The legendary Austin hospitality is especially extended to first-time filmmakers. That’s what the Emerging Visions section is about—highlighting the talent making the move from attention-getting short to career-making features. In with a chance this time around are documentaries tackling topics like Bill Hicks and bears, as well as features revolving around mung beans and android love.
Remember 2008? Man, wasn’t that a time! We were all running around, registering to vote, filled with hope in our hearts, shouting “Yes, we can!” at the top of their lungs … 2010 and the suck has set in. That hasn’t stopped director Jeff Deutchman, so inspired by the spirit of the times that he made this documentary on what people were doing the day Barack Obama was elected president.
For many, getting to work means jumping into the car and enduring a slow commute to the infernal chatter of morning zoo radio. Problem is, all this four-wheeled to-ing and fro-ing is killing our planet by degrees. Monteith McCollum took his cameras and went looking for those who do it differently. He found a quartet of characters who have taken to the pavement and waterways to get to work.
Why not wait until 48 hours before the SXSW Film Festival kicks off to post our preview? That’s a question that will haunt Squally until we crawl into our premature grave. While nobler movie bloggers pack their bags for Austin–visions of Harry Knowles smeared with BBQ dancing in their heads—here’s a humble look at what’s screening over the next nine days. First up: a rattle bag of marquee fodder which includes the Duplasses’ venture into the mainstream, Robert Duvall facing off against Bill Murray, Rhys Ifans as a stoner hero and the triumphant return of Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Click on the titles to watch trailers.
The Duplass Brothers do a David Gordon Green, moving to a bigger budget and familiar faces, while mining a familiar seam of discomfort that doesn’t seem so radical in hindsight. Things look like they’re turning around for loser John C. Reilly when he meets the hot Marisa Tomei. The problem is she has a stay-at-home son played by Jonah Hill. That means he’s going to be plenty gross and creepy.
Fresh from Sundance, where it failed to raise hackles, comes British satirist Chris Morris’s terrorist comedy. A quartet of hapless Sheffield Muslims cook up a suicide bomber plot that, in the best tradition of Anglo-cringe comedy, comes undone through their own stupidity. The point is that while fundamentalism and dimwittedness go hand-in-hand, the results are no laughing matter. Feel-badness all ‘round, then.
A race to Mars between humans and robots should be stuff of James Cameron’s next 3D-ring circus. Instead, it’s filtered through the modern indie sensibility of director Geoff Marslett. So astronaut Mark Duplass (Humpday) instead gets sweet on Zoe Simpson, and the space opera becomes a pop art yak-fest. The animation looks like an attempt to make Waking Life with photocopiers, but this still qualifies as one of the oddest movies of the year. With a cast that includes Kinky Friedman and Giant Sand’s Howe Gelb. Expect Mars to come in for a landing at this year’s SXSW Film Festival.
Inside every two-headed mumblecore beast is a mainstream director dying to make a comedy where John C. Reilly pretends to be Seth Rogen. But John C. Reilly pretending to be Seth Rogen is still funnier than most other mortals. In this Duplass Brothers film, his shlub falls for single mother Marisa Tomei. Her offspring turns out to be the creepiest child since Rosemary went into labor. Screening at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
“The young people in the quickly made Godard movies of the sixties dreamed of becoming gangsters, thieves, revolutionaries—characters, so to speak, in a movie. The studs and the female “superstars” of the Warhol films played at Hollywood glamour while enacting the ceremonies of decadence and self-destruction. Mumblecore disdains flamboyance; its reigning mood is diffidence.”
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