Luv Doc Recommends: 'American Beer' Screening

After the dogfucking debauchery of SXSW, it’s probably best that you take a cool-down lap, right? Maybe do a little detox? Banana for breakfast, bean sprouts on your salad, grilled instead of fried? You don’t need a doctor to tell you that all of that promotional beer and the lingering remains of 99 cent tacos from the Jack in the Box drive-through at four in the morning are going to take a while to leach out of your system. In fact, your lower GI tract could probably use a few minutes on the business end of a firehose, but like Communism, what sounds good in theory is often ugly and painful in practice. Take Easter, for instance: toss out all the fuzzy chicks, bunnies, and pretty painted eggs and what you have is essentially a brutal snuff flick – sort of like the one Mel Gibson made only without all the self-righteousness. Flogging, kicking, piercing, scourging, nailing, hanging … all look really exciting in the brochure, but what really sells the Christianity package is the resurrection and eternal life. Lose those add-ons and very likely the penny in your pocket would read, “In Allah We Trust.” Instead, the early Christian spin-doctors painted over all the blood and gore and suffering with the beautiful pastel colors of opportunistically appropriated paganism. Today’s Easter is a soft-focus lens, and its blurry, embryonic symbolism offers the vague hope that life would be perfect if you could just have a do-over at the end – and surely you’d get it right on your second go-round if you weren’t weighed down by a big, squishy, smelly corpse, eh? Sounds awesome. Nobody in heaven ever gets drunk and drives their Chrysler through a day care center or accidentally knocks up their first cousin – at least that’s not what we’re hearing. Then again, who knows? Heaven might be the same sort of crazy clusterfuck we’ve got going on down here, but with a really good publicity department. Maybe what we’re getting is just slick press releases. That’s the beauty of it all, right? You have to decide for yourself. Life on the dirtball is all about choices and consequences. This Sunday the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown (ADD) is screening American Beer, a unique documentary about five New Yorkers who travel the country in search of the most interesting beers. Served along with the screening will be a selection of 15 choice microbrews featured in the film. If you’re a beer lover, this might be heaven, but just in case it’s not, don’t drive the Chrysler. Get a cab.