SXSW

There may be no crueler creature on Earth than the average teenager. Slaves to conformity even when trying to be nonconformist, one of teenagers' favorite pastimes is making life miserable for anyone who varies too far from the holy teenage trifecta of great looks, great clothes and great social skills.

The unfortunate titular character of coming-of-age indie film Terri has none of these attributes. Obese, forever clad in pajamas and a quiet loner not really by choice, Terri (Jacob Wysocki) is the quintessential tormented, friendless fat kid who retreats into his own world to escape his schoolmates' endless cruelty. Terri, which screened three times at SXSW, is the quirkiest movie I saw at the festival, an entertaining but oddly written story of a misfit teen's struggle to fit into his inhospitable small-town world.

Terri lives in a dirty, cluttered house with his Uncle James (Creed Bratton), himself an oddball with an unnamed, Alzheimer's-like illness that sets him adrift between complete mental clarity and a trancelike fog of unawareness. The two rely completely on each other for companionship and compassion, as they seem to have no family or friends. Terri's main purpose in life is helping James get through the often frightening moments when his disease takes over. (In one instance, Terri catches James staring glassy-eyed while cooking at the stove, completely oblivious to the burning food in front of him.) When James is lucid, he reciprocates by being Terri's gentle mentor and only friendly human contact.

I'm not the greatest fan of Morgan Spurlock. I felt his Super Size Me was over-dramaticized, heavy-handed, and unfair. I only ever saw one episode of his series 30 Days, and I haven't seen any of his other work. Having heard people describe him as "a poor man's Michael Moore," I entered the Paramount with low expectations for the premiere of The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.

Product placement has become an integral, and inescapable part of TV and film production. Spurlock and co-writer Jeremy Chilnick began with the idea that if co-promotion of products could help make a movie a blockbuster, it could also influence the success of a documentary. So, they set out to make a documentary whose production was financed entirely through product placement and co-promotion. In order to do that, they decided to make the documentary about product placement and co-promotion.

The majority of The Greatest Movie Ever Sold consists of Spurlock meeting with various marketing heads and CEOs to pitch the film and request their participation in it. It is safe to assume they had no idea the meetings would be filmed and themselves be integrated into the final product. Interspersed with these are interviews with consumer advocates, including Ralph Nader; trips to the grocery store presumably to do product research, where Spurlock mostly makes fun of the "Mane 'n Tail" hair conditioner; and a trip to São Paulo, Brazil, where all outdoor advertising (billboards, cabs, buses, everything) has been outlawed.

The Greatest Movie Ever Sold is humorous and entertaining, but doesn't exactly serve as biting commentary on the state of advertising in the media. I believe that documentaries should be fair to their subjects, but if anything it felt the corporate sponsors were presented in a way that if not more favorable, they at least got more camera time. A notable moment was the attorney who when asked his rates stated the real question is how much his $700/hour would offset the fee for appearance and promotion in the film.

The Slackerwood staff is slowly recuperating from SXSW Film Festival, although we're still posting plenty of reviews. Keep an eye on Slackerwood this week for reviews of Austin movies playing SXSW as well as other films we caught, an interview or two and of course plenty of photos.

To kick off the week, I thought I'd share my second-favorite photo of the fest: with both the State and Paramount Theatres serving as SXSW Film venues this week, they lit up the Austin night in an especially festive way. For those who are interested, I took this photo just before My Sucky Teen Romance premiered at the Paramount. (My favorite photo? The one topping this entry, no question about it.)

Feel free to share links to any SXSW Film photos on Flickr or elsewhere that you like. My own best SXSW photos are now publicly viewable in a Flickr set.

The challenges of autism have inspired many great films, from the often-quoted classic Rain Man to the Austin-made Temple Grandin. This isn't surprising, because while autism can be devastating, the successes of autistic people can be very inspirational. Their stories are tailor-made for powerfully dramatic movies.

Fly Away is an example of how autism's challenges can translate into interesting cinema. The low-budget indie, which played SXSW this year, is the story of single mother Jeanne (Beth Broderick) and her teen daughter Mandy (Ashley Rickards), whose severe autism impacts their lives in both expected and unexpected ways. While Fly Away is uneven, it's a mildly entertaining and poignant depiction of living with autism.

Mandy has reached a point in her life where Jeanne must make some difficult decisions about the girl's future. Now an adolescent, Mandy still behaves like a young child at times, throwing tantrums and demanding her way. But she's also becoming a woman who's curious about dating and marriage. She exhibits common autistic behaviors such as fixating on objects, constantly repeating words and phrases, and not listening to others, as if she's in her own world. Jeanne can manage these behaviors, but is less able to handle Mandy's violent outbursts, which get her suspended from her special education program.

"A man walks into an Alamo Drafthouse for the first time" sounds like the start of a joke. But no matter how many times I see someone get giddy over the experience, it makes me happy to live in Austin. The man in question was a SXSW Platinum badgeholder who finally was taking the opportunity to catch a movie on the last evening of the festival.  I don't know if he liked the film, but he sure made the waitress laugh with his enthusiasm at being able to order food and beer at his seat.

As for me, I made it to three more films; four technically, but the last film wasn't holding my attention and being so exhausted, I figured it was better to walk and and wonder if it got better.

