Entries Tagged 'SXSW 2009' | Indie Eye

Entries tagged “SXSW 2009”

Joe Swanberg doesn't stop.

By Alison Willmore on 04/01/2009

Filed under: Festivals

I had a good half-hour talk with Joe Swanberg at SXSW, two days after the world premiere of his latest film "Alexander the Last" and a few days before my laptop hard drive failed, taking with it my audio files and transcripts. I'm slowly getting everything back, and while this interview isn't so timely anymore, I didn't want to let it go, either, since we covered a lot of interesting ground about how the way Joe shoots films is changing, and how he'd like to be, as impossible as it might seem, even more prolific. So here's a selection, with... MORE »

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SXSW 2009: "The Hurt Locker."

By Alison Willmore on 03/25/2009

Filed under: Festivals

"The Hurt Locker" is an action movie, which, given that it's also a movie about the Iraq War, is kind of a revelation. Enough Iraq War films have been made now to enforce the common belief that no one actually wants to watch Iraq War films because they're "depressing." Which they generally are. The war is depressing. The trauma faced by the troops is depressing, the ethical morass of our involvement is depressing, the cost, in dollars and, more importantly, in lives -- depressing. "The Hurt Locker" doesn't sidestep these facts as much as it doesn't engage them at all... MORE »

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SXSW 2009: "Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be the Same."

By Alison Willmore on 03/24/2009

Filed under: Festivals

After watching "Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be the Same," a documentary about an artist preparing for his first New York solo show, I got into a fight. Two of us who'd seen it loved it, others had disliked it, and one insisted it was a travesty of a supposed nonfiction film that had to have been completely complicit and staged. I don't agree, but the more I dwelt on it, the more beside the point it all seemed. Brock Enright is the kind of guy who'd never forget that he's on camera, and who'd act equally outsized whether... MORE »

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"I think my heart's big enough..."

By Alison Willmore on 03/24/2009

Filed under: Watchy

Funny or Die gets all inside mumblecore baseball with this trailer for the nonexistent SXSW 2009 selection "The Dirty Garage," about, apparently, how a pair of childhood friends/brothers clean a garage and have lots of incoherent conversation, accompanied by one of their former flames. Swanberg co-conspirators Kent Osborne and Tipper Newton appear, as do fake quotes from Amy Taubin, Scott Foundas and Manohla Dargis. C'mon, though, an hour and 45 minutes? Realistically, this would run 75 minutes, tops, and that's with the help of an extra slow credit crawl.... MORE »

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SXSW 2009: "We Live in Public."

By Alison Willmore on 03/19/2009

Filed under: Festivals

Josh Harris might just be too good a subject for a film. A dotcom millionaire, Harris was unerringly ahead of his time, seeing promise in the internet before it really existed, focusing on chat at the dawn of services like Prodigy, moving into web-only TV before there was even infrastructure for it, and putting the home life of himself and his girlfriend online 24/7 all the way back in 2001. (The fact that by the end of "We Live in Public" he's been forced to flee to Ethiopia to escape his creditors seems today merely more evidence of forward thinking.)... MORE »

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SXSW 2009: "Observe and Report."

By Alison Willmore on 03/17/2009

Filed under: Festivals

Jody Hill's "Observe and Report" is like a Will Ferrell movie that's been run over by a car again and again until it's warped and unrecognizable. It's still has the rough shape of a feel-good story about a lovable loser, a mall security guard who longs to be a real policeman and who's in love with the bitchy make-up counter girl while failing to see that the sweet coffee stand cashier genuinely cares about him. And it manages to hit every expected point in that scenario, including the triumphant nabbing of a flasher who's been terrorizing the shopping complex, without... MORE »

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SXSW 2009: "Sorry, Thanks."

By Alison Willmore on 03/17/2009

Filed under: Reviews

Apologies for whipping out the m-word, but mumblecore always seemed to me to be defined by its choreography of conflict avoidance. Its characters are so vague about they want and what they think because what they definitely don't want is to lay those things out and risk disagreement, rejection or open hostility. They lack any obvious sharp edges, and so seem to be infected with terminal niceness, but to say that is to ignore all the passive aggression lurking underneath the surface of those meandering exchanges. A fine sign of how the mumble-crowd is coming of age is Dia Sokol's... MORE »

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SXSW 2009: "Trust Us, This Is All Made Up."

By Alison Willmore on 03/15/2009

Filed under: Festivals

How to capture improvised comedy, which is the essence of having to be there, on film? Recorded, performances are always going to feel flat without the high wire act immediacy of watching people pull characters, jokes and storylines out of thin air. The central hour or so of Alex Karpovsky's documentary "Trust Us, This Is All Made Up" is a straight shot of a show that improv specialists T. J. Jagodowski and David Pasquesi did at the Barrow Street Theatre in New York, where they have a standing monthly gig. Filmed on multiple cameras capturing the goings-on from different angles,... MORE »

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SXSW 2009: "The 2 Bobs."

By Alison Willmore on 03/15/2009

Filed under: Festivals

Goofy, well-intentioned and not particularly good, "The 2 Bobs" is a mad-lib love letter to the city of Austin -- the tech industry, barbecue and a billion other disparate elements have been swirled together into a shambolic comedy about how the brilliant, socially inept founders of a gaming company, both named Bob, lose the title they spent years coding and are forced out into the harsh daylight to attempt, with backup from some friends, to retrieve it. Because it's written and directed by Tim McCanlies, who scripted "The Iron Giant" and, less excellently, "Secondhand Lions" (which he also helmed), the... MORE »

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SXSW 2009: Reinventing the distribution wheel.

By Alison Willmore on 03/14/2009

Filed under: Biz

Times are tough everywhere right now, but they've been tough in the indie distribution world long before the current economic downturn. Too many films, too high advertising costs, not enough arthouse screens, not enough time for titles to build up buzz before they're bumped to make room for next week's offerings -- people bemoan the shift away from theatergoing, but theatrical releases have largely become just a glorified means of marketing a film's DVD or digital release. There are several attempts to break away from the traditional release method kicking off here in Austin this week: "The Least of These"... MORE »

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SXSW 2009 is all lined up.

By Alison Willmore on 02/02/2009

Filed under: Festivals

The complete SXSW 2009 film line-up has been unveiled, the first under new head Janet Pierson and, arguably, its first post-mumblecore iteration. Not that there aren't still plenty of names familiar to anyone acquainted with the movement -- it was already announced that Joe Swanberg would be premiering his fifth feature in five years, "Alexander the Last," at this year's festival, but his wife and sometimes costar Kris Swanberg will also be debuting her first feature, "It Was Great, But I Was Ready to Come Home," and collaborators David Lowery and Dia Sokol each have a film of their own,... MORE »