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.
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.
MISCELLANEOUS
Michael Tully compares/contrasts SXSW 2007 to SXSW 2008
Paul meets Vanessa Hudgens and other absurd teenage celebrities on the 21 red carpet.
Harmony Korine, stand-up comedian
REVIEWS
21
At the Death House Door
Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet
Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay
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.
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.
During a Q&A session after one of the first short film blocks at this year’s SXSW, an audience member turned the spotlight on programmer Lya Guerra and asked her about the curatorial aspects of her job, and how she organizes the order of the selected films. It was a great question, one that’s not asked often enough, and it put a bit of perspective on the art of programming a festival (and, indeed, programming is as much an art form as making a film). Short films at festivals cannot by necessity function in isolation, and it takes a real love of film to curate a program as strong as the one Lya has assembled this year; a lot of consideration has to go into not just what films make the cut, but which one might compliment another. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, and I’d imagine that there are always some pieces that just don’t quite fit, no matter how good they might be.
Here, readers, I must offer full disclosure: a film of mine was one of those that apparently did fit. When I compliment the lineup, though, I don’t mean to be self-aggrandizing; it was truly an honor to be featured alongside these other films. I’ve already written about Glory At Sea; now let me turn my attention to a few of my favorites.
Small Apartment (dir. Andrew T. Betzer)
In a tiny urban apartment, on a bright spring mid-morning, a young couple make love. As one of Wagner’s Vorspiels swells through the tinny speakers of a radio, the man’s aged father watches the couple in the throes of their passion, peering through a small partition in the bathroom wall with a video camera in his hand.
What Betzer’s created out of this conflict of interest is a simple, quietly heartbreaking glimpse at the pure beauty of physical intimacy with another human being. The film is fairly explicit (it played in the Adults Only category when it premiered at Slamdance this past January) but is not lascivious in its intentions: rather, it offers a strong and pointed delineation between sex and pornography, between love and perversion. I was afraid this film would be too subtle to win people over, but no: it wound up winning the Grand Jury Prize for Short Filmmaking. Bravo.
What a lark this film is, what a caustic joy! As with his shorts, Josh Safdie’s first feature film, The Pleasure Of Being Robbed, is too articulate a work to describe as whimsical, turning into a pejorative what would seem to be the best adjective with which to describe it. I could describe it as entirely unique, but then I couldn’t discuss its cinematic precedents, which are probably myriad but which I’d narrow down to the one that keeps springing to mind: Bresson. It’s like nothing Bresson has ever made, but the entire film, with its heightened naturalism and precise spontaneity, seems possessed by Bresson’s notion of cinematography - not the lighting and photography, but the art of cinematography with which he delineated between those films that elevate the medium and those that are restrained by the trappings of the theater. I guess means that the best compliment I can pay Safdie is that his work makes film better. And it’s here that I feel the need to quote his own synopsis of the film, which ends with this quizzical postulation: “It’s a comedy?”
As the first decade of this new millennium ticks towards its conclusion, we find ourselves in the general temporal vicinity of what recent generations have perceived as ‘the future,’ and there’s nary a flying car or replicant in sight. Resultingly, most recent science fiction films - from the relatively successful (A Scanner Darkly) to the utterly ridiculous (Southland Tales) to the annoyingly didactic (Sundance hit Sleep Dealer) - have recast the near future in more immediate and recognizable terms, predicting the throughlines of current socio-economic and political trends to imagine what might be just around the corner. Director Jennifer Phang takes the same approach in Half-Life, but to a more unique end. Her film takes place sometime within the next ten years, after global warming has flooded the world’s coastal regions and parched the land left above sea level. Social disorder is rampant: there are riots in the streets and whispers of endtimes. And amidst all this is the Wu family, dealing with the suburban woes of a million cinematic families before them.
Phang’s science-fiction conceit doesn’t affect the core of her story; indeed, it could be removed entirely without affecting the plot. But what it does do is reflect the plot, giving the characters’ emotional turmoil a greater context to ebb and flow within. This family is a microcosm of the world they live in; but because it’s their story, the circumstances around them become epic extrapolations of their most intimate moments.
