SXSW Wrap-Up

The SXSW Film Festival wrapped up Friday in Austin, Texas. Because the last LiC update nearly destroyed the Internet with its sheer popularity and because I promised another one, here it is, delayed but undaunted. Do not be alarmed, you may continue to ignore it in good health.

All of the reviews came from either Cinematical or SpoutBlog because, frankly, they provided the most comprehensive coverage of SXSW among the sites I traffic. SXSW has an excellent reputation as a vital film festival minus much of the hype and hubbub surrounding Sundance. It also seems to attract less of a crush of blog coverage and even the trades don’t go crazy.

For the record, Cinematical did it’s own Top 10 of SXSW which you can read here, or you can see a few of the reviews I’ve singled out for attention after the jump. Mainly, these are lower profile films than the ones noted last time.

Written and directed by Harmony Korine who wrote Larry Clark’s Kids and would go on to write and direct Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy, Mister Lonely is about a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) living in Paris who falls for a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) and then follows her to live in a commune of other impersonators in a remote castle in the Scottish highlands. Cinematical’s, Kim Voynar is intrigued by the setup, but sounds let down by the execution. She likes the performances by Luna and Morton and, though she doesn’t seem sure what to make of the whole thing, she’s unwilling to declare it a dud.

Kim had better luck with the winner of both the Grand Jury and Audience awards for documentary feature, They Killed Sister Dorothy. It tells the story of the activist nun from Ohio who was brutally murdered in the Brazilian rainforest she’d worked 30 years to try and save. According to Kim, it’s “a story about the wealthy versus the poor, and about an activist trying to protect a natural resource from those who would destroy it for profit.” I included this review because of the award wins and because Cinematical included it in its top 10, but I have to admit I didn’t get a clear sense what Kim liked about it exactly.

The documentary One Minute to Nine is one of the movies at SXSW that Karina Longworth at SpoutBlog says is a must-see. It tells the story of Wendy Maldonado who faces a 10-year prison sentence for murdering the husband who beat her and her three sons over a period of 20 years. Karina calls it “Disturbing and heartbreaking in equal measure” and finds that while we may talk about the oppression of women in other cultures, there are women in our own who find themselves at a similar dead end.

Wellness, the winner of the SXSW Grand Jury Prize for Narrative Feature, is a melancholy story about a middle-aged salesman for a pyramid marketing company selling health products. Kevin at SpoutBlog says it’s a “profound meditation on the blurry line between faith and self-deception” that asks “what do you do when you realize you believe in something that doesn’t exist?” Harsh.

2008 marks the fourth year in a row that Joe Swanberg (Hannah Takes the Stairs) has had a film at SXSW. This year he brought Nights and Weekends, a film about a long distance relationship. Cinematical’s, Erik Davis says “Swanberg and [co-star Greta] Gerwig do a tremendous job tapping into everything we love about our relationships as well as everything we hate – and they do this with moments, glances, kisses and tears. No score. No set pieces. No set up and payoff.” There, and I didn’t even use the popular label whose name I won’t speak (but it rhymes with ‘stumblesnore’) to categorize it.

The winner of the SXSW Audience Award for Narrative Feature, Explicit Ills features Rosario Dawson and Paul Dano among a cast of unknowns as a group of people living at the bottom of the economic ladder in Philadelphia. At Cinematical, Scott Weinberg admires this look at his hometown, saying Mark Webber’s film is “an Altman-esque indie drama that has something to say about poverty, health care, and the importance of basic human kindness.”

Finally, Medicine for Melancholy is Barry Jenkins’ look at the city of San Francisco through the eyes of a black couple spending the day together after a drunken party that led to a one-night stand. Karina likes this examination of “what it feels like to be young, black and artsy in a city in which people who fit that description make up a minuscule fraction of the population.”

Filed under: Film Festivals