SXSW Features
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How to Go Green with Producer Miranda Bailey
For a filmmaker approaching L.A.’s Ambush Pictures with a new project, “greenlit” is the happiest word in the English language. For Ambush Entertainment co-founder Miranda Bailey, an executive producer of The Squid and the Whale and a producer of the upcoming Super, the word came to mean something very different as she made her directorial debut. Greenlit is its title, and it refers to Bailey’s commitment to “green” the company’s The River Why by hiring an environmental consultant during production. While there’s been much documentation about greening the motion picture business, Bailey brings a perspective that’s both practical and irreverently […]
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“LOVERS OF HATE'”S BRYAN POYSER | By Alicia Van Couvering
Originally posted as part of our Sundance 2010 coverage, Lovers of Hate will screen at SXSW and is available on VOD beginning March 15. Playing in competition this year is Austin filmmaker Bryan Poyser’s Lovers of Hate, starring Alex Karpovsky and Chris Doubek as brothers, Paul and Rudy, vying for the attention of Rudys’ soon-to-be ex-wife, Heather (Heather Kafka.) Paul is enjoying wild success as the author of a Harry Potter-like series of children’s books, which are based on stories that Rudy used to make up for Paul when they were children. Rudy, who calls himself a writer but who […]
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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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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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“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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BROCK ENRIGHT’S JODY LEE LIPES By Alicia Van Couvering
When Jody Lee Lipes set out to follow his friend Brock Enright prepare a solo art show for the prestigious Perry Rubenstein gallery, he knew he wasn’t going to change anyone’s opinion about contemporary art. If you hate the art world, you might still hate it after watching Enright’s strenuous, stressful and altogether bizarre chronicle of several months putting a solo show together. But you have probably never seen art-making this up close; probably never witnessed the day-to-day negotiations for resources and time between an artist and gallery; probably never seen someone try to justify their art to their girlfriend’s […]
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‘AMERICAN PRINCE”‘S TOMMY PALLOTTA By Scott Macaulay
Even if you consider yourself a literate, well-viewed, cinema completist, you may not remember the name “Steven Prince.” I could jog your memory and tell you that he was influential to the films of Quentin Tarantino, Rick Linklater, and, most directly, Martin Scorsese, and the name still might not ring a bell. If that’s the case, don’t stress — I didn’t recognize the name either, even though I vaguely remembered that there exists a Scorsese film, American Boy, that I’ve never seen, and that Prince’s one scene in Taxi Driver, in which he plays Easy Andy, a fast-talking gun dealer, […]