The first of those moments occurs on the ground, to which nineteen year-old Pam Wu (Sanoe Lake) has just plummeted in a moment of desperation. She wakes up, bloodied and bruised, and sees her little brother Timothy looking at her, down there amidst the Northern California fauna. She smiles reassuringly; that moment is gone, and she brushes herself off and resumes her role as surrogate mother to her younger sibling. Their actual mother, Saura (Julia Nickson-Soul) is in the midst of a mid-life crisis, and is looking for the fastest possible solution to all the things that are wrong in her life. The answer she’s come up with is a young white jock of a boyfriend named Wendell, who moves into the Wu’s home and innocuously lets Pam know that he wouldn’t mind extending his affections to her as well. Pam’s soulmate, though, is Scott, the gay adopted son of an Evangelical pastor. They meet frequently on the grassy knolls high above the city, talking shop about sex and love and all the nasty details of both. Pam pines for him. He pretends not to notice.
The other central character in this drama is the Wu patriarch, who is defined entirely by his absence from his family’s lives. He was a pilot, whose departure some years prior coincided with the rise of the oceans and the increase in solar flares, occurrences which allow the characters to ignore or make excuses for the sad state of their lives. Likewise, they separates Phang’s film from similar tales of middle-class unhappiness, of absentee dads and clinically depressed children. Indeed, a simple synopsis of Half-Life fails to encapsulate the scope that the film traverses: it jumps from epic to intimate, from the end of the world (conveyed via newscasts and subtle special effects) to the private thoughts and daydreams of its characters, which take place in an animated world of disintegrating airplanes and beached leviathans. These formal shifts are drastic, but they’re bound by a unifying tone that weaves these melodramatic threads and surreal flights of fancy into an elegiac tapestry of unrest.
The film’s slow boil eventually come to a head; everything hits the fan, and those threads spire together and begin to fray as one. Secrets are revealed, accusations are made, true love is requited and the sun burns brighter than ever. There’s an achingly beautiful moment where Pam and Scott lay in each other’s arms and wait for the world to end. “Now,” Pam says, “or now.” Snapping her fingers as the seconds pass by and the world moves on anyway. It’s the sort of scene that is so perfectly irresolute that no actual ending can top it, and indeed, the actual denouement is where the Phang’s ambition finally falters. She attempts to justify the conceit of her film with an awkward step into magical, almost messianic realism. Whether or not anything that happens at the end of the film really happens. Such tropes always work on a superficial level, which is why filmmakers so often use them to wrap up unwieldy narratives; but what happens here is both too subtle to qualify as deux ex machina and too bombastic to work within the literal world the film has established. Considering how much of that world gives way to dreamscapes and reverie, that the ending doesn’t work is actually a tribute to the difficult tonal balancing act Phang has pulled off in the rest of the film.
What the ending does succeed in, though, is offering a different perspective on the standard apocalyptic tones of recent sci-fi, which generally imply that the world is on a fast track to man-made annihilation. Consider the title, which is taken from the scientific term for “the time required for one unstable element to decay and transform into another,” and put it in the context of the film, and we’re left with a vision of the future that has a bit more faith in humanity. Half-Life sees past dissolution, past the end of the world, all the way to something else. What that something is is anyone’s guess; the point is that there’s something there at all.
Jon Polito’s pencil-thin mustache and raging temper have been a feature of many Coen Brothers productions. I caught up with Mr. Polito before the premiere of Coen-inspired buddy comedy The Marconi Brothers, in which he plays “the undisputed king of Long Island wedding and event videography.”
In his Q&A following the premiere of his feature film Paper Covers Rock, director Joe Maggio noted that he set out to make a disposable film. That is, a film made with no money, the barest of bones, with no pressure and no expectations. Naturally, the absence of some factors liberates others; Paper Covers Rock is a simple, lovely expression whose quote-unquote disposability is hardly evidenced by the care that’s been put into its execution. The film treads a familiar path, but does so with nary a false step: it serves as a reminder that narrative predictability isn’t such a bad thing if it provides room for something more interesting than traditional plot.
In this case, it is a gateway to intimacy. Occupying nearly every frame of this film is Sam (Jeannine Kaspar), a twenty-something single mother whose winsome face we first glimpse, wrapped in plastic, when her daughter discovers her laying in bed with a ziploc bag over her head. The suicide attempt is not successful and, in short order, Sam is revived, committed, and then released to the care of her older sister Ed (Sayra Player). As sisters in films generally go, Sam and Ed are diametrically opposed; one being successful and shrill, the other mopey and in shambles; the former trying too hard to mold the latter into her own image and the latter withdrawing even further as a result. It’d be novel to see those roles reversed one day, but to the credit of Maggio and Player, it’s subtly hinted at that Ed is dealing with her own form of instability. By the time the sisters reach the end of the film, they’re two peas in a pod.
