4/12/08: The Upper Deck

After slugging my way through the morning, sleeping through the Camper Scamper 10K (technically, I didn’t really sleep through the race; I woke up, in Euless, ten minutes before the race started in Dallas) I planned on doing and then lounging around and watching a couple of DVDs (“Fast Food Nation” and “The Oh In Ohio”), I finally got my ass in gear and starting doing stuff on Saturday, namely getting something to eat (Bagelstein’s – Royal and Preston in Dallas), bumming around Border’s while digesting, and then running five miles on the Katy Trail. Which reignited my appetite and after cruising around Dallas trying to decide where to eat, I decided to delay the decision by driving back to the burbs. Which is how I eventually wound up at The Upper Deck, a sports bar on Trinity Boulevard in Ft. Worth, but that weird long arm of Ft. Worth that most people don’t think of as Ft. Worth, which is why a lot of people apparently think the place is in Euless.

The Upper Deck used to be O’Dwyers and then was closed for a time; it opened under new ownership and its new name sometime last spring or early summer, I think. They also built a deck overlooking Trinity Boulevard; I’m assuming this was done to allow them to handle larger crowds because I never heard of people gushing about how scenic Trinity Boulevard is and wondering where they could go to get a decent view. I’m not sure how long O’Dwyers was around but however long it was, I never went there and I had the same streak going with the Upper Deck until Saturday.

While there I had a burger, chili cheese tater tots, and three pints of Shiner Bock. The burger was pretty good and I like their pricing system – the burger is $6.95 and there are all sorts of things – cheese, mushrooms, onions – you can add on free although the more extravagent garnishes (i.e., bacon) cost extra.
The chili cheese tater tots were not that great mostly because of too much mediocre cheese but that was probably actually a good thing; the burger came with fries so as it was I had more food than I really needed.
The Shiner Bock was as tasty as Shiner Bock usually is, which is tasty enough to be my beer of choice when I’m having more than none and it’s available and I’m not trying something different just for the hell of it.

The ambience of the place was laid back wanna-be dive bar but to really be a dive bar you need to have some history, or at least furnishings that look like they might have seen some history. I was sitting in a room off to the side of the entrance; it had booths and tables, flat panel televisions showing the Rangers game, a couple of screens showing NTN trivia, and a couple of couches at one end. From where I was sitting I had a view of the bar, which is directly ahead when you walk through the door. The room I was in was off to the left; there was another room off to the right that I think was more of a game room, but I didn’t really check it out so I can’t say for sure.

AFI Dallas: Shorts Awards

For a short film to be taken seriously for awards at AFI Dallas, the evidence suggests that it’s best to be serious: the winners featured beatings, smuggling, a shooting, a stabbing, some dead and dismembered fairies, and, in the lightest piece, death by pie. Of course, the awards were purportedly difficult to decide because all the shorts were ‘amazing’; I saw nearly all the shorts in the festival and while I saw more amazing shorts than I did sucky ones, and while I wouldn’t put any of the winners in the sucky class, I’d put the vast majority of the shorts I saw, including all the ones included in the winners’ compilation, somewhere between those two extremes. Then again, none of the ones I thought were amazing won anything and all the ones that won I thought were good but not great (I didn’t think any were the best in their respective programs) so what the hell do I know?

The Grand Jury winner was “The Second Line” which was one dude’s crappy day – crappier than usual, even – in a Katrina FEMA camp and a flood-ravaged New Orleans neighborhood. Honorable mention went to “A Catalog of Anticipation,” about a girl whose collection of dead things comes to include the aforementioned fairies. Two other shorts, “Bongo Bong” and “The Object”, received a special directing mention. “The Object” was most notable for being in English, with English subtitles – and they were helpful. Both these shorts were not shown in the winners’ compilation which was too bad, because I liked them better than any of the ones they did show. Which isn’t meant to be a knock on the shorts that were shown – both of these were inventively entertaining.

The student award went to “The Vulnerable Ones”, which is about a father-and-son relationship but whose plot seems to involve smuggling. In Africa. But with little violence – the son gets slapped near the beginning of the film and the father gets slapped near the end. “A Day’s Work”, about the eventually violent interactions between three immigrant day laborers and the family that hires them to help them move, won honorable mention and also won the audience award.

I liked the various shorts programs, and I saw all but the documentaries and the Booker T. Washington showcase, but I was disappointed by the winners. I thought they were all safe choices – earnest, serious projects carefully snipped from today’s headlines. Well, that last part was mostly true of “The Second Line” and “A Day’s Work” but none of the winners really rocked the screen. At best, they folkrocked the screen but really they were more like early seventies singer-songwriters of shorts. More John Prine, say, than John Denver but still.

One baseless fear I had was that this would be a tough ticket. Turns out, not so much – the theater was the smaller of the two they had at the Angelika and it wasn’t full. I’d say it was maybe two-thirds full although that was partially because all of the winning filmmakers had already left town.

AFI Dallas: Fat Wan Walking

Steve Vaught is a mess. His thirteen-month walk across the United States was also a mess. It would be a rare filmmaker who could sculpt a coherent tale out of the diverse, sometimes conflicting stories Vaught and his odyssey encompass; unfortunately for Vaught and for us neither P.J. Bagley nor David Mollering are that filmmaker, and as a result “Fat Man Walking” is also a mess.

My uneducated guess is that the filmmakers suffered from three main problems: too little money, too little experience, and too much material. Steve Vaught is a morbidly obese, clinically depressed dude from San Diego who starts walking across the country with an 85-pound backpack and a plethora of personal issues, such as uncontrollable anger and guilt from having killed two elderly pedestrians in an automobile accident. Before setting out he sets up a website and finagles free gear from local stores in exchange for website ads. Over the course of his journey, which will take over a year partially because of trips back to California and breakdowns enroute, he becomes a minor media sensation with appearances on “Today” and “Oprah”. He doesn’t always seem too pleased by all this attention, particularly when the attention turns critical or hostile. He also gets a lucrative book deal but that creates its own problems; his ghostwriter says Vaught’s journal entries are ‘boring’ and ‘pedantic’, and Vaught tells his ghostwriter, “It’s a good thing you’re not within choking distance.”

During the course of the film we see Steve hanging out in hotel rooms more than we actually see him walking. Apparently he tended to walk less when the film crew was around because he had people to hang out with; when he was by himself there was nothing to do but walk. The documentary dudes began to suspect that Steve was fudging the miles he was reporting when they weren’t around – he walked eighteen miles in one day just to prove that he could do it. We don’t see one of the crucial events of the journey – Steve throwing his antidepression medicine down a storm drain – but we do see what is probably one of the results of that decision – Steve exploding in anger and throwing his cell phone against the wall when P. J. Bagley asks him if he ever sees the glass as half full.

It’s a redeeming moment in the film, a sign that, despite the glare-filled camera shots and misspelled titles and underdeveloped themes, these guys are not talentless hacks, that they are capable of asking insightful questions and eliciting a visceral response. These moments are rare, though; I felt like I had a better grasp of the facts of the journey before seeing the film than I did afterward. I think that if if someone who had never heard of the Fat Wan Walking saw the movie, they’d walk out feeling like they had just sat through a stranger’s home movies, too many of which were shot by the drunk guy at the party. They’d also come out with at least one question for Steve Vaught: Do you ever see the glass as half full?