying to ride an ad-hoc mechanical bull (simulated with prisoners variously tugging on ropes tied to a suspended saddle) and hitting the ground –– a good fall gets a laugh every time. Beesley doesn’t even seem to know what his movie’s about when it’s not hitting the beats. Is it, in fact, about the female sweethearts? If so, why, and what makes them more compelling than any number of young women in similarly dire straits on the outside? Is male Danny — a 13-year rodeo veteran who’s got the reformed hellraiser’s knack for disarming your reservations with his own bluntness at every turn— actually a more compelling character, and if so why isn’t he the main character (or in the title, for that matter; he gets enough time)? Why is the structure of this movie such a mess, and why do we learn nothing we couldn’t have figured out on our own before showing up?

What Sweethearts knows — what audiences come to be wanly reassured of — is that folks are folks; if we ignore the most obvious differences between them, everyone feels vaguely reassured. It’s remarkable how much interesting stuff that could’ve provided at least some counterpoint is flat-out ignored. What, for example, of the wizened old men — true cowboys at their most iconographic — who come to train the prisoners? What do they think of all this? No answer. What are the implications of Oklahoma’s draconian prison system for the nation’s? No interest. Sweethearts kills your soul: in its search for “common humanity” (whatever that is), it flattens a unique environment into one like any other. Which sucks, because I really do want Beesley to be Oklahoma’s cinematic poet laureate; someone has to.

I’ve hung out with enough graphic design nerds to know how tedious their fetish can be to the unconverted, and the options for a documentary about rock posters seemed to be either that kind of geekery or hipster hagiography. “Culture is that thing you shovel out of your window in the evening,” interviewee Mike King wisely announces in Died Young, Stayed Pretty; “otherwise, it will drown you.” The danger in such a project is obviously that kind of self-valorizing mythology, when your clique’s self-evident importance is inaccessible (or just stupid-looking) to outsiders. But Eileen Yaghoobian’s documentary is unexpectedly excellent, a bracingly free-form group portrait of people who only recently discovered each other’s existence when the founding of GigPosters.com showed isolated artists they weren’t just working alone in the dark. I’ll have to take Yaghoobian’s word for it that eminently quotable interviewees like Art Charney and Tom Hazelmyer are actually luminaries of the poster world, but this is one entertaining film regardless of how its profiled community receives it .

Yaghoobian lives for tangents, by-ways, one-offs, weird interview interruptions and non sequiturs; this is the most-edited documentary I’ve seen in a while, and one of the best-edited too. She’s amped up the non-linear, multi-dialectical logic of Fast, Cheap & Out Of Control to a faster tempo (if not as strangely affecting, it has an equally eccentric score by Mark Greenberg). Sometimes it’s easy to tell what she’s thinking — a fairly banal comment from one person about how selling your art is like getting fucked goes over random footage of gorillas humping in a zoo cage. Most of the time, blissfully, I don’t know what she’s getting at. I heard a lot in this movie, but I learned almost nothing worth repeating, and that’s a good thing; this works minute-to-minute more than enough.

The presiding spirit of the film might be Charney. Everyone’s met someone like him: a fearsomely auto-didactic aging punk who talks obnoxiously at a ridiculous WPM rate but knows it, and most everything he says is interesting. “I make cultural artifacts,” he announces early on, rejecting any claim to artistry. Over the course of the film, he’ll display a poster for a band called the Von Zippers featuring zippers over the mouths of everyone who annoys him (”David Byrne…such a twit”), announce the smiley face is the finest piece of graphic art of the last 50 years (”the American version of the swastika”) and generally provide excellent copy. Perpetually dyspeptic, hanging on to his coffee cup and proposing with a minimum of irony that everyone should smoke from birth, he’s genially apocalyptic and angrily recondite.

There’s a few real through-lines. A lot of people appear deeply concerned that the spirit of punk is dead; most proclaim it’s already stiff and worry what will “push music forward,” which basically means nothing has changed since 1981. There’s a great deal of breast-beating and concern about whether or not “the scene” is “underground” or has “sold out.” (Austin’s Jay Ryan is unambiguous: the answer has to be underground, because if not, “we’d all be getting sued.”) Dialectics emerge: Tom Hazelmyer complains that anti-Bush posters are no substitute for punk’s true spirit (”‘Oh, Bush is so stupid!’ Jesus, shut up!”), only for Yaghoobian to move on shortly to one Noel Waggener pontificating in Austin’s Sam’s BBQ about oppression; fortunately, everyone soon loses interest and Yaghoobian follows the restaurant’s owner pointing out the autographed posters on the wall.

