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, in which a dumb, drunken, “bros will be bros” dare serves 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.
indieWIRE has posted the lineup for this year’s panels at the American Pavilion in Cannes. The events include a Conversation with Francis Ford Coppola moderated by journalist Scott Foundas; a panel presenting a cross-section of American indie talent including Lee Daniels, Josh and Benny Safdie and Lynn Shelton; and sessions on the recession, documentaries as journalism, and new platforms of distribution.
And I’ll be involved in two panels: on Sunday evening, I’m moderating a session called Fan Nation, featuring Anvil! director Sacha Gervasi, Tim League from the Alamo Drafthouse/Fantastic Fest and other esteemed guests; the next night, I’ll be speaking to the evolution of film journalism ona panel called “It’s a mad, new media world.” Full details on all of these sessions can be found at the link above.
In a bit of an about-face, after issuing a press release announcing his intention to decline an invitation to screen his Tetro out of competition at Cannes, Francis Ford Coppola has agreed to allow the film to open that festival’s non-competitive Director Fortnight sidebar. For that reason and many more, the Fortnight lineup is terribly exciting: new movies from Josh and Benny Safdie, Pedro Costa and Hong Sang Soo will screen alongside Lynn Shelton’s Humpday and the still distributor-less Sundance comedy I Love You Phillip Morris. The full lineup, including shorts, after the jump.
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.
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.
Fox Searchlight, the distributor that tends to get the most bang for its Sundance buck, has picked up worldwide rights to Max Mayer’s romantic film Adam with intent for a 2009 theatrical release. Other big deals of the past 24 hours include Sony Classics’ acquisition of North American rights to the blaxploitation tribute Black Dynamite and Magnolia’s pickup of worldwide rights to Lynn Shelton’s comedy Humpday, which will get a VOD release a month prior to its debut in theaters this summer.
Check out our Sundance Deals chart for the full scoop on these three deals and the rest of the acquisitions as of this morning.
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.
Director Lynn Shelton’s follow-up to My Effortless Brilliance, Sundance Dramatic Competition entry stars Mark Duplass (HumpdayThe Puffy Chair) and Joshua Leonard (The Blair Witch Project) as two college friends who meet up a decade later and somehow end up pacting to make a boy-on-boy sex tape together. Answering our 4 Questions We Ask Everyone, Shelton declared her love for The Princess Bride, named the crew member she poached from Medicine for Melancholy, and explained her philosophy of low expectations.
Lynn Shelton’s My Effortless Brilliance (which I reviewed at SXSW) has its New York premiere tonight at Rooftop Films in Williamsburg, before heading to IFC VOD later this summer and DVD later this year. The film was co-written by and stars Harvey Danger singer Sean Nelson, who has given Ann Powers a recap of how he’s spent the last ten years since his band’s one massive hit for her LA Times blog. “10 years ago (pretty much exactly), we had the number one song on KROQ, and sold out the Troubadour, The Roxy and The Viper Room during the summer,” he writes. “Next week we’ll play in front of 60 people [at LA's Largo]. And we’re happy.”
More from Nelson, including details on the “exaggeratedly autobiographical” nature of the character he plays in Brilliance and his recent experience singing with R.E.M., here. You can buy tickets to tonight’s screening (which actually will take place not on a rooft, but on the lawn outside a Williamsburg high school) at the Rooftop Films site. In addition to Brilliance, there will also be a happy hour, a performance from Drew and the Medicinal Pen, and an open bar afterparty at inner Greenpoint bar Matchless.
Chris Thilk points to Mark Bell’s take on that “asinine piece that appeared in The Hollywood Reporter that seems to hang the failure of independent movies on their inability to get a major newspaper reviewer.” Says Bell: “I know that an audience exists for indie film; I am a part of that audience. I don’t think that audience is waiting or needing to be pandered to by the print promotion and corporation whores anymore, though.”
In a recent New York Times column, Maureen Dowd made an offhanded analogy comparing George W. Bush to the late Gene Kelly. Kelly’s widow was not amused. “To suggest that “George Bush has turned into Gene Kelly” represents not only an implausible transformation but a considerable slight,” fumes Patricia Ward Kelly at the Huffington Post. “If Gene were in a grave, he would have turned over in it.”
Sean Nelson, star of Lynn Shelton’s SXSW Competition entry My Effortless Brilliance (see review here) blogged his festival experience for The Stranger. “Though there are several competitions—narrative, documentary, short, etc.—within the festival, the atmosphere among the artists is 100 percent noncompetitive. Even when you’re all drunk.” Via GreenCine Daily.
