One Minute to Nine is one of three films that I’ve been wandering around Austin championing as a must-see, and every time I offer the in-a-nutshell synopsis to someone who hasn’t heard of it, their jaw drops. This is what I’ve been saying: One Minute to Nine is about Wendy Maldonado, a woman whose husband beat and emotionally tortured her and her three sons for two decades. One day, the woman cracks and beats her husband’s head in with a hammer. The film tracks her last few days before she goes to prison for the crime, as she explains why she did it, why she feels no remorse, and why ten years in a prison is a victory compared to what her life would have been like had her husband lived.

…Read more

The opening night selection in the ‘Round Midnight category at SXSW was Tony Krantz’ Otis, a darkly comic twist on the torture porn genre. Dear readers, I must admit: the film was not my cup of tea, satisfying neither my taste for horror nor my penchant for finely tuned wit. Nevertheless, I was curious to hear Krantz discuss the picture, and to hear him explain it from an artistic perspective. Also of interest: hearing the tale of his meteoric 20-year rise through the echelons of Hollywood, from the mail rooms of CAA to the position of superagent extrordinaire, all the way to the directors’ chair he now occupies. So tune in to the podcast below, and if you’re a fan of Otis, feel free to chime in and let other horror fans know whatever I might have missed. The film will be released on DVD through Warner Home Video in June.

SXSW news, reviews, interviews and discussions

Liz Mermn’s Shot in Bombay weaves a complicated web of Bollywood intrigue. The film follows the making of a Bollywood gangster film based on real events (Shootout at Lokhandwala), complete with interviews of the hardened cops 15 years after the notorious shootout. Another layer of the Bollywood-meets-underworld tale is that leading man Sanjay Dutt keeps getting pulled away from the set to fight an ongoing court battle involving illicit weapons possession. I talked with Liz Mermin about Bollywood, gangsters, and celebrity worship.

 

 SXSW 2008 Interview: Liz Mermin of Shot in Bombay [8:53m]: Play Now | Download

SXSW news, reviews, interviews and discussions

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.”

…Read more

Margaret Brown’s The Order of Myths is an immersion into the archaic miasma that is Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama. Mobile’s Mardi Gras is the oldest in the world, and in keeping with tradition, its two weeks worth of parties and parades are mostly segregated. Using Mardi Gras season as a microcosm for a portrait of contemporary race relations in the city, Brown gets a filmmaker’s dream gift in the black and white Mardi Gras associations’ selection of their queens. Queen Stephanie, a black schoolteacher, is a descendant of slaves who were transported on the Clothilde, the last slave ship to enter the US. When the Clothilde came ashore, there was a fire and the passengers escaped into the woods, ultimately settling in an area that came to be known as Africatown. Queen Helen Meaher, whose family now owns most of the land in Africatown, is a descendant of the company that brought the Clothilde over. “My people was on her people’s ship,” Stephanie says, with a slow, matter-of-fact nod. That nod confirms the film’s thesis: casual racism is not an outrage in Mobile, it’s an institution.

…Read more

Before Saturday’s screening of his incredible Mister Lonely at the Alamo Ritz here in Austin, director/notorious bullshit artist Harmony Korine took the stage and, wired mic in hand, paced back and forth whilst grasping for the appropriate words to mark the occasion. “I’m not used to theaters where people eat like this,” he began. “I saw somebody back there choke on a nacho.” Pause for effect. “I got excited.”

Korine then launched into a story about the last time he was in Austin, which, he claimed, was at age 16, when he was picked up on a hitchhiking road trip by a guy who drove whilst eating raw sticks of butter. Long before Korine got to the punchline, the guy sitting next to me, who earlier said he was friends with the filmmaker, started laughing. He leaned over and whispered, “None of this is true.” Not that it matters––it was the best stand-up comedy I’ve seen in a while.

More on Mister Lonely soon.

