New to DVD this week: FREELOAD
Daniel Skaggs portrait of modern-day freight train riders debuted at Thin Line earlier this year. It has gone on to screen at Big Sky, DocuWest, Docutah, BendFilm, Sydney Underground, SF Docfest, IFF Boston, and Revelation, among others.
Skaggs spent over a year riding the rails, befriending a loose-knit assemblage of young hobos who, in contrast with their famed forebears, took to boxcars not out of a desire to find gainful employment, but instead to drop out of society. Adopting colorful names like Ponyboy, Blackbird, and Dice that reinforce a fantasy world of no responsibilities, the film’s subjects welcome Skaggs, and, by extension, the viewer, fully into their no-frills existence. This immersion simultaneously highlights the freedom of their fringe lifestyle and reins in any romanticism by exposing its gritty, rough, and often messy underbelly. The film itself evinces a matching rough-hewn nature in both its technical and storytelling aspects. Either unable or unwilling to provide a focused structure, the result is episodic, with too many promising characters inhabiting its barely hour-long running time, and none ever quite being fleshed out enough, making this an intriguing but uneven project as a whole.
what (not) to doc 