Both a huge party and something of a petri dish of American independent creativity, SXSW is steadily becoming an invaluable stop on the festival circuit. The Austin festival is also the forerunner of a whole slew of American festivals that are proud to be far from New York and LA, and more importantly, far from Park City. So it’s no surprise that the festival would break even more ground in the decentralization of the independent film experience. This year, SXSW and IFC have teamed to offer five films on-demand via IFC Festival Direct, allowing viewers at home to see festival premieres on the same day the play for Austin audiences.

For a midwesterner such as myself, this is tremendously good news. The elephant in the room when talking about any artwork is always access. Who is it for, and who can actually see it? For many, entering the current discussion surrounding independent film is simply an economic impossibility. SXSW is very friendly toward the average-Joe or Jane attendee, especially compared to many other festivals, but a plane ticket and a pass are still a serious expense. It would be easy for the festival organizers to pay lip service to the idea of creating an event for more than just the elite, and then do nothing about it. Instead, they deserve a tremendous amount of credit for actively attempting to engage people who want to attend the festival, but can’t.

That said, the “festival at home” experience is far from flawless. Despite the fact that I’m pretty close to the ideal candidate for this type of thing, I don’t have the right kind of cable package required to see on-demand movies. I’ve often considered anteing up for better cable just for IFC, but for the most part a high-speed internet connection and Netflix subscription keep me occupied, and they are a big enough chunk of my monthly budget. So while audiences can technically watch these festival films anywhere, there’s still a large barrier to access, and it still comes down to cost. So I spent the weekend calling up friends, interviewing them about what kind of cable they have, then sheepishly asking if I could invite myself over to watch a few movies. Luckily, I have gracious friends.

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As a wedding present, Kris and Joe Swanberg received, among other gifts, an ice-cream maker. Almost immediately, Kris found herself experimenting with recipes—whiskey with bread pudding, hot chocolate with roasted marshmallows, coffee and doughnut and gingersnap cookie, four flavors a season. She sells them now by the pint at a local grocery store. During the day Kris heads to work as a substitute teacher, and though she loves teaching and is pursuing her graduate work in higher education, it’s a transitional occupation that she says is rather worthless and unfulfilling.

Joe, meanwhile, constantly developing ideas for a seemingly endless list of to-make films, struggles with all those mundanities that thwart his creative productivity. “Doing my laundry or washing my dishes, all of these tasks are cutting into time that I could use to be making work,” he says. “If I could employ a labor force to dress me in the morning, do all these tasks, drive me places, and if I could have people simultaneously scouting locations for several different projects and setting up the paperwork with SAG, then I’d have the energy within me to make six or seven features a year, I’m sure. Now, I’m just physically incapable of it.” The statement, made during an initial interview, is all the more humorously appropriate considering that Kris answers the phone for the second of the two lengthy conversations saying, “Oh, I’ll get Joe; he’s just folding socks.”

In many ways, as most couples do, Kris and Joe see and think in very different manners. While Kris tends not to debate film, or even at times actively note it, Joe delves into every nook and cranny of a cinematic trend or debate. While she’s articulate although softer spoken, he’s passionately, loudly declarative. While she finds comfort in realism, he finds himself moving into a greater period of experimentation. Yet for all of these differences, and perhaps because of them, the Swanbergs have weathered ten years together of both romantic ramblings and professional collaborations. This is only just the briefest of glimpses at the Swanbergs as a couple.

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The Internet seems eerily quiet today, which is probably due to all the blog writers being miles above wifi signals, flying towards Austin for SXSW. Of course, there are some posts here and there discussing rumors about Jon Favreau directing The Avengers and continued commentary on Watchmen’s box office future and Joaquin Phoenix’s “brawl” in Miami, but there’s not much new news to get excited about.

So, I’ve decided to highlight some recent SXSW-related posts from other blogs in anticipation of the festival. I won’t be there this year, and the Bloggery posts will be taking a week off in order to let SpoutBlog focus on film reviews, interviews and other SXSW goodies, so this is my one chance to be a part of the SXSW fun, albeit from a very cold, very jealous perspective up here in NYC.

I wish everyone down in Austin a good time and, more importantly, a lot of good movies.