Yaghoobian gives the fervantly — if often incoherently — liberal artists a chance to wax political way too much, but otherwise most prove to be good company, hard workers minimally possessed by delusions of theoretical grandeur and/or being the cultural movers-and-shakers of the moment. A surprisingly hardheaded thread is how artists choose bands — trading drinks and admission for posters with venues, doing posters for already-sold-out shows because they’ll sell better, worrying about selling their posters at the show because they don’t want to siphon off the band’s merchandise table customers. The wealthier, older ones worry less and have less attachment to any kind of “scene”; all of them are united less by proximity to an alluring music scene than their artistic compulsion and trying to figure out how to make money off it, or if they even should. But it’s really just a blast of a movie, tying together the absolutely most entertaining bits from what appears to be a very conscientious and overwhelming amoun of footage. Yaghoobian ends not with any of her ostensible subjects, but with an angry ice-cream-truck driver talking about how kids these days are no good and when they get together there’s trouble. Yaghoobian shows not just that these kids are good when they get together, but better yet, that you don’t have to drown in culture. You can float on it, and that goes for her movie too, which is as far removed from its subjects’ aesthetic as their posters are from the music.

There’s the SXSW of indie premieres, and then there’s the stuff the fanboys come for; the home of Ain’t It Cool News and the Alamo Drafthouse has an understandably enthusiastic place in its slate for midnight gorefests. So relax fanboys: Sam Raimi’s “work-in-progress” screening of May 29’s Drag Me To Hell (missing ambient sound and end credits, but generally looking ready to judge) showed the final product will give you what you want. There will be cartoonish gore and gleeful bad taste; yes, there will be Evil Dead shout-outs. Alison Lohman shall suffer the punishment of beautiful blonde women everywhere: she will atone for her selfishness, and she will do it in a wet t-shirt.

The screening began 40 minutes late with, fittingly, an introduction from Harry Knowles himself. “I don’t know if the thought has gelled in your mind that we’re about to see the new Sam Raimi horror film,” he enthused, and the crowd whooped. Knowles indulged the old pep rally trick of not hearing the crowd and demanding louder cheers; eventually, the enthusiasm petered out, and when Knowles said once more that we would be seeing the NEW SAM RAIMI HORROR FILM, a lone voice retorted “We will.”

Raimi emerged to a standing ovation, did a schticky comic routine of reading the wrong speeches, then brought out brother/co-writer Ivan and producer Grant Curtis, and then it kicked off — to another outstanding round of applause, as Raimi’s got the old-school ’70s Universal horror logo. It’s a cool gesture, but unlike Superbad and Zodiac’s similar resuscitations, it’s no real indication of what the film will actually be like. There’s nothing particularly old-school about it, unless you think Evil Dead is when movies started: still, the logo’s tenuously justified by the inevitable prologue in 1969 Pasadena, with a little boy who’s been hearing voices after stealing a gypsy’s necklace. The title is gleefully literalized; cue bravura title card, and the sound of a capacity theater losing its shit.

Drag Me To Hell is more than a little lazy about the exposition no one will remember because it won’t make a good YouTube clip. Christine (Lohman) is bucking for promotion at her local bank, but she’s competing with slimy newcomer Stu Rubin (Reggie Lee), so when she needs to deny an old lady a loan to prove she can make “tough decisions,” she turns her down. Big mistake: Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver) is waiting in the parking lot, in her alarmingly c.-1973 car, and she’s got her talons sharpened. And sharp implements. And a big fucking brick to throw through the window. In a zippy 15 minutes, Raimi delivers his first major setpiece: a ridiculously brutal face-off, complete with all manner of unexpected fluids and impalements. But Ganush casts her gypsy curse, and then it’s all over for poor Christine, who will be tormented by a camera zooming in onto her face every five minutes and sloooooooooowly tilting diagonal before she’s attacked by sudden loud noises and Satanic flash frames. (Raimi takes great pleasure in scrupulously obeying horror-movie cliches — “conventions,” depending on your POV — then destroying them in a finale as unsurprising in its subversion as it’s supposed to be satisfying.)

