March 15--No film festival, especially if it's part of a larger glob of festivals and activities, sticks to a nice, neat message. Art has a way around that nonsense. Nevertheless: Talk about your mixed messages!
Continuing through Saturday, the party surrounded by concerts, screenings and seminars known collectively as the South by Southwest Music, Film and Interactive Conferences and Festivals opened Friday with a keynote conversation featuring the highest-level guest speaker currently available: President Barack Obama.
In elegant broad strokes, Obama talked with Texas Tribune editor Evan Smith about the need for younger, tech-savvy, SXSW-attending citizens to get involved with making government work better.
Almost in passing, Obama noted how "people's attention spans have shrunk," and how we're "fetishizing our phones above every other value," and "how much of our lives are digitalized." I watched this on a live-stream in a ballroom at the Austin Convention Center, and everybody around me who wasn't on their smartphones at the moment nodded in wordless agreement, before going back to figuring out the online SXSW schedule.
Judging by its first few days, the 30th edition of SXSW presented a simple, enormous contradiction. How do you sell people on the glorious economic promise of the digital realm while warning them of the dangers? Yes, in its daylong "online harassment summit" and other panels, the interactive slice of the SXSW pie paid lip service to the worrisome, dangerous aspects of our online lives. But the dominant offerings told another story. While Obama spoke, a Friday panel convened on the subject of "Short-Form Filmmaking: Stars of Social Media." In the same Friday afternoon time slot, convention center SXSW panel options included "Dude, Where's My Par? Making Virtual Reality Golf."
Several SXSW films over the weekend underscored the risk and the soul-crushing aspects of lives lit by the cold glow of a laptop screen. The arresting if overly slick documentary "Beware the Slenderman" introduced a digital nightmare into a digitally obsessed festival. Airing later this year on HBO, it's a gut-grinder from director Irene Taylor Brodsky that breaks down the Waukesha, Wis., case of Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser. The girls' obsessive online lives and devotion to the viral fictional sensation known as Slenderman went horribly off-line in 2014 when the 12-year-olds stabbed a friend 19 times, leaving her for dead.
The third girl lived. The documentary necessarily deals with a tangle of issues involving mental illness and the role played by omnivorous technology, and the online universe's hold on the imaginations of millions upon millions of kids, in all sorts of childhoods.
In "Kill Me Please," a cool, carefully composed debut feature from Brazil's Anita Rocha da Silveira, a spree of apparent serial killings in a newly developed, eerily empty neighborhood of Rio becomes the subject of fascination for a group of teenage girls. In scene after scene, someone's gaping at a screen or fiddling with a device; it's as if they can only process real-life horror by channeling their angst into selfies.
These films exist on one movie planet. Last year, the SXSW Film Festival planted a flag on a different planet altogether. "Furious 7," "Trainwreck" and "Spy," one global smash and two solid hits, premiered at last year's SXSW in the same theater in the same six-hour period on the same very, very big day.
This year, by contrast, the festival opened with a hometown hero's latest, which was a much smaller sort of mainstream picture: Austin resident and "Boyhood" auteur Richard Linklater's slight but amiable 1980-set college comedy "Everybody Wants Some!!" Other weekend premieres included the latest from Linklater's fellow Austinite Jeff Nichols, the fascinating, mixed-up "Midnight Special" (opening commercially April 1, as is "Everybody Wants Some!!"), along with a work-in-progress world premiere screening of "Keanu" (opening April 29), in which Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele kept the stupid fun going for nearly one-half of an increasingly labored mixture of cute-cat video and drug-war action comedy.
At SXSW this year, the Chicago aroma wafted everywhere. Logan Kibens' intriguing "Operator," co-written by longtime Neo-Futurist Sharon Greene, was shot all around Andersonville and along Lake Michigan. The story concerns Joe (Martin Starr), an anxiety-prone programmer who enlists his performer wife Emily (Mae Whitman) to become the reassuring voice of his latest customer-service client project. He then finds himself getting more comfortable with the digital fabrication than the real thing.
Much of "Operator" was shot inside the Neo-Futurarium on Ashland Avenue; hotel concierge by day, Emily is a fledgling member of the long-running late-night scripted sketch revue "Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind." Chicago's image as an enterprising theater capital is fondly maintained in this wry depiction of a marriage on the digital rocks.
"Insatiable: The Homaro Cantu Story" also debuted at SXSW, and filmmaker Brett A. Schwartz treats his subject, the late, great Chicago chef, to a respectful if somewhat routine chronicle of his rise and fall. Cantu's 2015 suicide rerouted, by tragic necessity, the course of Schwartz's project; there's a ton of interesting material here, more recounted than explored.
We're still waiting for the restaurant scene documentary that Chicago deserves. If you took the best parts of "Insatiable," the best parts of the recent "For Grace" (about Cantu's fellow Chicago culinary star Curtis Duffy) and found a way to capture, honestly, their experiences under the tutelage of chef, restaurateur and trendsetter Charlie Trotter, then you'd really have a meal.
My favorite film this year at SXSW wasn't a Chicago project per se. But the spirit and the lessons of Chicago comic improvisation guru Del Close guided every scene. Close's advice and axioms, in fact, are name-checked several times during the wonderful comedy "Don't Think Twice" from writer-director Mike Birbiglia, about the mostly mid-30s members of a fictional New York improv troupe called The Commune.
The friendships, rivalries, jealousies and performance wiles of the ensemble are handled with a disarmingly delicate touch. The cast, a terrific one, includes Birbiglia, Keegan-Michael Key, Gillian Jacobs, Chris Gethard, Tami Sagher and Kate Micucci. It was an apt bookend to the SXSW-screened documentary "Thank You Del: The Story of the Del Close Marathon," a pleasant if frustratingly minor ode to Close's influence on so many starry Second City and Upright Citizens Brigade improv and sketch comedy alums.
The Close tribute was shot during the 2013 improv marathon held, as it is every year, in New York. Amy Poehler, among others, offers discreet commentary on Close's drug-addled, alcohol-ravaged genius. In the late Close's own words, he learned to content himself with being "the door through which" so many great talents passed.
Halfway through "Don't Think Twice," one of the rare movies about comedy that actually nails the process, the end result and the offstage dramas, I realized something was missing. Here, in the middle of a digitally obsessed, technologically preoccupied festival selling itself as a convergence between film, music and interactive domains, was a defiantly analog movie. Improv doesn't respond well to technology, except as a satiric subject. Birbiglia's characters aren't living in the past, but they may as well be cobblers, or commedia dell'arte street performers.
What's missing from "Don't Think Twice," which is due out this summer, is what makes it human, and makes it special.
mjphillips@tribpub.com