On the surface, Jake Mahaffy’s Wellness seems similar to many films that have played at SXSW recently. It was made with almost no money, shot on a handheld camera with natural light, and the non-actor cast was not working from a script. While many films that fit this description never leave the territory of Gen-Y narcissism, Wellness takes a different tack, examining several days in the life of a middle-aged pyramid scheme salesman. Like many films of its ilk, it nails awkward social situations with laser precision, but the value of Wellness doesn’t stop there. As the tragic story unfolds, the film becomes a profound meditation on the blurry line between faith and self-deception.
Here’s an excerpt from a comment by Variety writer Peter Debruge, left on a SXSW dispatch by Aaron Hillis on Glenn Kenny’s blog:
Pretty soon, it all reduces to semantics, but the label benefits those it describes in that it connects films that, on an individual basis, would be too small to register on most people’s radar. Would Hannah Takes the Stairs or Quiet City or Mutual Appreciation have warranted a NY Times piece on their own? (Then again, is the NYT even the right forum to discuss such films, which seem to do just fine with the more selective audience of the blogosphere?)
Debruge is here giving us an object lesson in why most applications of The M Word are really, really frustrating: the genre label becomes a polite form of thinly masking the condescending assumption that none of these films can stand on their own without it. Mutual Appreciation is not a film that needs a movement as a prerequisite, especially one which mostly coalesced after its premiere. As resolutely analog as it is, it also hardly fits in with Debruge’s wider argument that “important thing is that digital cameras, home editing software and the internet have enabled a new wave of filmmakers, many of whom have become very close friends, sharing equipment, ideas, cast and crew.”
This statement is not totally false, but at the risk of sounding like a cranky Marxist, it seems like he’s really talking about the means/tools of production. Goliath and Hannah Takes The Stairs might share an actor and certain technical commonalities, but I can’t imagine two films being more different in their sensibilities. By Debruge’s rationale, The Ten Commandments and The Tingler were part of the same “movement,” because both were shot on film cameras, both were released in movie theaters, both were produced by gimmicky showmen, and both productions employed Vincent Price.
Actually, now that I think about it, The Ten Commandments and The Tingler are basically the same movie. Never mind!
Ibid tells the story of Lionel and Tin, escapees from a psychiatric hospital on a madcap mission to add an addendum to the Ten Commandments. I talked to writer/director/star Russel Friedenberg and co-star Christian Campbell about the pleasures of filming in the American West, and being on a mission from God.
FrontRunners is a timely campaign film, but it has nothing to do with the battle for the White House. The film follows four students through the rigors of running for school president of Stuyvesant High School, one of the most competitive public schools in the country. Director Caroline Suh was fortunate enough to capture some delightful comic moments, especially when the drive to succeed mixes with teenage awkwardness. I spoke to Suh and producer Erika Frankel about hanging out with teenagers and the racial politics of a high school presidental campaign.
It’s fitting that the last film I saw at SXSW was Nerdcore Rising. I’d begun my experience of this year’s festival with a screener of We Are Wizards (review here), a documentary that mostly focuses on the Harry Potter-based “wizard rock”, which I’d then assumed was the nerdiest music genre in existence. And now I’d finished my experience with this doc, which is actually about the nerdiest music genre in existence, “nerdcore hip hop”.
The proof is not in the artists, though. It’s in the fans, which director Negin Farsad is right to concentrate on and showcase so significantly here. The film may center on one specific nerdcore hip hop artist, MC Frontalot, and his band’s first tour, but Nerdcore Rising is really, ultimately, about the freaks and geeks who make up the audience at each show along the way. Not since the height of the ska scene ten years ago has there been a genre so well defined by the character of its fanbase.
Margaret Brown’s documentary The Order of Myths delves into the secret societies of Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama. I talked to Margaret about segregation, access to forbidden parties, and shooting in formal wear.
Be sure to check out Karina’s review of the film here.
Kevin Buist
FilmCouch #114: The Final Show
Christopher Campbell
Third or Fourth Look at Dakota Fanning...
Brandon Harris
5 80s Literary Adaptations Worse Than...
Kevin Kelly
John Krasinski, Brief Interviews With...
Karina Longworth
Ghostbusters, New York &...
Paul Moore
SITA SINGS THE BLUES available free...
Lauren Wissot
Sasha Grey Interview
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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