Lynn Shelton’s My Effortless Brilliance plays something like an overtly comic remake of Old Joy, with mountains swapped out for woods, and a third man wild card pushing the narrative along. It’s not quite like nothing I’ve ever seen before, but it’s a nicely rendered, novella-esque character study with some impressive naturalistic performances.
Sean Nelson plays Erik, an exceedingly shlubby, thirty-something author trying to match the unexpected success of his first book with his third. Terribly insecure, he turns every interpersonal reaction into a grand performance with him as the star. When asked if he’s hungry, he answers, “Yes. I am INCREDIBLY hungry!” He seems right away to be faking it like he’s still making it, and eventually we get confirmation that success was something that came and went very quickly for him, a moment he was unable to grasp and fully enjoy before it floated away. Years after his fifteen minutes, he spins party stories out his failure to assimilate into the world of fame: “I got to be at the table with Liv Tyler, but I only got to talk to her ass.”
Lynn Shelton’s second feature, My Effortless Brilliance stars Sean Nelson of the band Harvey Danger (whose biggest hit, “Flagpole Sitta”, was memorialized in a ridiculously popular web clip last year) as Eric Lambert Jones, a novelist whose self-obsession costs him his relationship with his oldest friend. Struggling to recapture the success of his first book with his third, Eric takes a detour from a book tour to drop in on said friend’s cabin in the woods in an attempt to try to repair the friendship. Brilliance will be screening in the Narrative Competition at SXSW. Shelton’s last feature, We Go Way Back, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Slamdance Film Festival. By now, you know how this goes: trailer above, Shelton’s answers to the 4 Questions We’re Asking Everybody below. Tell us about your movie. Who did you work with, why did you make it? Give us the reductive, 25-word or less, “It’s like [pop culture reference a] meets [pop culture reference b]!” pitch, then explain what the quick and dirty sell leaves out.
My Effortless Brilliance is like My Dinner With Andre meets Deliverance. With a cougar thrown in for good measure.
It’s about narcissism, the crippling effects of success, the terror of failure, and, most all, the limitations of friendship.
I got the idea for making a film like My Effortless Brilliance while I was in production on my first narrative feature, We Go Way Back. That experience was truly eye-opening for me because it was my first time working on a traditional movie set. Although I’d been making films for over a decade, my educational background had been in photography and theater and I’d always approached filmmaking like a painter in a studio might–it was a totally solo experience. I had worked on other people’s narrative work, but always as an editor so I was totally unfamiliar with the culture and life of a film set.
And I loved it, I loved being on a real movie set, the busyness of it, the way that everyone worked together to form this gigantic functioning creative organism. Having creative collaborators was terrifying and liberating and astounding and it totally changed the way that I approached making art–it all became about relationships for me. Relationship-based filmmaking you could call it.
As life-changing and wonderful as the experience was however, I was frustrated by the way that traditional movie-making seemed almost custom-designed to obstruct the central work of the project–that of the actor. I immediately started fantasizing about trying to find a way of making films that would be as easy on the actors as possible–a completely performance-centered process: small unobtrusive crew, minimal eqiupment, 360? lighting, long takes. Plus, characters based on the actors themselves and words that would come straight out of the actors’ own brains: improvised lines.
I did not expect to wake up this morning to a feed reader and email inbox full of stories about the full lineup for the 2008 SXSW Film Festival––the press release was not supposed to arrive until sometime this afternoon. But The Hollywood Reporter apparently broke the embargo on the information yesterday evening, so now it’s here. And it’s a LOT to process before coffee.
In a nutshell: we’re looking at new films from Michael Almereyda, Ashley Sabin and David Redmon, Joe Swanberg, Mary Bronstein, Lynn Shelton, and Frank V. Ross; Sundance hits American Teen, Gonzo, The Order of Myths, Baghead, and Goliath; and a number of buzzy films culled from recent international fests, including Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Stones doc Shine a Light, Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, Christophe Honore’s Love Songs, and Heavy Metal in Baghdad. All of that should be enough to make anyone happy, but of course, there’s also much, much more.
The full lineup is after the jump. We’ll have sickeningly exhaustive coverage of SXSW starting soon. The Festival itself begins March 7.
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.
filmcouch-114
In a bit of an about-face, after issuing a press release announcing his intention to 
Fox Searchlight, the distributor that tends to get the most bang for its Sundance buck, has picked up worldwide rights to Max Mayer’s romantic film 
Lynn Shelton’s My Effortless Brilliance (which I 
Chris Thilk
I did not expect to wake up this morning to a feed reader and email inbox full of stories about the full lineup for the 2008 SXSW Film Festival––the press release was not supposed to arrive until sometime this afternoon. But The Hollywood Reporter apparently 
