Bob Byington
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“Nine Pages a Day of Heavy Dialogue”: Bob Byington and David Krumholtz on Lousy Carter
In 2012, Bob Byington won a Special Jury Prize at the Locarno Film Festival for Somebody Up There Likes Me; last year, he returned with Lousy Carter. Writing about the festival, I said of the film: Introducing Bob Byington’s Lousy Carter alongside the writer-director, star David Krumholtz preemptively noted that while the film was shot and is set there, “Whatever you think of Texas, its politics have nothing to do with the film.” The disclaimer is accurate—this is another of Byington’s immaculately mean comedies with an underlying sentimental streak, a blend he’s been iterating with various degrees of sharpness for […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 28, 2024 -
Inclusive Feelings at the Oak Cliff Film Festival
There’s an argument happening at the bar of the Texas Theater. No, it’s not about politics, as one might guess with a liberal film crowd taking over a small pocket of Texas. This is Oak Cliff, the blossoming cultural community north of the Dallas Trinity river, and no, the conversation is not about karaoke either. The Oak Cliff Film Festival opening night party was at Barbara’s Pavilion, a dive bar in a re-purposed home. As the film festival crowd rolled in around midnight, badges and conversations about Lemon and 35mm making the nerd fumes quite potent, the argument was about […]
by Meredith Alloway on Jul 19, 2017 -
Dark in the Daytime
Blue City The 1986 release Blue City might not be one of the best movies Walter Hill ever had his name on, but it’s certainly one of the most fascinating from an auteurist standpoint, despite the fact that Hill isn’t even its auteur. That credit goes to Michelle Manning, who got the job while still in her mid-20s after her former boss, Ned Tanen, took over as head of Paramount. Manning’s early career trajectory was swift: fresh out of University of Southern California film school, she rose from Zoetrope production assistant to a position as Tanen’s associate producer on a […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Oct 28, 2015 -
Five Questions with 7 Chinese Brothers Director Bob Byington
7 Chinese Brothers, Bob Byington’s latest, takes its title cue from an REM song, so the familial rapports on display might not be exactly what you suspect. Jason Schwartzman stars as Larry, a boozed-up, bedraggled sad sack, who punctuates his big gulp binges with extended visits to his grandmother (Olympia Dukakis) and her supervisor (Tunde Adebimpe) in a nearby nursing home. Things start to look up when he takes a gig at the local Quick-Lube, where he develops an instant crush on his boss, Lupe (Eleanore Pienta), even if her interests plainly lie elsewhere. Filmmaker spoke to Byington about his satirical treatment of […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Mar 12, 2015 -
Director Bob Byington on Somebody Up There Likes Me
It’s rare to come across a film that genuinely feels “different,” but Bob Byington’s Somebody Up There Likes Me is one of those films. Byington is an Austin-based writer/director and has worked (on both sides of the camera) with a number of mumblecore and post-mumblecore figures, directing Justin Rice and Alex Karpovsky in his 2009 feature Harmony and Me while also cameoing in Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax and Alex Ross Perry’s The Color Wheel. His recent films, the gleefully edgy RSO [Registered Sex Offender] and the charming, sweet Harmony, were quirky indie comedies but definitely felt like they fit within a […]
by Nick Dawson on Mar 29, 2013 -
LOCARNO CRITICS NOTEBOOK #2
Philosophical musings on the nature of time, an unlikely friendship between a sexy Cali chick and an elderly woman, a bizarrely fast-forwarded comical look at a very sad life, and an indictment of systemic oppression in China: these are the subjects of the four films from Locarno’s main competition (“Concorso internazionale”) that I’ve caught over the past few days. First on the docket is Peter Mettler’s intriguing but disappointing—relative to his other work, at least—The End of Time, an epic non-narrative film about the multitude of perspectives that render an objective definition of linear time meaningless. At times expressive and […]
by Adam Cook on Aug 8, 2012 -
BYINGTON’S “SOMEBODY” AND CASSIDY & SHATZKY’S “FRANCINE” GET PICKED UP
Today two recent festival favorites, Bob Byington’s Somebody Up There Likes Me and Brian Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky’s Francine, found distribution. Somebody, which stars Parks and Recreation‘s Nick Offerman and former “25 New Face” Jess Weixler, premiered at SXSW earlier this year and has now been picked up by Tribeca Film, to be released in Spring 2013. The fifth feature from Byington (Harmony and Me, RSO [Registered Sex Offender]), it is about a trio of friends (Offerman, Weixler and regular Byington collaborator Keith Poulson) who waste their lives on meaningless relationships as time ebbs away. Geoff Gilmore, the former Sundance head […]
by Nick Dawson on Jul 25, 2012 -
Bob Byington, Harmony and Me
JUSTIN RICE IN WRITER-DIRECTOR BOB BYINGTON’S HARMONY AND ME. COURTESY HARMONY AND ME, LLC. From Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez to Bryan Poyser and the Zellner brothers, Austin is a hotbed of gifted directors, and Bob Byington now emerges from there as another talent to be reckoned with. A native of Lincoln, Nebraska, Byington studied at UC-Santa Cruz before going to graduate school at the University of Texas, where he used his American Studies major to indulge his newfound love for the movies. In 1995, he cut his teeth as a production assistant on the indie hit The Last Supper, […]
by Nick Dawson on Sep 18, 2009
