My favorite non-fiction film at SXSW 2008 was Tommy Davis’ One Minute to Nine, a haunting portrait of a mother’s last few days at home with her family before she heads off to prison for killing the husband and father who abused and terrorized them all. My review attracted a number of comments from people wondering where they could see it; I myself wondered why the doc seemed to disappear from the festival circuit in the Spring with no formal announcement regarding distribution. I had hear a while back that HBO had picked up the film for broadcast, and in this interview with AJ Schnack, Davis confirms the HBO deal, and says the film will also be back to festivals and in theaters prior to its premiere on the channel in late 2009. Good news for an extremely sad film.
A favorite on these pages for her clever 08′ SXSW hit My Effortless Brilliance, a sort of comedic cousin to fellow Northwesterner Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy featuring former Harvey Danger frontman Sean Nelson (not the kid in Fresh and American Buffalo), Lynn Shelton will be back on the fest circuit in 09′. Her new film Humpday, which will bow at next month’s Sundance Film Festival, goes right back into the breach of examining the follies of male companionship. We caught up with Lynn to discuss stealing techniques from Kira Muratova, finding kindred a kindred spirit in Sherman Alexie and just how much KEXP in Seattle has shaped her musical tastes. …Read more
When your film is without official distribution, yet you continue to have screenings, it’s worth your while to make distinctly new trailers that advertise specific shows. This is apparently what the makers of Nerdcore Risinghave done. The above promo was posted to YouTube this week in order to announce the music doc’s west coast premiere, happening this Saturday, August 30th, at the 2008 Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle.
Nerdcore Rising is one of the most entertaining films I saw at SXSW this year; in my review, I particularly applauded the attention paid to the hilarious fanbase of nerdcore hip-hop. Both the music genre and the documentary are as much about the fans as they are about the artists, which include nerdcore “godfather” MC Frontalot (seen in the promo with Nerdcore director Negin Farsad).
From the looks of it, Tom Quinn is having a pretty remarkable year. He started off by winning the Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance with his positively Cassavetian take on a disintegrating South Philly Irish clan, The New Year’s Parade. This week, he became one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces in Independent Film. Although the director, writer, producer, DP, gaffer, editor, financier of this micro budget film doesn’t feel like an indiewood cop-out waiting to happen, we will certainly be seeing more from him soon. While we wait for Tom’s indie darling status to cement, I chatted with him for our Media Diet interview series about what he’s listening to, his plans to remake Darby O’Gill and The Little People and how he saw The Dark Knight like everyone else. …Read more
Matt Dentler offers exciting news: the Jeffrey Tambor Acting Workshop, which began as a panel at SXSW featuring the sometime George Bluth, Greta Gerwig and Kent Osbourne, is becoming an actual acting workshop at the Santa Monica Playhouse. Extra layer of excitement: The Playhouse is the very place where Your Blogger was part of a young adults theater company in the early 1990s. There might even be a picture of her at age 13, in heavy stage makeup, on the premises. Be afraid.
Regardless, the class begins June 2nd, and it’s open to the public. Matt has details on how to sign up at his blog, where he also points to the above clip from the SXSW version…courtesy of the YouTube auteur who brought us Howl (For Lindsay Lohan).
Winner of the SXSW Wholphin Award (and rapturously reviewed for us at the festival by David Lowery), there’s not a single short film on the circuit more eagerly anticipated (by me, at least) than Glory at Sea. As director Benh Zeitlin is still recovering from injuries sustained en route to the film’s SXSW premiere, Sea’s next screening has been postponed until May. But in the meantime, via Twitch, we can watch the trailer. See above.
We told you we were done with our SXSW coverage. We lied. Here’s one more treat: an interview with Andre Williams and Eric Matthies, subject and co-director of the documentary Agile, Mobile, Hostile. Watch the interview above, and for more on the film, check out its MySpace page.