Drag Me played like a screening of Evil Dead II for those who already have it memorized; what I personally think seems way less relevant than reporting that people seemed pleased. I found the opening stretches mostly unconvincing: the non-genre scenes are pretty sad, the inter-office rivalries of Christine’s office job too thinly sketched to be as funny as apparently intended, and many of the big scares are of the joy-buzzer variety. As Christine’s boyfriend Clay, Justin Long sucks the air out of pretty much every scene he’s in; presumably hired to add a blatantly comic cue, he’s way too slacked-out to contribute. Lohman, as always, is gorgeous but uncharacteristically generic. Raimi enjoys his goofy comic set-pieces, but a nervous meeting with Clay’s parents is mostly an exercise in oversold comic cliches about class snobbery, which would be fine but the jokes aren’t very funny; the French waiter sequence in Spider-Man 3 was more fun (no, really). But it picks up momentum and inventiveness as it goes along, most notably in an admirably deranged exorcism sequence.

Drag seems a little too easy — its theoretically nervy finale seems like pretty much the only possible endgame given the target audience — but, like a competent band churning out a decent single for an album’s worth of pleasurably nostalgic filler, Raimi gives the fans what they want. Most of the scares are both exactly when you think they are yet surprisingly freaky; Raimi’s got the knack of honing in on Lohman’s face for an excruciating amount of time before letting things kick off, and he times everything to excruciating length. (He also knows how to stage a hectic climax without having it degenerate into unblinking screaming noise, which is nice.) I don’t really know why he thinks it’s so much fun to have characters spout deliberately worn-out lines like “I don’t know what I believe anymore” or what his obsession with goopy fluids is about, but it seems to resonate with the people who’ve been waiting for it longest. That’s good enough, at least for this kind of festival screening. Is this really a Raimi comeback? I don’t think so, but it’s got more than enough to resonate with the converted, if not with newcomers.

Severe Clear is the Iraq documentary I’ve been awaiting conscientiously if not eagerly. There certainly hasn’t been a shortage of retrospective examinations from a position of authority - e.g. the macrocosmic No End In Sight and the microfocused Standard Operating Procedure - or, in lesser quantities, on-the-ground reportage. The best-known of those is probably 2004’s Gunner Palace, which could be politely described - in internet slang - as Epic Fail. Well-intentioned though they were in spending time with soldiers both at rest and patrolling, Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein screwed up by including little you couldn’t have seen on the news - gore and atrocities discreetly off-screen - and also in basic competence, like providing audible sound.

Working from the footage of Marine Mike Scotti, Kristian Fraga does much better. An Afghanistan vet who voluntarily re-enrolled and went over to Iraq in 2003, Scotti took along a camera for documentation and kept a journal with the ultimate purpose of writing a book; the movie’s accordingly divided into titled chapters. Rarely on-camera, Scotti’s personal arc and perspective on the war is kind of beyond the point. There’s no revelations here; from the opening blast of Marine excitement to Scotti’s closing sense that something’s gone wrong, there’s no surprises. What there is is an utter lack of reserve, a jolting immediacy that could’ve come from Walter Hill, but one that never telescopes the war into its own bloodless movie.

Scotti’s portrait of the Marines is unambiguous: “We’re loud, drink too much, fight too much, curse too much,” he announces. “All the cliches are true.” Neither the saints that so endeared Taking Chance to conservatives nor the retarded rednecks of Brian De Palma’s rock-bottom Redacted, the Marines here don’t have any personality except collectively, which is wise: Fraga and Scotti refuse to milk the deaths of individual soldiers for easy pathos. They’re seen in fragments and in voice-overs, profanely exultant; the collective, retaliatory bloodlust for 9/11 colors everything. “People are dying,” one says after an early battle. “This is the coolest thing ever.” News reports frame the soundtrack, but the soldiers are stuck on the ground: sitting in masks wondering if they’re getting gassed, one announces “We just heard that Jennifer Lopez just died back in the States.” They’re conscientious about their job - which, they’re quite clear on, is to kill people, not police Baghdad - and avoiding civilian casualties. Scotti’s division is a good one, bloodthirsty within understandable limits.