Present Company is ostensibly about two young parents in a fading relationship who suffer cohabitation in a parent’s basement for the sake of their toddler, but director Frank Ross tells us what his film is really about in the first scene. The director stars as Buddy, an insensitive, immature twenty-something who is apprenticing in construction. We meet him on the job, where his co-worker has just opened a can of some kind of hazardous chemical. Not wanting to inhale the fumes, Buddy recoils. “I’ve got a long life ahead of me man,” he protests. A few lines later, assessing the work they’ve done, Buddy says, “We kind of glued ourselves into a corner, huh?” “Not me, man–you did it,” his co-worker responds.This is a movie about a boy stuck in a situation that feels interminable, who instead of taking responsibility for having glued himself in a corner, tries to share the blame with everyone around him. Too on-the-nose? Maybe, but it’s forgivable as a kind of thesis statement for a film that otherwise refuses a black-and-white analysis of its characters and their behavior. Somewhat less concerned with physical space than his last film, Hohokam, Present Company concentrates on making tangible the invisible space between people, and the lying, cheating and play-acting that we do to either transverse the space or willfully ignore it.

…Read more

Is Yeast a movie, or a dare? Its official synopsis contains this brag about director Mary Bronstein’s level of experience: “Conceived and made by an actor with no concept of the language of filmmaking, takes traditional dramatic structure and throws it out of the window to be swept away by the street cleaners.” It’s less a pre-emptive defense than a come on, a tease designed to seduce a certain kind of audience into stepping up to the plate. But it’s not pure provocation. Even fans of Frownland (which Bronstein starred in under the direction of her husband Ronald) may not be ready for Yeast’s full-on assault on the senses. This is a film that not only seeks to dodge the audience’s comfort zone, but it actually, actively mocks it. It’s not just abrasive; it’s restless, punishing, totally juvenile in its humor and indifferent to narrative flow or niceties of image. It appears to offers moments of genuine redemption or closure, and then undermines those moments with prankish punchlines. It is resolutely indelicate, and often absurd. It’s a nasty little stink bomb of a film that’s going to instigate a fierce tug of war between supporters and detractors––if it doesn’t completely clear the room. I think it’s a laugh riot and a must-see. Consider yourself warned.

…Read more

Butterknife creator Joe Swanberg returns to SXSW with his fourth feature in as many years, Nights and Weekends. This one is co-written, co-directed and co-stars Greta Gerwig, of Hannah Takes the Stairs and Baghead fame, and it was shot by Matthias Grunsky, the man behind the camera on both of Andrew Bujalski’s features. Check out the trailer above, and Greta’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.

Nights and Weekends is When Harry Meets Sally meets DIE HARD without the cuteness or the explosions. It is a collaboration between Joe Swanberg and myself, with Kent Osborne, Lynn Shelton, Jay Duplass, and Elizabeth Donius in the mix. That synopsis leaves out just about everything.

Do you have a day job/a non-filmmaking occupation that raises money for your filmmaking efforts? Tell us about it.
My non-filmmaking jobs have been tutoring kids for the SATs, being a club kid, catering, babysitting, and looking for change under my couch.

…Read more

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.

…Read more

In the interest of full disclosure: I play a very small role in the subject of today’s SXSW preview, Natural Causes. As such, I’m going to have to pass the SXSW reviewing duties along to another member of the Spout team––and in fact, as of this writing, I haven’t even seen the film, even though parts of it were made in my apartment––but we passed along our standard 4 Questions to co-directors Alex Cannon, Paul Cannon and Michael Lerman nonetheless. Check out the Emerging Visions selection’s trailer above, and answers from the boys 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.

25 words or less? Natural Causes is like the greatest hits of a relationship.

That said, we wrote it in 1 month and shot it in 11 days, some of them 23 hours long. This was our attempt to make an extraordinarily personal film about the nature of a young relationship. The three of us have gone through similar experiences and we know so many people who have as well. Natural Causes is our way of taking a look back at that and examining what it’s like to be with someone at this age and all the shit that goes along with it. We’re not blind to the fact that there are movies that resonate with us in an emotionally similar way, like David Gordon Green’s All the Real Girls or Atom Egoyan’s Calendar.

The best part of the whole experience might be the collaboration. Who better to make a movie with than two of your best friends? Combine that with a really great crew and you have the most fun the three of us have had, pretty much ever. Michael Tully is a jack-of-all-trades, Asif Siddiky is a genius and the whole cast is incomparable. We worked with some of the most dedicated and inexhaustible people around and the fact that nobody ended up screaming or in prison is a miracle, although we managed to get some stitches along the way. Literally.

