AFF Diary: Muskrat Lovely, The Outdoorsmen

I like to get all organized about a film festival. I print a list of what I want to see and when and where. Sometimes I have more than one choice in a time slot so I can decide later, but usually I have a firm choice for every time slot. For Austin Film Festival (AFF) this year, I picked out films to see as well as a few panels and events during the conference. AFF holds a conference during the day and then shows films at night.

For Thursday, I decided that the movies I would see that night would be Going Through Splat, a documentary about screenwriter Stewart Stern, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. I picked up my badge and other registration goodies, then against my better judgment, decided to drop in at the opening night party at Oslo. As I suspected, it turned out to be what I call a Black Hole of Calcutta party (I totally swiped the name from The Tall Guy)—a huge crowd of people crammed into a smaller venue. This kind of party is only fun if you know most of the people there and if you can tolerate an insane amount of noise. I made one circuit through the packed room, saw no one I knew, and slipped away.

The big movie on opening night of Austin Film Festival was Shopgirl, with Jason Schwartzman and Claire Danes in attendance. The lines to get into the Paramount Theater were unbelievable. I was very happy to get to the Stephen F. Austin for Going Through Splat and join a group of maybe a half-dozen people in line. However, I didn't pick quite as intelligently as I had thought. Turned out something was wrong with the movie media and despite valiant efforts from the film festival guys, the screening had to be cancelled. Well, these things happen at all film festivals. It was still early enough for me to try to slip into Shopgirl, but I knew I'd end up in a crummy seat and besides, I remembered not liking the book very much.

Fortunately, I was able to walk over to the Hideout in time to catch Muskrat Lovely, which is only about an hour long. I had never seen a movie at The Hideout before. For those of you who don't know Austin, The Hideout is a coffeeshop with a couple of performance areas, including a small theater that seats 75. (Also, they make wonderful milkshakes.) It was probably a good thing for Muskrat Lovely that the other screening had been cancelled, because it added four people to an audience of maybe a half-dozen.

Muskrat Lovely turned out to be a pleasant little surprise, a well-made documentary about a small town in Maryland that holds a beauty pageant and a muskrat-skinning contest at the same time every year. The documentary alternates between the Miss Outdoors contestants as they prepare for the big day, and a hsitory about how the local economy has depended on muskrats.

One difficulty I had in watching Muskrat Lovely is that Christopher Guest has spoiled hometown documentaries like this for many of us. You hear people going on at length about how to remove the musk from a skinned muskrat and it seems too much like fiction. At any moment you expect Fred Willard to show up.

Fortunately, a sincere and touching story shines through, the story of the high-school girls all preparing for the pageant, without any crazy backstabbing histrionics or other dramatics that would surely occur if this were a fictitious narrative, such as Drop Dead Gorgeous. Yes, one of the girls does skin a muskrat (which she blowdries beforehand so it looks pretty) as part of her talent act, but the movie gives us a chance to see these girls as real and not something to mock.

Another difficulty for me was that the girls looked so similar in many ways that it was difficult to tell them apart. They even had similar names, including two Stephanies and a Tiffany. However, we can't blame the filmmakers for the town's demographic makeup.

Unfortunately, director Amy Nicholson wasn't at the Thursday night screening, but she will be attending the Sunday screening of this movie. Muskrat Lovely is definitely worth a look, and the muskrat-skinning scenes are carefully shot so they are not too graphic. I hope the documentary gets a larger audience on Sunday; it certainly deserves it.

After Muskrat Lovely, I was supposed to stroll over to the Paramount for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. However, the next movie at the Hideout started at 9:30, whereas if I went to see the Shane Black film, I would have to wait another hour. Plus, I figured I would have a chance to see it in theaters eventually, whereas I would be much less likely to get another opportunity to see the documentary at The Hideout, The Outdoorsmen: Blood, Sweat, and Beers. 

We were really lucky to have the director, Scott Allen Perry, in the theater with us. Not just because of the standard Q&A afterwards, but because he realized as soon as the movie started that it was being projected in the wrong aspect ratio. He got up on a chair himself, borrowed a cell phone to use for a flashlight, and tinkered with the projector until he was able to adjust the aspect ratio. This is why I like seeing the smaller movies in smaller theaters. Would Claire Danes and Jason Schwartzman have fixed a projector?

The Outdoorsmen provided a terrific contrast to Muskrat Lovely. Both were about small-town or small-group traditions: in this case, a group of guys who grew up together and started an annual weekend competition in the woods outside Seattle, in which the guys combine beer (lots of beer) and feats of athletic prowess. Both films focused on activities that fell into traditional gender roles: the beauty pageant for the high-school girls, and the beer-and-camping "no wives" weekend for the guys. The guys' weekend sounded more fun to me, except for the amount of beer.

Because, I mean, these guys drink a whole lot of beer: the tally Perry gave for the weekend was 38 cases. It's all weak stuff like Michelob and Bud Lite, and a lot of the beer foams up a lot or rolls down someone's face while they're trying to pound the can ... still, that's a lot of beer for a dozen or so guys. During most of the film, they aren't drinking the beer for fun; they're drinking it to win. The beer drinking is part of most of the competitive events -- not the hatchet toss, fortunately, but there were a lot of races in which competitors had to stop at some point to drink a beer and then continue.

I didn't get the extreme sense of competition the guys had: they were all determined to win. Sure, they're having fun, but they say stuff like "Why would I want to be a loser? I want to be a winner." It reminded me at times of the rival coach in The Bad News Bears (either version), except that this wasn't meant to be over the top. I don't think this is inherently some kind of gender gap, either, because I can't imagine most of the guys I know acting like that. Well, that's not true. I can totally imagine the guys I used to work with being in this documentary, but not most of the guys I know socially.

My favorite part of The Outdoorsmen was the "Blind Man's Beer" competition. The filmmakers chose to show a lot of it so you know they had to like it too. Two guys were put in a wide rope-enclosed circle, wearing dark goggles to block their sight, and had to find four cans of beer strewn throughout the circle. After they found the beer, they had to chug them. Watching these guys scrabble around blindly in search of the beer cans was hilarious.

Again, I had the problem I had with Muskrat Lovely: these guys look a lot alike and it was hard for me to remember who was who. And I disliked the implication that this was "all about being a man"—that this is the kind of event a woman wouldn't like to do, or that a woman would not be able to do. These guys all know each other and are comfortable with each other, and perhaps it makes sense to them to keep their weekend tradition male-only, but I could see a similar successful weekend with a co-ed group that didn't care about gender roles quite so much.

After the movie, Scott Perry talked with the audience a bit. He said it took a lot of convincing to get the guys to agree to being filmed. He's hoping to make a narrative feature based on the documentary; can't you see Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson out in the woods tossing logs and tossing back beers together?

Chris of Blue Glow posted an excellent interview with Perry that I unfortunately didn't read until after I saw the movie; I had no idea Perry was from Lafayette, Louisiana, since the documentary was shot in Washington state. The movie didn't have enough food in it to have been made by a South Louisianian. I suppose the beer more than made up for it.

The Outdoorsmen is playing again at AFF on Tuesday night ... at the IMAX theater, of all places. I think this would be a great movie to tie in with an event, like local chain Alamo Drafthouse often does: something involving a lot of beer, naturally.