I scheduled the Ides of March to be my day of interviews. In the past, I’d mixed interviews in with full days of screenings, peppered throughout the week and, while that can work, quite often you find yourself running late from one appointment to the next. You get frazzled, you get sweaty and you get rundown fast. So, I try to batch process interviews; get as many in as possible in one day.
With that in mind, I sat down in the lobby of the Driskill Hotel and talked, respectively, to the filmmakers for “Dance With the One,” “Marwencol,” “Citizen Architect” and “Pelada.” A diverse mix of films, for sure, and the personalities that went along with said films were also uniquely interesting, making for a fun time and dynamic that shifted every time a new interview got started.
After the interviews, I made my way to the Paramount for a sold-out screening of “American: The Bill Hicks Story,” which was, appropriately enough, a documentary about comedian Bill Hicks, full of Hicks’s routines and comedy footage which means, simply, that it’s a hard film to f**k up. I mean, lost on where to go? Show more Hicks! Pretty simple. Luckily, the filmmakers kept to that formula, and the story of Bill Hicks, while tragically cut short, kept me smiling and engaged.
The filmmakers did rub me a smidge the wrong way, though, before and after the screening, as they seemed to have this mantra about needing to get Bill Hicks finally appreciated and accepted in America as the legend he is and… I don’t think he’s unappreciated in America. I don’t think I know more than most, and I know who Bill Hicks is (Hell, I didn’t go see the film because it was called “American,” or because of who made it, I went because it was about Bill Hicks; you’d have to have SOME idea of the subject to be drawn into the theater in the first-place, methinks). It’s like, save the mission statement, you made a great movie about a great comedian. Folks’ll see it, they’ll appreciate it. Done and done.
I do want to apologize, though, because I know it seems like I’m not seeing many films (or maybe it seems that way to me), but I know I am. I just know I haven’t fleshed out my thoughts on most of the films I’ve seen. I pray for your patience, as those reviews are coming… and then they’ll keep coming, because there are many, many on-deck.