There’s footage for every stage of the journey, from the initial weeks aboard a massive carrier to the waiting in Kuwait for a go-ahead to the actual road to Baghdad. Footage naturally changes from the jocular to the jolting, and the brilliance of Scotti’s footage is that, as a veteran soldier, he’s got no qualms about capturing the most brutal stuff. It’s one thing (numbing and monotonous) to hear testimonials from soldiers about how seeing mangled corpses shakes you; it’s another to see them with their skulls half-open, unsurprising but still upsetting. Scotti’s also meticulous about the Marines themselves and the general shittiness of life during wartime: especially during a tactical halt, when the Marines pause on the road while waiting for supplies or god knows what, he’s nerveless about capturing the flies on the corpses, the generally mucousy atmosphere that hits the soldiers with attendant contamination, and even someone shitting into a crate in the middle of the road. This is reportage no one’s dared so far.

Fraga’s editing makes the footage formally, as well as viscerally, meaningful. For our first major digital war, he uses the inherent giltches and noise patterns on the original footage as wipes and dissolves from one moment to the next; the digital grain becomes its own aesthetic, with a night-time rocket attack visible only as an avant-garde exercise in red lines darting Tron-like across blackness; footage veers between the grimly coherent and the disorientingly illegible. At times, Scotti simply has to plunk the camera down as he gets to work and the compositions can be inadvertently arresting: a close up of a cigarette and hand tapping a radio console, people working through a tangle of wires that creates bizarre mise-en-scene.

When they hit Baghdad, Scotti’s shocked to learn that Babylon was real: “I thought this shit only existed in fucking Led Zeppelin songs.” Predictably, when things sour in Baghdad, Scotti starts wondering if the mission’s as justified and righteous as their commander’s motivational speech made it seem. Musing on the battle-field, Scotti notes: “You’ve got to keep it simple out here” to survive. The “out here” is key: if soldiers (and the Marines, to whom the film is unambiguously at least in part a testament) have no choice but to keep their blinders on to complete their mission, that’s what they must do; for those off the battlefield and out of the immediate moment, though, there’s no excuse for not thinking hard about what’s happening. But that’s not Scotti’s problem for much of the film, and Fraga avoids preaching to the anti-war choir: Severe Clear does a remarkable job of erasing what we know now and plunging us back into the immediate initial campaign. Its portrait of the military is unsympathetic and clear-eyed, and the overall film grimly exciting. Severe Clear doesn’t answer any questions, but that means there’s no chance for self-congratulation either.

Robert Blecker is a professor at New York Law School, best-known for being one of the most active public proponents for the death penalty. He’s a retributivist who likes to quote Socrates and the law of Solon when arguing the death penalty isn’t just a judicial but a moral imperative, just retribution for the worst of the worst. Ted Schillinger’s documentary Robert Blecker Wants Me Dead follows Blecker through his tangled relationship with Tennessee death row inmate Daryl Holton.

Having spent hours on death row to document life there — convinced most people would be shocked at what Blecker feels is the obscenity of rapists and murderers playing softball and watching TV while waiting for the end — Blecker became involved with Holton. Holton had killed his four children after they’d been assigned to his ex-wife; his explanation was that he wanted to spare them from a hellish life with their neglectful mother. He also planned to kill his wife’s new lover’s kid, but didn’t and instead promptly turned himself in. Holton had refused to aid his defense at this trial at all, turned down all appeals and appeared to want to die. Blecker was sucked in and kept returning for conversations for the next year-and-a-half; their last interview, the day before Daryl’s execution, couldn’t be filmed.

Schillinger’s doc is shot on what could be kindly called sub-consumer-grade video, which makes it irritating. Nonetheless, it’s the first genuinely troubling and provocative documentary I’ve seen, maybe since Josh Aronson’s Sound And Fury. Blecker does all the work here, constantly questioning every instinct and position he takes on-screen, cross-sectioning himself in articulate real-time — especially after Holton launches a last-minute appeal with the Supreme Court, forcing Blecker to question Holton’s sincerity and why the appeal angers him so much. The film ends on the night of Holton’s execution: on one side pro-death penalty advocates won’t listen to Blecker, who feels that Holton’s death by electric chair (as opposed to lethal injection) is disproportionately cruel to his crime. On the other side, anti-death penalty people keeping vigil want nothing to do with a man who’s opposed to their position. The film ends with remarkable ambivalence, with Blecker literally standing in the dark between two sides. It’s a powerful image, but I wondered if it was misleading; it’s Blecker himself, after all, who invokes the Heisenberg principle on-screen.

