Because I used to make a (meager) living as a driver, I can appreciate what the folks who drive "the big rigs" go through- especially in this country, where things like our current economic Depression make it exceedingly more difficult to make a living behind the wheel. As a cab driver, I was forced to pay for my own gas every time I got behind the wheel. (College kids, who thought it was funny, would "jump and run" from time to time- never knowing (or caring) that the only person they were really hurting were the drivers; the company itself never lost money on a bail-out: the driver owed half of every fare metered, as well as a full tank of gas at the end of the night...) This past year, doing an on-going comic strip for a local ad paper (CAPE FEAR COMICS, which can be seen, I'm told, at encorepub.com), I did a panel showing big rigs lined up beneath a DIESEL $4.29 sign at a service station. The caption above the cartoon read: THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. To all the drivers out there: you are not alone.

This movie is a great concept and brings us some great stories and personalities. It's educational and fun to ride with the truckers featured here. Unfortunately, the filmmaker doesn't seem to trust them to make an exciting film by themselves, and so there is near-schizophrenic cutting throughout (the average shot is probably about 3 seconds) and an overpowering amount of music to accompany every moment. It's also shot like an extended episode of Road Rules, with countless montages of road signs and scenery backed by aforementioned beat-heavy rock. I think the movie would actually be half as long if you took out these interludes. Which is a shame, because based on the amount of road footage the film includes, the filmmakers must have spent quite awhile on the road, and have got to have many more interview reels with truckers than they put in the final version. Since the filmmaker himself doesn't have much to say beyond the fact that truckers are good people and trucks are important, it's too bad that he didn't let the truckers say more themselves.

I was interested in the title and description of Big Rig while attending the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, TX. However, I was eager to get the heck out of the seats as soon as Big Rig ended. Big Rig is comprised of several "big rig" drivers who set out to deliver goods driven across the United States. The characters are all wonderful people, however the filmmakers never dug deep into the complexity of them as people. Instead, the story meanders as much as the maps in the film are meant to guide, but never do. At most, we get lost. We - the audience - end up going nowhere and, like the direction of the storytelling, end up somewhere but without direction, location, or plot. Why are we here? Where are we? How did we get here? The storytelling is sloppy and the directors' intent on "humanizing" a group of people who they regard as "overlooked" and "invisible" comes across as unconsciously and irritatingly condescending. The problem here here lies in the perspective of the directors instead of the truck drivers. The directors bring their own naive assumptions about truckers forward and then simply edit the film to confirm those assumptions. Overall, the story lacks any tension, the film is entirely too long (should have been a 15 min sketch), the big question of "So what" is never answered, and the entire film is one piece of see-through propaganda that does nothing to further "enlighten" (as the directors claim) the outside world about big riggers.

Big Rig screened this week at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, TX where it was very well-received. Big Rig is an entertaining and very personnel look at truckers that attempts to counter the many negative stereotypes that Americans have about truckers. The film acts to humanize this group that most Americans know little about. The cinematography of the American landscape as viewed from trucks driving across America is quite beautiful. This is backed up by an entertaining soundtrack. The truckers interviewed are often quirky characters who come off as much smarter and reflective than most of us would expect.In the film, we see a great variety of truckers of different backgrounds, races, personalities, ages, and politics. The film also includes several female truckers and talks about the difficulties that they face in a male-dominated world. The focus is mostly on who the truckers are, why they do what they do, and the difficulties that they face (rising gas prices, time away from their families, government regulation, etc.). The film also tries to show us how crucial and under-appreciated the role of trucking is in our national economy.The only real weakness is that by only telling the story entirely from the truckers' perspective, they provide a portrait that is almost entirely sympathetic and essentially uncritical. They never speak to any consumer advocates or critics of trucking industry, for example. They don't discuss many of the problems that truckers cause for the roads, other motorists, or the environment. They don't really explore much about trucking industry and its faults. The view is more personal and in this case that's mostly a positive. The film is charming and scenic view of an under-appreciated American subculture that is in many ways the unseen backbone of much of the American economy.