Benh Zeitlin, the director of the much-beloved SXSW epic shortGlory at Sea, is currently recuperating in upstate New York from the car accident that sidelined him on the way to his SXSW premiere. Although he was able to make it to the final screening of his film, Zeitlin was in the hospital for the rest of the festival and otherwise missed the SXSW experience entirely. So Rooftop Films (who co-funded Glory) have asked SXSW filmmakers who have the means to send Zeitlin a copy of their film on DVD. I know one or two SXSW filmmakers read this blog; please go to the Rooftop Films blog for more info.
Here is a master guide to all of our reviews, interviews and assorted other coverage from the 2008 SXSW Film Festival. You can also revisit all of our SXSW previews here.
For those of you who don’t know, in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a series of race riots broke out in major cities all over America. On one night in April of 1968, James Brown put on a show at the Boston Gardens. The televised broadcast of his performance is said to have kept the streets quiet that evening, giving citizens a distraction from looting and unifying the city in peaceful memorial to one of history’s great professors of peace itself. In his new documentary for VH1, director David Leaf wanders around the happenings of that evening, retelling the story of how Brown became a savior to the people of Beantown.
It’s hard not to think of The Night James Brown Saved Boston as failing on many levels. It’s trite, pandering and not terribly informative. What could be a fascinating account of a legendary concert turns into kind of a mess when Leaf tries to grasp too much extra James Brown history within the 1 hour plus running time. Can you really blame him? He can’t really seem to make one of the most electric stage performances of all time come alive with his bland cinematic rhetoric. The pieces of the concert itself that are in there are overrun by incredibly run of the mill interviews by important figures of the time (Rev. Al Sharpton comes to mind) explaining what’s happening in the footage instead of letting it speak for itself.
From the powerful opening notes of Reformat the Planet, the doc hooks you to your seat with curiosity. A series of catchy tunes made on old school video gaming devices, hacked and manipulated to their furthest capacity by a series of talented artists from around the globe who come together for a four day music festival showcasing all this 8-bit work, is portrayed as a love letter to the art of working within limitations and coming out with something new and different.
Starting with the a brief history of how the so-called “chiptunes” scene was born in New York City, filmmaker Paul Owens captures with nostalgic excitement a musical movement starting before our very eyes, through the help of a few keys artists who call themselves Nullsleep and Bitshifter. Using a program called LSDJ, they compose dance music on a set of original Gameboys. Finding a home in a NYC space called The Tank and set of artists creating similar sounds using a variety of devices – Nintendo samples in a techno program (Tugboat) and DOS built Nintendo cartridges playing 8-bit sequences over two guitars, a bass and drums (Anamanaguchi), just to name a few – Nullsleep and Bitshifter put together a community of nostalgic gamers and music-makers alike. After building several years of momentum, The Tank was able to gain enough popularity to put on the film’s titular showcase – one that isn’t likely to die out in years to come.
When I was about eleven or twelve, my mother took me to see a Rolling Stones concert on the Omnimax screen at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. I remember the sheer power of the size of the screen itself – us laughing about seeing Mick Jagger’s lips, each fifty feet tall. Now, year’s later, when Scorsese himself decides to make a Rolling Stones concert film, the memory of that experience ingrained in my mind allows me to compare and contrast how far we’ve come in IMAX technology over the years. And, for all our advances, Shine a Light certainly pays off, providing the full concert film experience to viewer from the new millennium.
The film starts out small. Populating only the center section of the giant screen, Scorsese begins with a mini documentary about his collaboration with the band and the process of organizing the filming of these shows. Boasting some great 16mm camerawork by Albert Maysles, this short film unto itself is a highly entertaining piece that could work on it’s own. So, to come out of that, you can imagine he has to step it up a notch. Suddenly, and without warning, the film captures the explosive intro to the concert with “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” From there, it’s full speed ahead, fluctuating between quick close-ups and long takes, based on the rhythm of the music of the feeling of the performance.
One of my favorite things about Scorsese’s piece is the sound work. Not only does it come blaring at you in full force through the powerful IMAX system, but also the instruments are mixed and isolated so that you can really get the full concert experience. If one guitar breaks and let’s the other guitar fill the space, you can hear through the sound mix. During duets with the likes of Christina Aguleria and Jack White, Jagger is heard harmonizing from one side of the theater while the other respective singer is working it on the other side. The medium is utilized to full power that it should be. This is not a concert experience. In a concert experience, you would view it from a distance. When you comprise the film with so many tight close-ups, it’s more like being on stage and the sound reinforces that.