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It would take a certain amount of energy and emotional strength to produce a full consideration of David Denby’s piece in today’s New Yorker, which swiftly traces the lineage of the last seven years of American micro-independent film up to and including Joe Swanberg’s upcoming SXSW and IFC VOD debut, Alexander the Last. I currently feel that this variety of strength and quantity of energy are resources that I cannot access, and if I could, I’m not sure the best target to point them at would be a piece that has already been declared late to the party by two reliable sources.  However, in case it seems imperative to take up this task at some point in the future, here are the vague bases I would try to touch in such a consideration:

• Prior to this, David Denby has produced two notable works in the past six months (in this case, we’ll take “notable” to be equivalent to “provoking of blog posts and/or mocking on The Daily Show“; if there is another definition of the word here on Planet Earth in 2009, I don’t understand the question and I won’t respond to it). Most recently, there was Snark, a polemical book in which the film critic argues that “snarkers like to think they are deploying wit, but mostly they are exposing the seethe and snarl of an unhappy country, releasing bad feeling but little laughter,” and goes on to cite with no apparent humour intended the nine elements that make snark so dangerous.  A short time after Snark was published, Denby wrote off The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — a film which might rightly be considered to embody the bloated sincerity that finely calibrated snark so successfully deflates –– with the witty rejoinder, “who cares?” Denby then went on to point out, clearly without “bad feeling”, that “many people in Hollywood endlessly have ‘work’ done to put off aging, and here’s a movie that begins with a wizened baby and ends with physical perfection, a progression that may encapsulate both the nightmares and the dreams of half the Academy.” …Read more

The news that Greta Gerwig will star opposite Ben Stiller in Noah Baumbach’s upcoming Focus Features-financed Greenberg would seem to represent just the latest landmark in an evolution.

As polemicists rush to reject mumblecore as an ill-defined concept and Joe Swanberg as an auteur, Noah Baumbach is borrowing both the Nights and Weekends director as a cameraman and Swanberg’s frequent ingenue as a star. Even Steven Soderbergh is adopting the production methods with which Swanberg has become associated –– shooting fast and cheap on digital, using acquaintances of the production in lieu of actors and asking them to improvise based on an outline, etc. Swanberg invented none of it, but neither did Soderbergh, and when you consider Bubble as a kind of experiment in exotica, the latter has never gone as far in a quest for contemporary naturalism as he does in The Girlfriend Experience. There’s something, at the very least, undeniably interesting about the fact that both filmmakers will release films in 2009 made roughly the same way.

As a result, the m-word might cease to exist as a stand-alone concept –– and I think no one would be happier about that than some of the filmmakers who bristle at being lumped into a movement just because they made a movie about 25 year-olds shot on video –– but its stars and spirit are being assimilated into mainstream indie film. Are boundaries finally breakind down between Indiewood and, uh, DIYwood? Was this inevitable, or are we surprised?

The lineup for the 2009 SXSW Film Festival is now out, and pasted in full after the jump. First skim highlights:

• Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax, which will world premiere in a matter of days in Berlin.
• Sorry, Thanks, directed by Dia Sokol (producer of Mutual Appreciation and Nights and Weekends), and starring Wiley Wiggins and Bujalski.
• New features by both Joe Swanberg (Alexander the Last, starring Jess Weixler, Justin Rice and Barlow Jacobs) and Kris Swanberg (It Was Great, But I Was Ready To Come Home, screening in Narrative Competition).
• Objectified, a new documentary by Helvetica director Gary Hustwit.
• True Adolescents, about an “Aging indie rocker” who “takes two teen boys on an ill-fated hiking trip.” Starring Mark Duplass and Melissa Leo.
• Creative Nonfiction, a narrative feature by Lena Dunham starring Eleonore Hendricks (The Pleasure of Being Robbed).
• St. Nick, directed by David Lowery, who reviewed Robbed for us at SXSW last year.
• Some of our favorite films from Sundance 2009, including Moon, Humpday, and You Won’t Miss Me.
• Toronto favorites Goodbye Solo, The Hurt Locker and Three Blind Mice.
• Early contender for Best Title & Synopsis, Sight Unseen: Make Out With Violence, described as “A rock musical wherein the living love the dead and break into silence instead of song.”

I’ll be at SXSW once again this year, so if there’s anything on the lineup you’re particularly looking forward to that you’d like to see coverage of, let me know if the comments.

We’ll also be doing pre-SXSW coverage again this year, so if you’re a filmmaker showing work at SXSW this year, and you’d be interested in being featured in one of our SXSW previews and/or can send us a screener, do get in touch by sending an email to karina AT spout DOT com. If you can send us a screener before the festival, you definitely improve your chance of getting covered.  If you do send a screener and we don’t like the movie, we won’t write about it at all until after the premiere (and unless it’s problematic to the point where we think a negative review would spark an interesting discussion, chances are we probably won’t write about it at all). But, like some films we screened before the festival last year (see Medicine For Melancholy, My Effortless Brillance and Yeast), if we fall in love with your movie, chances are we will never shut up about it.