…Read more

Judging by its trailer alone, Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie seems to approach its mythic subject from an angle that sounds, well, atypical. A documentary portrait of Bigfoot hunters in Applachian Ohio, the doc ties the pursuit of these probably fictional creatures to the area’s decaying economy and a shared desire to transcend the everyday. You can watch that trailer above; director Jay Delaney answers 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.
It’s like American Movie meets Grizzly Man! As the title hints, it’s about more than just Bigfoot. Through the experiences of two amateur Bigfoot researchers in southern Ohio, Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie provides a look at how the power of a dream can bring two men together and provide a source of hope and meaning that transcend the harsh realities of life. The feature doc grew out of a short doc I made back in 2001 – American Dream – about these two local Bigfoot researchers in my hometown. The short haunted me for years thereafter, and I always wanted to revisit the project in greater depth.

I see a tremendous amount of honesty in Dallas and Wayne’s story, and it raises so many questions in my mind. My connection to the story stems largely from its ability to capture the contemporary state of the American Dream in old Appalachian steel towns like Portsmouth, Ohio. Although the economies there face some real challenges, people like Dallas and Wayne find a way to hold onto their dreams and keep hope and faith alive.

…Read more

Yeast [trailer]

Add to My Profile | More VideosWelcome to the first of many posts that we’ll be doing over the next couple of weeks, previewing upcoming SXSW premieres and profiling their makers. I’m so excited to start this plug fest with the work of a good friend of Spout, Mary Bronstein’s Yeast. Mary, of course, is the co-star of the Spout current webseries Butterknife, and she also starred in her husband Ronnie Bronstein’s debut feature, Frownland (which, incidentally, will be running for a week at the IFC Center in New York concurrent with Yeast’s debut in Austin).

Mary stars again in Yeast, alongside Greta Gerwig (Hannah Takes the Stairs), and together they explore friendships that are, according to the SXSW synopsis, “Ebola-infested, maggot-filled and bursting at the seams.” You can watch the trailer for Yeast above. Below, check out Mary’s answers to the 4 Questions We’re Asking Everybody (heretofore known as the 4QWAE). Yeast, which is screening in the Narrative Competition at SXSW, premieres at 7pm on Monday, March 10 at the Alamo Ritz; for more information, go here.

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.

“It’s like Laverne and Shirley meets Mike Leigh’s Nuts in May…on PCP!!”

Sorry…here’s the real 25 word-or-less: Yeast is a film about a maddeningly oblivious, tyrannical and stunted young woman trying to negotiate two toxic friendships.

Something that the synopsis doesn’t say is that Yeast turned out to be a lot funnier than I had originally anticipated. Another thing to know is that it isn’t a study in realism, or the way people “really” behave. It is more hyper-realism. We were interested in telling the story from the inside-out. Showing on the outside what the character is feeling on the outside. I find this more interesting than dialog about how characters feel. For example, sometimes you may be so frustrated at someone you wish you could just hit that person in the face. In real life you don’t, but you might say “You know, you are like, kind of being a little bit annoying right now.” In this movie you would actually hit the person.

I decided to make this film after I realized that I didn’t want to wait around for other people to make projects. I wanted to make a film about female friendships that dealt with the issues of resentment, hostility and emotional manipulation that often are present in too-close enmeshed friendships of either sex. I wanted to make a film about women that I’ve never seen before, about people who have no business being friends with each other but don’t know how to stop. And I wanted to see if I could pull it off.

…Read more

Two of my film blogging colleagues, Jette Kernion and Michael Tully, have posted requests for filmmakers showing work at SXSW to contact them about possible coverage. I’ll jump on that bandwagon: filmmakers can contact Karina directly at karina [at] spout [dot] com; you can also leave links to official websites, YouTube/MySpace pages, etc, in the comments to this post.

Right now I’m especially excited about video that I can post on the blog before the fest (trailers, clips, whatever––anything that’s embeddable), and of course, sending a screener before the fest is like buying insurance that your film won’t be overlooked during the festival crush. But even if you’ve got none of the above, if you’re reading this and have a film at SXSW, don’t hesitate to be in touch.