So I went downtown to Blecker’s Law School office and talked with him about the film and how it turned out. The tireless Blecker gives meaty, multi-paragraph answers with complete responsiveness, occasionally apologizing for their length. After it was over, he said he was tired of talking about the death penalty; he’s thinking of turning his energies somewhere else. For now, though, we talked about death.

When did Ted Schillinger get in touch with you, and when he approached you with this project, did he tell you about his own views on capital punishment?I met with Bruce Klein, who owns Atlas [Media, the production company]. I have tens of hours of footage and many years in maximum-security death row prisons. I’ve been looking to make — and still am — my own documentaries, so I was looking for an experienced partner that would help shape them. Bruce came down to this office and I showed him footage that I’d shot. About two or three hours in, he cut me off in mid-sentence and said “I’m not interested in making a documentary with you.” I said, “Huh.” He said, “But I am interested in making a documentary about you.” “What?” He said, “Well I think you’re a more interesting story than the guys you’re talking to.” So I was skeptical about that. He said “I have the perfect person to make this documentary,” and that was Ted. We met preliminarily to talk, and his views — to answer your question directly, was I aware of his views on the death penalty? I certainly was, that we didn’t share them. I was also immediately aware of how bright and articulate he was, and how committed he seemed to be to trying to understand the perspective, even if he rejected it. It took 2-3 months of discussion before I agreed to let it happen this way and put off my own plans to make a documentary.

So what’s the documentary you think you got?
It’s a very different documentary. It started out to be about me.

At what point did it become about Daryl?
About our relationship? Maybe it is about Daryl. I mean technically, if you look at the title, Robert Blecker Wants Me Dead, the Me is Daryl. So in that sense, you could argue that the title and movie are about Daryl.

Pretty early on, even before Ted came to terms with Bruce to be the director, I was meeting with Daryl for those four hours, presumably just a few days before he was supposed to be executed. Ted’s not even officially on-board at this point, but he has a sense that this is a very dramatic situation and it’s worth it for him to come down to Tennessee. So we did a two-camera shoot in which I’m shooting Daryl and he’s shooting me shooting Daryl. We didn’t know — well, I never knew anything, because Ted never really consulted with me about how the film was shaping up as he saw it. But we both knew he had guessed right in the sense that when Daryl wasn’t executed — when he got his stay and our relationship continued and ripened and deepened — it became clear that Daryl’s story would play a critical part.

At one point, Daryl warned me: “Don’t turn into Capote on me, where you need me dead in order to finish your documentary.” And the irony is, I never turned into Capote. Ted did, because Ted is an abolitionist against the death penalty, and as a good story, the story can only end one way: Daryl’s gotta die. From my perspective, as I told Daryl in a letter, “I don’t need you dead. It’s an interesting story either way.” It’s either the story of the struggle of a guy who wants to be executed and the system won’t carry through with its threat, or it’s the story of a guy who gets what he wants — or at least when that’s what I felt he wanted.

You seem increasingly ambivalent over the course of the film about Daryl specifically, not your position on the death penalty overall. And the ending is extremely dramatic and has you between those two camps, which works for me, but I’m not sure represents how you felt overall, because that’s where the film ends.
That’s where the film ends. That’s not where I end. It worked as a metaphor, and it was odd that it worked that way. It increasingly reflected an ambivalence after Daryl was dead. I was waiting for the letter from Daryl that I knew he must’ve written to me on death-watch right before he was executed. I used to check my mail every day, waiting for the letter to come. Because he had to have sent it, right? He had to. Well it never came. Never wrote it.

