Movies

AUSTIN – It's not an election year, but you wouldn't know it by looking at the South by Southwest film slate. You can't look at a screen down here without finding someone – a rambunctious granny, an action movie star, two guys names Bush and Kerry – running for office. It's almost enough to make you launch an exploratory committee.

Or, as festival director Matt Dentler said: "I can't help but think everyone's appetite is being prepared for the presidential race."

First out of the gates Friday night was the world premiere of Running With Arnold, a scathing documentary on California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that plays like a political version of VH1's Behind the Music. "Sex! Drugs! Gary Coleman! Coming up right after this."

There's plenty about the 2003 California recall election and the Guvenator to raise eyebrows, including Gropegate and the time-honored tradition of bashing special interests during your campaign only to bow at their coffers when the time comes. Director Dan Cox highlights each, as well as the candidate's success in turning his campaign events into carefully controlled Hollywood press junkets.

Still, you have to wonder when almost half of the onscreen "sources" in a political documentary are comedians – and when the subject is linked via editing to Mussolini and Hitler.

During his Q&A, Mr. Cox expressed surprise that Mr. Schwarzenegger and supporters, including Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, didn't want to participate in the film. But Mr. Cox certainly knows better; he's the one who made this engaging hatchet job.

If Running comes out swinging, then Election Day is content to observe. Yet it's the more satisfying of the two – a panoramic view of Nov. 2, 2004, as lived by a dozen vastly different Americans.

The cast includes, among others, an ex-convict voting for the first time in New York; an activist trying to get out the vote on American Indian reservations in the Southwest; and a Republican poll monitor at work in Chicago, a city not well known for Republican politics. (His incongruity makes him one of the film's most compelling and dogged characters).

Election Day is unique largely because it's not about politics so much as the act of voting and what voting means to people of various walks of life and affiliations.

"We tried to stay away from what people typically think of as politics, which would be a particular campaign contest, or the idea of a political agenda, a la Michael Moore," said director Katy Chevigny in an interview Saturday, right before the film's world premiere. "It's not a film of political expediency, like you watch this and then take political action X. We wanted it to be a movie first." Election Day is slated to show on PBS later in the year.

Speaking of Mr. Moore, he's the subject of another doc here, Manufacturing Dissent. It premiered Saturday night, after press time, but its stated goal, according to the festival Web site, is to "separate fact, fiction and legend" regarding the left-leaning filmmaker and to chronicle "the politically supercharged climate in America that has fueled Moore's transition from mere filmmaker to icon of the political left."

Elsewhere at the fest, Run Granny Run tells of a 94-year-old U.S Senate hopeful; and Campaign gets down and dirty with a hotly contested campaign in Kawasaki, Japan.

Our apologies if we missed one. As you may have noticed, it's a pretty crowded field.