Hybrid is an elegy for the passing of a man who fell in love early in his life and remained faithful until the day he died, two years past turning one-hundred. Presented in gritty blacks and whites, Monteith McCollum's six-year labour of love memorializing his grandfather Milford Beeghly is a stunning documentary that itself plays as a hybrid of something dreamed-up by Errol Morris and the Brothers Quay. Ostensibly about Beeghly's obsession with finding the perfect hybrid breed of corn as an industrial crop, the film somehow becomes a grand metaphor: for the rough grace of the American way of life; for the lingering death of the agrarian lifestyle; for the difficulties of balancing family with a calling; and even for the true meaning of happiness.

Hybrid avoids the urge to which many documentaries succumb: interjecting narrative morals where the silences of mere humanity more eloquently convey a bounty of lessons. McCollum understands that there is a story in his grandfather's life better told through long takes of the flat land that Beeghly pounded, fondled, sowed, and reaped his entire life. He loved corn's fecundity ("Corn is so alive and unafraid of its sexuality") and did what he could to foster its growth, taking five years at a time to allow his cross-pollinated vegetable "children" to reach a level of purity that would allow for them to replicate eternally and incestually. Beeghly's fixation alienated his late wife and children; daughter Alice, the mother of the filmmaker, is still stung by Beeghly's rejection--you can see it in her eyes. Hybrid touches at the soul of Beeghly when it sits back and observes him hobbling between his rows, fondling the greenery like a proud father. McCollum's own quirky score (that favourably recalls work by neo-classicist quartet The Rachels) gels with the still photography, stop-motion animation, and time-lapse into an ineffable and archetypal gestalt. Incredibly, Hybrid is McCollum's first cinematic offering; it's hard to imagine how he could surpass it. (Showing with Ken Perko's 3-minute short "A Day in the Life.") **** (out of four) | SHOWTIMES: Friday, October 12, 9:15 PM; Sunday, October 14, 4:00 PM

Although it starts out well enough and detours in the middle with a vaguely interesting, if too-brief, look at how it must be for intellectuals to live in a place like Massillon, Ohio, Kenneth A. Carlson's documentary Go Tigers! is a repetitive and unenlightening piece whose attitude alternates between sympathy and scorn. The small town of Massillon, it seems, is obsessed with football--glimpses of other Ohio towns suggest that Massillon's fanatical fervour is perhaps the small-town Ohio norm. (Apocryphal tales suggest that Texas and Nebraska might be worse.) The revelation that rubes like their blood sports served rare is more than a trifle unsurprising; Go Tigers! very gradually amends our rooting for the high school gridiron heroes to succeed, and we start to wish that the team bus would crash and save the world from a couple dozen illiterate, ill-bred, spoiled animals who dangerously reached their peak at the tender age of seventeen--er, nineteen.

The film is populated with the people of Massillon: old and young, demented (such as the town's peculiarly fey strength-coach) and deceptively sane (Ellery Moore, the team's star defensive end, has spent fifteen months in jail for rape), incoherent (Danny Studer, the coach's son and captain of the team whose howling pep talks boil down to obscene idioglossia) and dangerous (rocks through windows and death threats announce the eve of a big rivalry). Carlson pieces Go Tigers! together from endless game footage of the 1999 season, plus scenes of liquor binging and projectile vomiting and increasingly bizarre interviews with townsfolk and players. Garnering tension from a big game at the end of the season against competing burg McKinley, the film also introduces the spectre of a school district funding shortfall that, if not covered by a publicly approved mill levy, might spell the end of Massillon High's sports program.

The fact that almost everyone on the Massillon Tigers was held back a year in junior high so that they'd have an extra year to bulk up in high school stands in stark contrast to the school superintendent's repeated contention that a mill levy must be passed to preserve Massillon's proud educational tradition. Worse, the way that public opinion might fall in regards to the education vote most likely hinges on the outcome of the Tigers-McKinley matches. Go Tigers! is too long with too little to say, but it does do a good job of demonstrating what happens when a group of humans, isolated by and from occupation, education, and ambition, revert to the kind of tribalism that stunts cultural learning--and evolution. Go Tigers! can be seen as a caution against an entire American culture grown fat, brutal, and stupid on their own frugal repast of bread and circus. A sage caveat, no question, though one made once too often and perhaps ultimately unintentionally. *1/2 (out of four) | SHOWTIMES: Friday, October 19, 6:30 PM; Saturday, October 20, 1:15 PM

Arliss Howard's Big Bad Love (or, "Fear and Loathing in Appalachia") is both self-conscious and self-indulgent. It doesn't pass the sniff test in terms of truth and lack of pretense, malodorous with that peculiarly rank stink of hubris. Marking his auteur debut, veteran character actor Howard adapts a collection of Larry Brown short stories wearing three hats (star, director, and writer--co-writer, actually, with brother James), each of which fits uneasily if at all. As a director, Howard tosses so many gimmick shots and narrative tricks (dream sequences, fantasy sequences, magic realism, etc.) at the celluloid wall that it's almost a statistical impossibility for not a one of them to stick--but it happens. Gimmicks like fake voice-over radio news broadcasts are distracting and irritating at the best of times; when overused, as in Big Bad Love, they're screaming bores rather than endearing quirks. As an actor, Big Bad Love is evidently a vanity vehicle for Howard, and it's again something of a marvel that Howard is so consistently ineffective and emotionally flat. Onscreen for about 98% of the time, Howard's exercise in self-love backfires to the extent that every other performer he shares a scene with blows him off the screen. Finally, as screenwriters, the Brothers Howard prove themselves to lack a sense of grace in their symbolism and a sense of coherence in their narrative.