But I sort of discovered a letter to me he did write, in a manila envelope that I had put away and never read, because it was a time we were deeply estranged. He had sent me a report from social services, at the time when his wife had gotten custody of the kids. That report was remarkable, because it talked about all of Daryl’s sacrifices. He’d given up his army career, come home from Saudi Arabia, his wife had abandoned — this doesn’t come through [in the film]. She abandoned the children. The irony in that report is that the recommendation is, “He should be reunited with the children as quickly as possible, but we should be careful because his wife is not reliable and shouldn’t be left alone with the kids.” And so increasingly, after he was dead, a different kind of portrait emerged. I felt distraught that I might have misjudged him and been overly harsh with him. And you said, an ambivalence not about the death penalty, but about Daryl. And you’re quite right. He isn’t the best candidate, from my perspective.

Is this one of those cases you talk about, about how there needs to be less executions and more carefully chosen ones? Did you think Daryl was one of the exceptions?
One of the things I advocate — and this doesn’t come through in the movie — is a higher burden of persuasion in death penalty situations in terms of the emotional. That is, it’s not enough that you’re convinced beyond a lingering doubt that he did it; you have to be convinced to a moral certainty that he deserves it. That’s something greater than proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And if you ask me now if I’m convinced to a moral certainty that Daryl Holton deserved to die, my answer is no. He did it to spare himself from the pain of being apart from his children, but he did love his children. Had it been a truly altruistic killing, had he really killed them under the delusion that he was doing it for their sake, they were better off dead, I wouldn’t on balance think he deserved to die. But he didn’t. So on balance, he deserved to die. I’m convinced beyond a reasonable doubt he deserved to die. I’m not convinced to a moral certainty he deserved to die. And if I really believe in the burden of persuasion I claim to publicly, then I as a juror should vote no.

The thing that struck me watching the movie is that you’re willing to question your own motives before anyone can even ask. So I get a sense of you thinking through all this on-screen. But I wonder if you feel you’ve been presented fairly on-screen.
[Pause] There are no cheap shots. And it’s not spun. Which are remarkable statements to make, given that it’s an abolitionist filmmaker. Ted deserves an enormous amount of credit. I trusted him, I opened up to him, and I knew I was enormously vulnerable to editing. He let me see one rush. Remember the swimming scene in Maine? At one point I was doing a crawl toward the camera, and coming up and over it with my mouth and eyes wide open — it made Jaws look tame. Had he wanted to, he could have of course have included that shot — which made me look like a monster — as a metaphor. Yes, there are moments when I look foolish, when everyone’s bored and I’m babbling on and I look like a jerk — but I am a jerk sometimes, I am foolish sometimes, and that was honest, that was fair. I regret some things that aren’t there. I mean, no film that’s an hour-and-a-half plus could really go all the way. My students are captive audiences for 28 classes, so they get it — although I co-teach it with a leading abolitionist, so they get a balanced perspective, always, because I’m committed to that. You’re right, I do think about it a lot, because I’m a retributivist, not a sadist, and there can be a very small gap, a very significant gap but a very small gap, so you have to be very careful that you don’t turn into a sadist.

What’s missing that you wish was there?
When I first met Daryl, his immediate response when he heard I was a law professor from New York was, “Do you know Jim Liebman?” James Liebman is a Columbia law-school professor who was the chief author of a very famous study — sometimes called the Liebman study, sometimes called the Columbia study — that showed 68% of all death penalties are reversed on appeal in the modern era. Liebman and I debated publicly a few times and discovered that though he’s an abolitionist and I’m a proponent of the death penalty, we have common ground, which is that if you really care about reducing the error rate, you should limit the death penalty only to the worst of the worst. So I knew Liebman, and I told Daryl that and his eyes lit up — the revered James Liebman, from whom he’d learned all his law.

