Day 7

I can feel the end coming. Bittersweet. I do want to go home, though.

Fewer and fewer people are making it to the film screenings.

Today, I went to the Dobie theater by the University of Texas (UT)campus, which is the furthest theater used by the film festival while still being in hailing distance of Austin.

After getting off the free Armadillo shuttle, I reconnoitered the land, locating the theater, scouting out the bus stop, and determining which buses drove by and at what times.

That done, I walked around the UT campus. Nice place. At an hour before the 6 P, I grabbed a sandwich. Then it hit me that I probably could've audited a class, but film was on my mind today.

I caught "Year At Danger." Coming in, I somehow thought it was a feature, but it was actually a documentary shot by a Texan army national guardsman on his 2005 Iraq combat tour. It was very touching to see how he received his orders nine days after getting married and missed his daughter's birth as he protected the division headquarters of his forward operation base.

Needless to say, the filmmaker made it through random gun ambushes, mortar firings, and bombs to return to his family. Seeing the documentary made it clear that conventional forces are nothing more than targets for insurgents and that the Iraqi army was capable of policing its territory--with American supervision.

Intelligence, counterterrorist task forces, and political solutions at the grass roots level are what's needed rather than a military presence to solve the mess in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I see I'm starting to digress...

"Year At Danger" gives people one man's perspective of the current war. It's worth watching.

The next film was "Superheroes" which tells the story of an Iraq vet with physical and psychologial scars who's documented by a college filmmaker. I thought this was a documentary, but it was actually a feature film. I'm afraid I walked out after seeing a third of the film. I felt for the vet, but the film wandered along at a crawl and I got tired of waiting to see what point it would make.

I took a Capital Metro bus back downtown to watch "Poor Boy's Game," starring Danny Glover and sundry unknown actors. A tale of class stuggle, racial tensions and boxing set in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

I almost walked out on this film, too, but I was intrigued just enough by the puzzle of Glover's character help train the male lead for a boxing match against his nephew. The male lead just got out of prison for severely beating the son of Glover's character. Glover's nephew, who happens to be a rising Canadian boxer challenges the male lead, who happens to be a boxer himself, to a match. I did not see the ending coming. It was worth watching, but I feel the film needs to be cut by at least a third. And I thought the Nova Scotia setting was boring, though I can imagine that it was cheap for the filmmakers to work in.

Now as my grip on consciousness loosens, I'm debating whether to catch a film tonight before my Friday morning departure. If I do, I won't stay out late.

I'll see.

Hailing frequencies closed.