Big Bad Love is about Barlow (Howard), a drunken house painter who is also a frustrated writer. He dreams about his ex-wife Marilyn (Howard's real-life wife Debra Winger) and gets the occasional dressing down from his pageant-veteran mother (an embalmed Angie Dickinson). His best friend Monroe (Paul Le Mat), also a drunken house painter, is in love with funeral home heiress Velma (Rosanna Arquette). Big Bad Love misuses its soundtrack while overusing the overwrought image of a man (boy, woman) running down a dark highway. Big Bad Love is also trailer park Magnolia: too long, too technically cutesy, too sure of its own cleverness and importance, and possessed of that peculiar, polar tension of being too dense about nothing at all. A little girl dies and there's not a wet eye in the house, a man gets a brain injury and we wonder how anyone can tell. There are so many things wrong with Big Bad Love, in fact, that it's easier just to say what's right: Michael Parks as a grizzled old drugstore owner, though perhaps he's only good by comparison. 1/2* (out of four) | SHOWTIMES: Friday, October 19, 7:00 PM; Saturday, October 20, 7:00 PM, 9:30 PM

If a song by Maggie Estep, the original riot grrl, were ever made into a film, it would probably turn out like Ilya Chaiken's Margarita Happy Hour. Profane and invested in the underground scene of late-eighties Greenwich Village and Brooklyn, the film carries on a certain gritty slice-of-street life storytelling tradition with an appropriately grim ethic, though its resolution is curiously upbeat. Margarita Happy Hour's tagline says a lot: "Hipsters, Single Moms, and the Cycles of Life." Essentially about being trapped in a miserable existence with few prospects for improvement, the film spends altogether too much time on extended metaphors concerning the ephemeral knot of existence and broken symbolism involving being isolated and adrift in a sea of sharks.

Zelda (Courtney Cox look-alike Eleanor Hutchins) lives in a house with seven roommates, including her shiftless aspiring writer boyfriend Max (Larry Fessenden). The sole caretaker for her 14-month-old daughter, as her decision not to abort somehow absolves Max from responsibility, Zelda makes some extra money drawing dirty pictures for a stag magazine (whose sleazebag publisher is played by Steve Buscemi's brother, Michael). For fun, Zelda hangs out with her similarly young and encumbered gal pals for the titular margarita happy hour: two cheap hours a day spent dishing, reminiscing, and regretting the choices that have led them all to the overpopulated land of destitute single-momdom. When Natali (Holly Ramos), an old friend recovering from a heroin overdose, moves into the house/commune, however, she proves to be the catalyst for all the margarita happy hour-ites to re-examine the dreams and aspirations of their youth that have fallen by the wayside.

Margarita Happy Hour looks so awful in that trés vérité way that it could, save for a tacked-on dream sequence at the end, qualify as a dogme95 film. The grimy image compliments the performances, each of which successfully conveys the slack-jawed burnout patois of the lower class bohemian counterculture smothering in the heart of the Big Apple. Unfortunately, the often incisive script (also by director Chaiken) tries too hard to make a statement with an interminable, exhausted finale. The film's apocalyptic urban setting and unrelentingly icy zeitgeist is message enough without a triumphant closing shot of Zelda defiant, staring pensively into an unknown, but hopeful, future. Bleh. **1/2 (out of four) | SHOWTIMES: Friday, October 12, 7:00 PM; Sunday, October 14, 6:45 PM, 9:30 PM; Friday, October 19, 7:00 PM

Though John Dunne clarified that "no man is an island, entire of itself," for all cinematic intents and purposes, Ousmane Sembene is the whole of the Dark Continent. Now seventy-three years old, the African auteur presents Faat Kiné ("Aunt Kiné"), a wonderful film resplendent with Sembene's unaffected anti-style and even-handed approach to thorny issues of the ails--new (AIDS) and old (neo-colonialism, violent misogyny)--festering at the core of the modern African sensibility, stunting its growth as surely as the murderous European invasions of a century ago. Faat Kiné is Sembene's sunniest piece, defining a trend for 2001 when one considers the return of another legendary, septuagenarian filmmaker: Jacques Rivette's effervescent Va Savoir. But although Va Savoir and Faat Kiné share strong and opinionated female protagonists and sweet love story endings, Rivette (eternally) grapples with the absurdism of identity; Sembene's demons are rooted in the absurd notion of a people divided by damning traditions and crippling prejudice.