Indie Memphis Review: OMG/HaHaHa

As the winner of several special jury awards at Indie Memphis this weekend, OMG/HaHaHa had a warm reception at its hometown festival. The crew and cast are from Memphis. Morgan Jon Fox, the director, has had a film in the fest every year for the past few years. While I’m completely unaware of his other work, as the first film to discover of his, I was moved by his subject and style.

There is a fine balance between experimenting with movie style and just making a piece of crap, and Fox manages to stay primarily on the positive end of things with his look at the on-line generation of today with cuts of Memphis life. His small vignettes of loosely connected friends in a somewhat dogme-95 style introduced many new faces to the silver screen. The connections between online and their outer world all tie into the need to be heard, to be seen, and to be understood. And much like the interactive life they lead, text scrawls across the screen prompting us with reactions from the main storyteller, Derrick.

Derrick, who was my favorite to follow along with his utter charm and classic emo look, youtube’s himself in an attempt to document history, and more like this generation, be history. Just like now anyone can be president, anyone can be famous, and his character epitomizes this dream.

Now, if I didn’t know Memphis, and saw this film, I would find it this amazing cultural town with a fantastically open Gay and Lesbian community. And honestly, there are pockets, but it doesn’t quite capture “Memphis” youth, but really, a more macrocosm of today’s national generation, with struggles of growing up on-line while parents are dying, families are breaking up, friends lose touch. Yes, it was set in Memphis but I could see this applying just about anywhere, set in bedrooms as people youtube and in coffee shops where teens attempt to still reach out to someone who gets them.

Several of the characters are dealing with gay and lesbian issues, including a verbal attack from a homophobic kid. Fox, an open homosexual, said in the Q&A that he has several gay characters in his film because that is the world he lives in. He said someone told him he always plays the gay card in his films and he asked, what is the straight card? How do you make the straight film that is different from everything else out there? And yet, I didn’t find it to be about gay or straight, I thought the characters that were developing relationships were just focused on love with their own set of problems. One of my favorite scenes is this beautiful intimate moment between two men where they hold each other in bed. It was a raw, and lovely sight.

I was with a friend who rolled her eyes after the credits rolled and said her favorite character was the turtle. I, on the other hand, thought it captured the spirit of youth today much the way Kids grasped my generation.  While camera work and the story was different, I still found a lot of similarities: the absence of parents in the film, the angst of the final years of high school and mid-twenty somethings struggling with identity and with a comprehension of the world around them.

Sure, bouncy camera work jars my eyes as much as the next person, but in the context of the film, it works well. And there are moments where the film is like a painting on fire, with perhaps one too many close up of images as indie films are so bound to do. 

Aaron Sorkin may be working on a movie about Facebook, but Morgan Jon Fox already beat him to the punch on capturing today’s online generation.