As Daryl faces death, and I’m to meet him with only a few days left, I’m very conflicted, because it seems to me very unfair that — just like I expose my students to both sides — it seemed unfair that mine would be the only voice Daryl would hear, and it would be a voice telling him to die, that he didn’t have a voice telling him to live. So I called up Jim and I said “Jim, there’s this guy Daryl Holton who thinks the world of you. I’ve been interviewing him on death row, and I’ve got some video and I’d like to show it to you. He’s due to die in a few days.” I showed him some clips from Daryl, and then I said to him “Jim, is there anything you’d like to say to Daryl?” He said, “Why, are you going to show him whatever I say?” I said, “Sure.” So I took the camera and turned it on Liebman and he gave a 20-minute talk to Daryl in which he was very dignified, very gentle, in which he said “Daryl, I can’t make your decision. I’m very flattered that you think so highly of me and the treatise [on habeas corpus] I co-authored. I can’t tell you whether to live or die, but I can see your respect for the law. And what I would say to you is, if you really do respect the law, you should appreciate that very much part of the legal process is the appellate process. And if you want to demonstrate your respect for the law, you would do that by appealing and submitting your trial to the judgment of appellate judges as well.” It was just brilliant.

So when the appropriate moment came for Daryl to break for a cigarette and lunch break in our four-hour meeting, I showed him. I said “Daryl, I have something you might want to see” and turned the computer around. How he knew it was Liebman I don’t know, how he saw a picture of him I don’t know. For the next 20 minutes, he just listened and his eyes opened wide. He was visibly moved by it and took the break right afterward. I’m not claiming that’s the reason, but four or five days later he picks up his appeal.

You’ve talked a lot about presenting both sides, and you do this a lot in the movie. When you’re presenting yourself that way in the movie, do you think that helps or hurts your cause?
There’s a common statement that hard cases make bad law, and in some sense, hard cases make difficult polemics. This movie’s not a polemic; this is not my argument for the death penalty. I allowed Ted to follow me around for a year-and-a-half and allowed him to see what I go through. Where there’s something to be said against the position, where you feel something on balance but there are two sides, one of which predominates but the other of which is significant, I let Ted see it. I go through that. I’ve appeared in the media occasionally to argue against the death penalty. The media tends to want you to take a clear position. When I’m interviewed by producers before deciding whether to have me on, they’re looking for a voice to articulate a position clearly. But the death penalty is a very complex issue. So: if this was supposed to be a polemic, then no, I wouldn’t have revealed myself to Ted. I would’ve gotten hired someone to help me make my movie.

But if you knew that the best-case scenario wouldn’t be a polemic for you, why did you take the time and trouble to do it?
Because I didn’t know Daryl was going to become the star! First of all, had Daryl been executed when he was originally scheduled to be executed, this film wouldn’t have been about Daryl principally. I had no idea where this was going. This started out to be about me and the struggle in the academic environment — probably one of 3 or 5% of faculty in northeastern institutions of higher learning who supports the death penalty. I’m just a mainstream American; I agree with about 80% of my fellow citizens about the death penalty. It just began as an opportunity to get my perspective — our perspective — in a way that had never been done before. There have been no documentaries, to the best of my knowledge, ever made, except for abolitionist polemics. So I didn’t know where anything was going. I just wanted an honest portrait. That’s the promise I got from Bruce and Ted, that this would be honest and accurate and there would be nothing inconsistent with your published views and nothing inconsistent with your honest, expressed views. So it seemed a worthwhile thing to do.

Upon its Russian release in 2007, Cargo 200 immediately provoked a national furor. Alexei Balabanov’s grim little movie centers around one Captain Zhurov (Alexei Poluyan), a police officer in 1984’s Soviet Russia who uses his position of authority to essentially institutionalize rape, prisoner beatings and all-round mayhem.  In a typical scene, he tosses the corpse of a girl’s soldier-fiance next to her while she’s chained to a bed and proceeds to read the dead man’s love letters.

When I first saw Cargo 200, I thought it was supposed to be black comedy, but it isn’t; its pitch-perfect production design is part of a whole package designed to check any nostalgia for the departed Soviet era, even if it summons up long-gone discotheques and hairstyles effortlessly. Cargo 200 itself is the code word for the boxes in which dead soldiers are shipped back from Afghanistan, which pretty much sums up the grim tone. Already available through Netflix, Cargo 200 receives a much-deserved if small release January 2; Balabanov’s film is appalling, but it’s also surprisingly elegant.

A few contextual things you may like to know: despite working as an interpreter for two year in the ’80s, Balabanov will only do interviews in Russian, so I spoke with him over the phone in that language. Balabanov is not what you might consider a tactful, soft-spoken guy: in an interview in 2007 with “Novaya Gazeta,” he responded to a question about charges of xenophobia with the terse statement, “In every country there are decent people and there are freaks.” Cargo 200 is his first film to be screened outside of festivals in the US in a decade, since 1997’s Brother, so I’ve included contextual notes as needed.