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• A few films were sold in the past 24 hours, but Lone Sherfig’s An Education was not one of them. Reportedly, Fox Searchlight offered around $1 million for the Nick Hornby-scripted coming-of-age drama, yet the film’s co-reps CAA and Endeavor are asking closer to $10 million. As if any title could seriously expect that high an amount during the “subdued” Sundance of ‘09.
• Oh, by the way, here’s another possible reason for slow sales this year that we missed yesterday: too many co-repped films make for confusing negotiations.
• IFC Films held a press conference yesterday to reveal that, for the first time, the distributor will release a film to VOD day-and-date with its world premiere at this Spring’s SXSW. The film will be Joe Swanberg’s Alexander the Last, and it’s one of a bunch of new titles, including the latest from both Phillipe Garrel and Denys Arcand, slated for IFC’s Festival Direct VOD channel. Steven Soderbergh says that these days filmmakers’ have to “let go of the fantasy” of receiving conventional theatrical releases for their work.
• Also from the IFC press conference: Karina asks about whether on demand data will ever be released a la box office figures; Swanberg tells festival directors that its up to them whether or not VOD kills festival runs; Soderbergh calls BluRay “the worst launch of a new format in the history of formats.”
• And in other IFC VOD news, the NY Times got it wrong last week when it reported that IFC’s hoped-for 250,000 VOD viewers for Soderbergh’s Che would be the equivalent of an $18 million box office take. The figure, corrected during a Sundance panel discussion, would be more like $1.8 million.

I’ve been accused in the past of having knee-jerk negative reactions to crowd-pleasers, and those accusations have not always been without a kernel of truth: it’s true that I tend to be skeptical of movies which instantly entertain but never ask us to ask what they’re really up to, and of that, I’m not ashamed. But this is not a problem with the tough-to-resist Humpday, Lynn Shelton’s whip-smart, uproariously funny comedy which uses a dumb, drunken, “bros will be bros” dare as the in point to talk about, amongst other things, the inevitable loss of self in long term relationships and the ongoing conquest to reconcile who we really are with who we’d like to think we could be.

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“What is indie cinema?” asks Richard Vine at The Guardian. He runs though a brief history of Indiewood, notes that the London Film Festival put Azazel Jacobs, Barry Jenkins and Joe Swanberg on a panel promoting a new wave of truly independent filmmaking, and then rhetorically wonders if his initial question is irrelevant:

But is indie a meaningful term anymore, or is it just shorthand for “cool”, “edgy” or “offbeat”? Does it matter if the so-called faux-indie production methods result in decent films such as Juno and Little Miss Sunshine that play at easy-to-access multiplexes alongside the CGI sequels and threequels?

To answer the three questions posed in the above paragraph: Yes, no, yes. What follows is essentially the same argument I’ve made one thousand times over the past three years, but apparently there are still some people who need to hear it.

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Joe Swanberg has a new web series called The Stagg Party, which premiered this past Monday on IFC.com. It’s a documentary series about commercial photographer Ellen Stagg, who also appears briefly in Swanberg’s latest feature, Nights and Weekends. The show is very much NSFW, as it focuses on Stagg’s erotic photography work and features a lot of nudity. Therefore, it’s taken a few days for me to get a clip suitable for sharing here. Fortunately the upcoming third episode, from which the clip is taken, concentrates more on Stagg’s family than on her photo shoots. Here she chats with her brother, Jared, about how they first met.

The series in general, and this clip in particular, is especially interesting to me, because I’ve known the Staggs for almost 15 years, and it’s kind of funny to see some family photos here that I’ve definitely seen before. It’s terrific that Ellen has become the subject of a series by Swanberg, whose previous web series Butterknife was presented by Spout.com. While I’ve been familiar with Ellen’s erotica photography for a long time, I’m actually learning a lot about the origins and the process of the work through this candid and humorously intimate series.

For the first two episodes, which I must remind you are NOT SAFE FOR WORK, check out the Stagg Party page at IFC, and stay tuned for Episode 3, which debuts on Monday. Also, be sure and visit Ellen Stagg’s sexy photo blog, Stagg Street — again, when you’re NOT AT WORK. Unless you work with Sasha Grey.

With Mary Bronstein’s Yeast debuting on DailyMotion tonight, and Joe Swanberg’s Nights and Weekends opening this weekend at the IFC Center, the two SXSW 2008 premieres starring Greta Gerwig will suddenly become available to a non-festival audience simultaneously. When I heard this was going to happen, I dug up some of the press Gerwig has garnered over the past year, most of it pegged to her appearance in the Duplass brothers’ Baghead. I quickly noticed a trend: Gerwig has been covered exhaustively by male writers who a) have a tendency to label her an “ingenue” or an “‘it’ girl“, and b) devote much column space to the question of whether or not Gerwig’s main talent is playing herself.