There’s a few cute pieces of archival footage cut-in as transitions between songs and I will be the first to admit: it is a little long. The 125-minute running time doesn’t bode well for those who find this kind of film repetitive. But, bloated as it may be, Shine a Light is still a powerful reminder of the strong performances the Stones are capable of and the absurd climax is also a reminder of how playful they can be too. Captured all by Scorsese with extreme gusto using a complex multi-camera set-up and a lighting design that overheats even the season Jagger himself, the film is a must-see for biggest to the smallest Rolling Stones fans.
Stop Loss - or UKPP as most locals call it around here in Austin (short for The Untitled Kimberly Pierce Project) – was easily one of the most anticipated films of SXSW 2008. Written by a native, shot in and out of town and pertaining to residents of the area, the film generated so much interest that when festival producer Matt Dentler introduced the film as being, “the movie I got the single most calls about saying, ‘You have to play this.’”
The title comes from an unfair clause in a soldier’s contract that acts as a loophole in wartime that states the army can keep you even after you’ve served your tour of duty. This clause has been commonly exercised under the George W. Bush regime and has, in some ways, been the lifeblood that allows America to stay at war in Iraq.
The story is simple. A group of friends comes back home from war and reunites with their loved ones, for better or for worse. When memories of their final, particularly painful combat mission send them all mentally into different dark tortured places, their home lives fall apart and they desperately try to help each other out. But when the leader of the pack Brandon King (played by Ryan Phillippe) is stop-lossed and faces the decision whether to flee his country and his army, their lives might never be the same.
Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, about a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who falls for a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) and follows her to a commune full of celebrity impersonators based out of a Scottish castle, would make an incredible double-feature paired with Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness. Both films deal with people who have fled to the Highlands in denial of real-world mundaneity and in exploration of an escapist fiction. Korine’s long-awaited comeback feature may be a bit more on the nose about the desperate things we do in the name of absolving our lonely fates, but like Build a Ship, it rides the line between pure shtick and genuine emotion to a degree of success that, when it works, can be truly thrilling. Both are patchworky and imperfect, but both are among my favorite films I’ve seen this year.
Korine has always been a filmmaker who plugs story in the gaps around visual one-liners, and while Mister Lonely is a more traditional shot-reverse shot narrative than anything he has done before, from the opening shot the director confirms that, in some sense, he’s up to his old tricks. Luna’s Michael Jackson, decked out in familiar sunglasses, black armband, and standard issue surgical face mask, rides through the streets of Paris on a kiddie motorcycle with a toy monkey tied to the rear. Shot in slow motion, set to Bobby Vinton’s rendition of the title song, this opening scene is both punchline and four-dimensional painting. Lonely is wall-to-wall full of comparable sequences which, though maybe only a step or two away or above the kinds of cultural regurgitations that litter YouTube––Marilyn Monroe, her hair in curlers, comes to Michael Jackson’s room and seduces him by feeding him a strawberry; Abe Lincoln, lit only by strobe light, recites the Gettysburg Address whilst spinning a basketball on his finger––together add up to surprisingly poignant portrait of the willful abandonment of reality in favor of pop cultural oblivion.
Jennifer Phang’s Half-Life is a story about the decay of family, religion, and the environment in northern California in the not-so-distant future. Basically, it gives you a lot to chew on. There’s even a little metaphysics thrown in for us overly brainy types. For more, listen to the interview or check out David Lowery’s review.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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My favorite non-fiction film at SXSW 2008 was 
Benh Zeitlin, the director of the 
From the powerful opening notes of Reformat the Planet, the doc hooks you to your seat with curiosity. A series of catchy tunes made on old school video gaming devices, hacked and manipulated to their furthest capacity by a series of talented artists from around the globe who come together for a four day music festival showcasing all this 8-bit work, is portrayed as a love letter to the art of working within limitations and coming out with something new and different.