When did you first come up with the idea for Cargo 200?
I came up with the idea for Cargo 200 a long time ago, after the film River [a 2002 project about a 19th-century leper colony left unfinished after actress Tuiara Svinoboeva died in a road accident during production]. I traveled a lot around the country in 1984-86. I know Siberia and the far north well, and this is based on true things that happened. The only thing I made up when the corpse of the dead soldier is thrown into bed with the girl. In reality, when I served in the army from 1981-83, the boxes with dead soldiers from Afghanistan disappeared all the time. And where they ended up, no one knows. Those kind of discotheques were everywhere then, I went to them. At that time, there were limitations on vodka, so everyone bought imitation vodka.

A lot of American reviews said the movie’s set in 1984 in reference to Orwell’s book.
No. That’s not correct. The truth is, Gorbachev is a thief. There was a famous cotton scandal in Uzbekistan in 1983. Everything that happened connected back clearly to Moscow, and it was all terrifying. And Gorbachev was then the Minister of Agriculture. That’s the whole story. I had 1984 in mind, because this was the last year under Chernenko. After that began changes in the country, right after his death.

The two boys who walk off together at the end are going to become oligarchs, right?
Yes yes yes, these are the people who will start businesses in the future. These are the beginnings of capitalism, and then these people became oligarchs. I don’t love capitalism. I don’t love communism either. I like it when people are honest and decent. Oligarchs are for the most part not decent people because their capital is stolen. The communists, they’re simply terrible people.

Does your film belong to the chernukha genre [a series of films popular during perestroika depicting Soviet life as unpleasantly as possible: 1988's Little Vera et al.]?
In the first place, this is a film without genre. I insist on this. I don’t like chernukha or horror movies. This is a film without genres that absolutely reflects the position of our history in 1984.

In the second place, many people don’t like this film, many people like it. For example, Alexey Zernov the famous director said “We all wanted to make such a film, but we didn’t have enough courage. But Balabanov made it.” It was very pleasant for me to hear his words. It seems to me that this film is honest, truthful and good. There’s no chernukha. In any case, the worst kind of movie is those they say nothing, when people instantly forget if when they watch it.

Did the ban on anyone under 21 seeing it cause you any problems?
Honestly, this is a formality. In reality they let everyone in. For example, I took my children to this movie. I’m not worried about showing it to them: my youngest is 13, my oldest 19. They go to the movie and they’re let in.

I read you were planning to work with Willem Defoe at one point.
I became friends with Willem Defoe at Telluride. He really liked [2002's] War. We walked around and talked. I told him about my idea for a film called The American. When I wrote it, I sent it to him. He read it and said it was very good, but he didn’t see himself in this role. I badgered him about it for a long time, but he refused.

Afterwards we began looking for an American actor and settled on Michael Biehn. We began filming with Biehn in New York, and he was great. Then we moved to Northern Siberia, and he began to drink vodka heavily. We filmed there for three days, then moved to Irkutsk. There all hell broke loose. He drank himself into a stupor. I refused to continue filming, and winter was already passing. He returned to Los Angeles and promised to return the money. He didn’t return anything. We filed a lawsuit in 2003.

Is the lawsuit over?
Of course not. We lost our money and that’s it.

How do you feel about the current state of the Russian film industry?
It’s not very good. Government support has fallen because of the world financial crisis. Has my film Morphia shown up there yet?

No, it’s the first time I’ve heard of it.
You’re calling me from New York?

Yeah.
Well, then you can easily find it at Brighton Beach.

Pirated copies?
Of course. You can find it online easily. It came out right after the premiere. Bad quality, but now there’s a better one. You can find it at Brighton for sure. Morphia is based on the early writings of Mikhail Bulgakov. This was the first screenplay by Sergei Bodrov Jr., who’s sadly dead now.

Do you think people misunderstand Cargo 200 when you show it outside Russia?
I don’t know. I think that 1917, the revolution, everyone understands what that means. All this happens at every step to this day. They kill every day. They show it to us on television every day, and it’s getting worse and worse.