SXSW Film Festival: What’s Been Said So Far

The jury and audience awards were handed out at the 2008 SXSW Film Festival on Tuesday evening. The Austin, Texas based festival which began March 7 and concludes March 14 honored They Killed Sister Dorothy, a documentary about a 73-year-old activist nun from Ohio who was murdered in Brazil in 2005, with both the Grand Jury and Audience Documentary Feature prizes. Jake Mahaffy’s Wellness won the Grand Jury Award for Narrative Feature award while Explicit Ills starring Rosario Dawson and Paul Dano won the Audience Award for Narrative Feature.

Now seems like as good a time as any to take a look at what some critics and bloggers are saying about the things they’ve seen at the festival so far. Let’s start with some of the higher profile offerings after the jump.

21, which officially opened this year’s SXSW, tells the true story of a bunch of MIT students who learn to cheat at blackjack in Vegas by counting cards.

• Christopher at SpoutBlog calls it a “gangster/crime film for nerds.” It’s a concept he likes on paper, but finds that nerds just aren’t as much fun to watch on screen as gangsters and blackjack isn’t as interesting as bank robberies.
• Cinematical’s Eric D. Snider finds the whole thing as generic as the title.

From producer Judd Apatow, the sort-of-romantic comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall tells the story of Jason Segel (How I Met Your Mother) who is dumped by girlfriend Kristin Bell (Veronica Mars) only to run into her and her new boyfriend on a trip to Hawaii taken to help him get over her.

• In Variety, Joe Leydon gives it a positive review, finding plenty of “withering put-downs, nifty non sequiturs, seriocomic ravings, [and] wisecracks that range from snappy to snappish.”
• Cinematical’s Scott Weinberg says that Sarah Marshall “delivers a lot of laughs” and that the screenplay “strikes an excellent balance between farcical silliness and weirdly sweet romance.”

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay is the fairly self-explanatory titled sequel to stoner favorite Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.

• Joe Leydon likes it, comparing it to a cross between Animal House and Dr. Strangelove and calling it one of the ballsiest comedies to come out of Hollywood in a long time. Sorry Joe, you lost me with the comparison. I’m not buying it.
• At SpoutBlog, Christopher liked the original better saying the humor in Guantanamo can be boiled down to a kind of formula that is repeated over and over. Even so, he finds it funny though not consistently so. Mostly he likes the performances of the two leads. “Cho and Penn are again a delightful duo.”
• Cinematical’s Eric Davis spots the same formula and ultimately finds it just as stale. On top of that, he found the sequel missing a certain relatability that White Castle had. Still, he seems to have begrudgingly liked it, if not as much as the first one.
• The Hollywood Reporter’s John DeFore on the other hand calls it “witless,” opening his review as follows: “Innumerable sharks lurk in the ocean between New Jersey and Cuba, and Harold and Kumar just jumped every one of them.” Youch, that can’t be good.

The Promotion stars Seann William Scott and John C. Reilly as two men competing for a promotion at a supermarket chain.

• Variety’s Todd McCarthy pans it, calling it a “stillborn would-be comedy.”
• Scott Weinberg at Cinematical loves it on the other hand. He calls it “a very small, very funny, and oddly warm-hearted flick” and goes so far as to claim it will be on his 2008 top 10 if it comes out this year.

Finally, Simon Pegg (Hot Fuzz, Shawn of the Dead) is in a new comedy called Run, Fat Boy, Run about a man trying to win back the woman he left at the altar five years before by winning a marathon.

• SlashFilm’s Mel Valentin says its mix of “raunch, silliness, slapstick, and sentimentality” amounts to “the perfect romantic comedy for people who don’t care for the genre.”
• Cinematical’s Scott Weinberg isn’t so impressed. He says it’s predictable from the very start though he finds it amiable and recommendable to fans of Simon Pegg.

That’s all for now. Next I’ll look into some of the smaller, lower-profile offerings including the award winners in the hope of uncovering a few gems. Stay tuned.

Filed under: Awards, Film Festivals