SXSW
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SXSW 2010 COVERAGE STARTS HERE
Think of this post as a scrawled line on a notebook separating notes you made a year ago with notes you are making today… SXSW ’10 coverage starts here (i.e., look above). If you want to see what we posted about last year’s festival, scroll below.
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“SEVERE CLEAR'”S KRISTIAN FRAGA AND MIKE SCOTTI By Alicia Van Couvering
Severe Clear premiered at SXSW this week, five years to the day after the US invasion of Baghdad. Back then, Kristian Fraga was just one of millions, watching events unfold on cable news. First Lieutenant Mike Scotti was crossing the Iraqi border in an artillery tank, and he had a video camera. Severe Clear is a chronicle of the Baghdad invasion culled from over 60 hours of this footage, edited from a pure first-person perspective to ensure that the viewer goes through an experience as close to Mike’s as possible. We first meet Mike and his unit in a desert […]
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“FOR THE LOVE OF MOVIES”‘ GERALD PEARY By Alicia Van Couvering
Gerald Peary is not a cell phone person. He has witnessed a quarter century of films and criticism, from when Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris drew their lines in the critical sand to the currently expanding blogosphere. Gerald Peary is old school. A working film critic for 25 years, his work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Toronto Globe and Mail, The Chicago Tribune, Film Comment, Cineaste, Sight and Sound and Positif, to name a few. He is the weekly reviewer for the Boston Phoenix, one of a rapidly diminishing club of alternative weeklies as paper after paper […]
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SMILE LIKE YOU MEAN IT
Arms locked together, smiles frozen in place awaiting the digital flash — we all have these photos on our cameras and phones when we return from a film festival. These moments sure look like happy ones now that a festival premiere has spackled over all the fractures that production wrought. At SXSW this year, however, one group tried to summon up smiles that were a bit more sincere in intent. Operation Smile is a non-profit organization that provides cleft-lip and palate repair to children and young adults around the world, many in developing countries. Reps from the organization manned a […]
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Creative Nonfiction’s Lena Dunham By Alicia Van Couvering
There is an actual college Creative Nonfiction class in Lena Dunham’s Creative Nonfiction, which premieres in the Emerging Visions section at SXSW this week. There is also the actual Dunham, who plays both Ella, a college student trying to get a grip on an ambiguous non-starter romance, as well as the heroine in the 16mm-filmed representation of the John Waters/fairy-tale screenplay Ella is writing. Dunham wrote the script, about her own real-life ill fated dorm-room non-romance when she couldn’t concentrate on her own fairy tale/John Waters script, which she was completing for writing class. In Creative Nonfiction we meet this […]
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SWANBERG… KRIS SWANBERG
Joe Swanberg’s Alexander the Last is not the only Swanberg film here at SXSW. His wife Kris’s movie, It Was Great, But I Was Ready To Come Home, premieres at the festival too. Pictured above at last night’s Florida Fish Fry, from left to right, are Alexander the Last star Amy Seimetz, Swanberg, and Three Blind Mice director Matthew Newton.
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MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The goal in any festival director transition: to maintain the quality of a festival and begin to put one’s personal stamp on it while not slowing its momentum or dampening its good will. Mid-way through SXSW, I’d say that for new director Janet Pierson, pictured here at the BMI dinner, that mission has been handily accomplished. Attendance is up; audience reaction to a good number of films is positive; the panels are informational and packed; there’s the requisite fanboy buzz from the opening night I Love You, Man plus today’s sneak of some of the Bruno footage; and there are […]
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“THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION OF LITTLE DIZZLE'”S DAVID RUSSO By Alicia Van Couvering
David Russo’s The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle is not your average Seattle-based, night-shift janitors eating self-heating cookies as unwitting test subjects male pregnancy special effects-peppered butt fish movie. The film’s official synopsis is: “When Dory’s life seems like it’s going down the drain, a strange ‘new life’ takes shape inside him and he learns that sometimes you don’t have to find meaning; it grows in you.” But this is a film that defies description and transcends its bizarre title and bizarre-er premise to take you into a strange and beautiful place you never knew you wanted to explore (but […]
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“ST. NICK’”S DAVID LOWERY By Alicia Van Couvering
There is almost no dialogue in the first half of David Lowery’s feature debut, St. Nick. A young boy and a girl enter an abandoned house, clean it up, build a fire, forget to open a window and fill the house with smoke, figure out a chimney and watch the embers turn into flames. They sleep, they forage for food; somehow they survive, until reality starts bearing down on them. It’s not clear why they ran away, or if anyone is looking for them. The film is stark and the house feels haunted, but you can’t stop thinking: this was […]
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SWANBERG AND DENTLER
Pictured above, on the second floor of the convention center, Alexander the Last director Joe Swanberg and Cinetic Media Rights’ Matt Dentler. Dentler to me: “You know, I don’t work here anymore, but you don’t need to wait on this long line for your badge. You can go to the Panelists Registration over there.”