The funny and controversial Kumaré, about a man who pretends to be a guru and collects a following, played to a packed house but unfortunately without a Q&A. As James Rocchi described it, Kumaré  is "Being There plus The Music Man, with real heart and insight with the absurdist comedy." He said it better than I could.

Updated with all Audience Award winners

Trying to match the SXSW award winners with their encore screenings the last two days of the SXSW Film Festival? We're making it easy for you with a listing right here, for screenings this afternoon through tomorrow.  The last three audience award titles will be announced tomorrow morning but we have placeholders for them so we can quickly update this page.

Editor's correction/retraction: When we published this article on Friday, it included a couple of errors, including mislabeling the Lone Star States Jury Award winner as the Audience Award winner. We have corrected the errors, and apologize for any confusion and misunderstanding that they caused. Please don't hesitate to contact us immediately if you notice anything incorrect on our website in the future.

Friday Special Screenings 
Grand Jury Award Narrative Feature: Natural Selection (yes, it's playing twice today)
2 pm, Rollins Theater

Audience Award Winner, Documentary Competition Feature:  Kumaré
6:30 pm, Regal Arbor (satellite venue)

It bodes well for Austin filmmaker Emily Hagins's new feature, My Sucky Teen Romance, that the current Twilight-fueled vampire craze shows no signs of abating. Last year's installment of the bloodily romantic franchise, Eclipse, grossed more than $300 million, and new Twilight movies will be released this year and next. It seems that tweens and teens (and adults who dare admit it) have not yet had their fill of films and novels about pale, fanged, lovelorn teenagers. (No, I'm not one of those adults. But I think you knew that.)

Of course, I'm sure Hagins has no aspirations that her film will gross $300 million; the teenage filmmaker probably be happy just to find a distributor. But if the wildly enthusiastic reception at My Sucky Teen Romance's raucous world premiere at the Paramount on March 15 is any indication, a lot of Hagins's friends and fans hope the movie will be a smashing success.

The so-called American Dream is little more than a fantasy for many Americans. We're told to pursue an ideal life of finding a good job, owning a home, and living in a happy, stable family situation. But for much of America, this life isn't reality and never will be.

The impossible disconnect between the increasingly mythological American Dream and life's harsh realities is the underlying theme of Inside America, an unfiltered and unflinching look at the lives of six high school students in Brownsville, Texas. A narrative film with the look and feel of a documentary, Inside America (which had its US premiere at SXSW on March 14 at the ACC Vimeo Theater) is jarringly, agonizingly realistic.

Curiously, while Inside America was filmed in Brownsville, it's actually an Austrian movie. Austrian director and writer Barbara Eder spent a year as an exchange student in Brownsville in 1994; her experiences during that time gave her the idea for the movie. She and producer Constanze Schumann spent three weeks in Brownsville in 2006 hanging out with students and gathering material for the script. They returned in 2007 and managed to shoot a terrific movie with a crew of only five people, a miniscule budget (all the actors are volunteers), and limited access to the film's main set, Brownsville's Hanna High School.

My favorite part about SXSW Film is not the film, it’s the people. And today was a "people" day.

I didn’t intend for it to start that way; after getting to bed at 5 am, I didn’t get moving until noon, and then ended up arriving late to A Bag of Hammers, which was sold out. It seems I wasn’t the only one avoiding downtown today, as I got shut out of Cave of Forgotten Dreams as well.  But it’s all good; I ended up going on a long walk, getting drinks and dinner with a couple of people I’d met before but didn’t know well, and it was a damn good day. Earlier this week I was feeling very unfocused without having a set schedule, but I wouldn’t trade a day like today for anything.   

I really don't want to deal with the madness of downtown tomorrow, but I just may brave it. There are seven encore screenings with audience award titles peppered through the day's schedule. We have the announced award screenings here, but there will be an announcement later this morning with the final audience award winners, so check back to help plan your final day of SXSW 2011. 

The SXSW Texas Shorts screening is a diverse and impressive mix of shorts made in Texas or by Texas filmmakers. While the nine films range widely in their subjects and filmmaking styles, many of them are either dark or darkly funny, exploring everything from substance abuse to a murderous automated pool cleaner. Collections of short films can be hit or miss, but I enjoyed all the Texas Shorts selections. The smallish crowd at the screening on March 15 at the Rollins Theatre seemed very appreciative of the films also.

The most interesting of the lot is Chainsaw Found Jesus, directed by Spencer Parsons (I'll Come Running). Described as a "suburban fairy tale," the Austin-made film is a tragicomic story about two fathers and their sons who spend an afternoon together. While the kids entertain themselves with porn magazines and a neighborhood walk, the fathers do a drug deal in the garage and discuss why one of them recently turned to Jesus. The film is very funny and yet slightly bitter, and Sonny Carl Davis adds a bit of indie-film royalty to the mix.

Arguably the most intense film is Drawback, directed by Daniel Rigdon. In this Austin-made short, an impoverished, beaten-down man visits his former girlfriend. From their conversation and several slickly edited flashbacks, we learn that he's lived a hard life of bad choices and bad news; now he's trying to make sense of his fate. Well crafted, empathetic and thoughtful, Drawback is a captivating look at a life no one would envy.