Certainly, the great success of Hannah Takes the Stairs, the highly improvised project on which the pixie-cute actress collaborated with Swanberg and friends, is that it parts of it seem so lacking in cinematic artifice, they can play as glimpses into lives in progress. But if Hannah seems real enough to reach through the screen and touch, Gerwig’s title character is too exasperating to make that a particularly attractive proposition (or maybe not: almost like a classic femme fatale, it’s hard to deny her appeal even as she’s leaving you for your best friend). So when in Baghead, she plays a pixie-cute actress collaborating with friends on a highly improvised project––who drinks too much, takes little convincing to remove her top, and ultimately ends up with the funny, schlubby nerd––it seems too coincidental to be fiction, and apparently too cute to resist.

Gerwig hasn’t resisted the suggestion that the roles she plays grow out of who she is, but Nights and Yeast add two disparate but fully realized characters to her repertoire. Yeast is, for some, an endurance exercise; for me, it’s a comedy, and on the contrary, it’s the comparatively gentle but fundamentally flawed Nights and Weekends (on which Gerwig is billed as co-writer/director alongside Swanberg, and co-producer alongside Swanberg, Anish Savjani and Dia Sokol) which tries patience. If the latter shows Gerwig pushing a character way beyond adorable, it often feels like an exhausting exercise for all involved. It’s her work as Yeast’s only semi-relatable comic relief that throws up a middle finger at the ingenue concept, literally.

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Team Picture has been referred to as the last in the Benten DVD boys’ trifecta of Mumblecore releases (numbers one and two were LOL and the Aaron Katz two-for, Quiet City and Dance Party, USA). It’s a fitting way to cap the distributor’s institutional affiliation with this movie moment, which inspired more words from journalists than were probably articulated across all of the films’ running times combined. Surfacing right at the peak of the M-word hype, Team Picture may be the picture that was bot most helped and most hurt by its association with that generic name.

As the legend goes, after director Kentucker Audley (who is the same person as Team Picture star Andrew Nenninger) had his short Bright Sunny South play at Sundance in 2006, he fell in with Joe Swanberg. Soon Team Picture, a barely-feature-length feature, shot in Memphis for $1500, was booked at last summers’ mythic mumblecore double-header at the IFC Center and the Harvard Film Archives. Team Picture thus got to premiere in New York alongside some of the most covered genuinely independent films of the last decade, without having to put in time on the festival circuit first.

That was the good news. Unfortunately, that platform had its disappointments. Most of the press on the events brushed over Picture in order to concentrate on the Swanberg supergroup collaboration Hannah Takes the Stairs, and future festival play was out of the question because, for most premiere-obsessed programmers, a movie that had already premiered in New York was old news. In that sense, regardless of the film’s pedigree by association, Benten’s release of Team Picture is directly in line with their stated mission to give second life to “overlooked gems that deserve greater recognition.”

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NewTeeVee, the web video journal that I freelance for, has just launched a sub page called NewTeeVee Station, which pulls editorial reviews from the main site, as well as reviews written specifically for NewTeeVee Station, into an IMDb-like database with cast and crew information, user comments, and more.

Yes, some of my reviews are included on the site, but I’m not posting this here on Spout purely as self-promotion. Obviously, there’s more overlap every day between the world of web video and what’s going on in indie film/film blog land, and I think a project like this does more to emphasize and strengthen those connections than diminish them. Plus, there are review on the site of work that should be familiar to Spouties, like Joe Swanberg’s Young American Bodies and Rob Parrish’s Next to Heaven and Micahel Cera’s Clark and Michael. Yes, I wrote those reviews, but I had absolutely nothing to do with these entires on Ze Frank and Star Wars Kid and Lazy Sunday, the latter of which contains Liz Shannon Miller’s immortal reminder that “2005 wasn’t that long ago. And it’s important to remember that back then, Hollywood had no idea what it was doing.”

• GreenCine Daily alerts us to the news that the third season of Joe Swanberg’s Young American Bodies has launched at IFC.com. I haven’t had a chance to watch episode 1 yet, but I can almost gaurantee you it’s not safe for work.
• Speaking of things you probably don’t want to be caught watching in public: a reminder of why no ultra-meta comeback can fully rehabilitate the Jean-Claude Van Damme of yore, who was such a cheeseball that he’d hump a girl on live TV, make a big show of covering up his apparent erection...and never once get around to taking off his sunglasses.
• And to the department of at-work distractions: At Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, Dennis Cozzalio offers a 36 question movie quiz. Perhaps I’ll delve into this more deeply when I have more time, but for now, by answer to Questions 2, 5 and 24: Stanley Donen, Veronica Lake, and Lloyd Kaufman’s 42nd Street, updated to 2008.