Indieville
March 2009 - Posts
SXSW 2009: "The Hurt Locker."
Wed, Mar 25 2009 4:49 PM
What's bound to be one of the best action films of the year happen to be set in Iraq.
Where the wild things are trailered.
Wed, Mar 25 2009 12:23 PM
Finally, we get a glimpse of Spike Jonze's long-awaited kiddie (?) flick.
SXSW 2009: "Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be the Same."
Tue, Mar 24 2009 8:05 PM
A portrait of the artist as totally unbearable.
"I think my heart's big enough..."
Tue, Mar 24 2009 11:03 AM
Funny or Die gets all inside mumblecore baseball with this trailer for the nonexistent SXSW 2009 selection "The Dirty Garage," about, apparently, how a pair of childhood friends/brothers clean a garage and have lots of incoherent conversation, accompanied by one of their former flames. Swanberg co-conspirators Kent Osborne and Tipper Newton appear, as do fake quotes from Amy Taubin, Scott Foundas and Manohla Dargis. C'mon, though, an hour and 45 minutes? Realistically, this would run 75 minutes, tops, and that's with the help of an extra slow credit crawl....
SXSW 2009: "We Live in Public."
Thu, Mar 19 2009 7:12 PM
Josh Harris might just be too good a subject for a film. A dotcom millionaire, Harris was unerringly ahead of his time, seeing promise in the internet before it really existed, focusing on chat at the dawn of services like Prodigy, moving into web-only TV before there was even infrastructure for it, and putting the home life of himself and his girlfriend online 24/7 all the way back in 2001. (The fact that by the end of "We Live in Public" he's been forced to flee to Ethiopia to escape his creditors seems today merely more evidence of forward thinking.) Such was Harris' foresight that the filmmaker he picked to document his work some ten years ago was Ondi Timoner, now the only director to twice win the top nonfiction prize at Sundance. Timoner was there to capture his rise and the fall and to get some truly spectacular footage,...
SXSW 2009: "Observe and Report."
Tue, Mar 17 2009 12:28 PM
Jody Hill's "Observe and Report" is like a Will Ferrell movie that's been run over by a car again and again until it's warped and unrecognizable. It's still has the rough shape of a feel-good story about a lovable loser, a mall security guard who longs to be a real policeman and who's in love with the bitchy make-up counter girl while failing to see that the sweet coffee stand cashier genuinely cares about him. And it manages to hit every expected point in that scenario, including the triumphant nabbing of a flasher who's been terrorizing the shopping complex, without being in the least bit feel-good -- a testament to Hill, whose willingness to take his laughs darker than anyone would expect and than some will be able to tolerate gave his 2006 debut "The Foot Fist Way" an immediate cult following. Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen) isn't just an oddball...
SXSW 2009: "Sorry, Thanks."
Tue, Mar 17 2009 8:56 AM
Apologies for whipping out the m-word, but mumblecore always seemed to me to be defined by its choreography of conflict avoidance. Its characters are so vague about they want and what they think because what they definitely don't want is to lay those things out and risk disagreement, rejection or open hostility. They lack any obvious sharp edges, and so seem to be infected with terminal niceness, but to say that is to ignore all the passive aggression lurking underneath the surface of those meandering exchanges. A fine sign of how the mumble-crowd is coming of age is Dia Sokol's directorial debut "Sorry, Thanks," a film set in a familiar milieu of noncommittal 20-somethings with a fair amount of time on their hands, but one that also asks its characters to come to terms with the fact that not acknowledging what they're doing doesn't mean they can't hurt anyone. Kira...
SXSW 2009: "Trust Us, This Is All Made Up."
Sun, Mar 15 2009 3:38 PM
How to capture improvised comedy, which is the essence of having to be there, on film? Recorded, performances are always going to feel flat without the high wire act immediacy of watching people pull characters, jokes and storylines out of thin air. The central hour or so of Alex Karpovsky's documentary "Trust Us, This Is All Made Up" is a straight shot of a show that improv specialists T. J. Jagodowski and David Pasquesi did at the Barrow Street Theatre in New York, where they have a standing monthly gig. Filmed on multiple cameras capturing the goings-on from different angles, it's essentially concert-style footage that suffers from that sense of remove while remaining a lively enough document of what Jagodowski and Pasquesi are legendary for -- long-form improv, done on a stage bare except for three chairs, all of it, as Jagodowski assures before the pair start, invented on the...
SXSW 2009: "The 2 Bobs."
Sun, Mar 15 2009 11:13 AM
Goofy, well-intentioned and not particularly good, "The 2 Bobs" is a mad-lib love letter to the city of Austin -- the tech industry, barbecue and a billion other disparate elements have been swirled together into a shambolic comedy about how the brilliant, socially inept founders of a gaming company, both named Bob, lose the title they spent years coding and are forced out into the harsh daylight to attempt, with backup from some friends, to retrieve it. Because it's written and directed by Tim McCanlies, who scripted "The Iron Giant" and, less excellently, "Secondhand Lions" (which he also helmed), the film has more recognizable faces than you'd expect, given its scale. Jay Chandrasekhar plays a villainous spam entrepreneur, Mika Boorem's the token geek girl and "The Perfect Score"'s Leonardo Lam, who I'd happily watch in anything, hams it up a gothy art director with an affected English accent that keeps...
SXSW 2009: Reinventing the distribution wheel.
Sat, Mar 14 2009 9:17 AM
Times are tough everywhere right now, but they've been tough in the indie distribution world long before the current economic downturn. Too many films, too high advertising costs, not enough arthouse screens, not enough time for titles to build up buzz before they're bumped to make room for next week's offerings -- people bemoan the shift away from theatergoing, but theatrical releases have largely become just a glorified means of marketing a film's DVD or digital release. There are several attempts to break away from the traditional release method kicking off here in Austin this week: "The Least of These" is getting a simultaneous festival and online premiere via SnagFilms; our sister company IFC Entertainment's putting five films on VOD via Festival Direct as they makes their premieres; Cinetic's just put three films from last year's fest that didn't get theatrical deals up on Hulu, "We Are Wizards," "Yeast" and...
Tribeca goes on a diet.
Mon, Mar 9 2009 12:45 PM
The 2009 Tribeca competition and discovery line-ups were announced this morning, and indieWIRE has the full list of films here. This new recession-era Tribeca consists of a svelte 84 features, and I'm sure I'm not the only journalist sighing in relief at that number -- in previous years, sprawling Tribeca line-ups made screenings sometimes feel like a crapshoot, and the festival loomed like a behemoth difficult to get an overall sense of. Quick observations on the selections: The Polish brothers have another film already? Having premiered "Manure" at Sundance, they're bringing you-can't-go-home-to-high-school-again comedy "Stay Cool," which stars Winona Ryder (!) and Hilary Duff (!), to New York. Conor McPherson's "The Eclipse" seems to promise an as far as I know unprecedented mixture of the supernatural and literary festival culture. The docs look more promising than the narratives at first glance this year, with new films from Ian Olds ("Operation: Dreamland"),...
True/False 2009 and the point of panels
Thu, Mar 5 2009 5:46 PM
When I tell people I only want to go to panels in which the speakers get into a fight, they usually laugh. I do not join them. I really do long to see a state-of-the-industry type discussion featuring some of the most serious of my colleagues build into a WWF-style, chair-throwing brawl, and by golly, someday my wish will come true, even if I have to heft that chair myself. Panels are the starchy side dish of film festivals and conferences, and they're often informative and a little dry, because moderating is difficult, because topics are broad, and because people are generally nice and cautious and very aware of being on the record. Most panels could use some bodyslamming, or at the very least some strong disagreement. I took in two of the best panels I'd seen in a while at the True/False Film Festival this past week, and while...
"In a Lonely Place" by way of Atari's "Crystal Castles"...
Wed, Mar 4 2009 10:17 AM
...with a touch of Chris Ware. That's the easiest way to sum up David O'Reilly's fantastic "Please Say Something," which won the short film Golden Bear at Berlin this year. (In an interview, he compared it to "Breaking the Waves" and "Persona," but pointed out "There's also a nod to Funny Games." A blockily animated cat and mouse live together in a blustery, geometric, largely monochromatic future, communicating in subtitled squeaks. Despite these trappings, the film's actually a half absurd, half genuinely sad story of the couple's troubled domestic life, one that runs through and refreshes every cliche of emotional abuse and relationship ups and down in the book -- when she leaves him, he doesn't even look up from his laptop; later he collapses in grief at a coffee shop when she's at the hospital. O'Reilly's offered his work up online, and you can watch it below....
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