Local Indies

Texas Independence Day is March 2, and local PBS station KLRU will commemorate the day with "Texas Independents' Day," an event involving several local filmmakers whose work has reached a national audience. For the first time, three Austin-based projects have been selected for this season of the PBS Emmy-award winning series Independent Lens: The Eyes of Me (my review), Sunshine (pictured above) and The Horse Boy (my review). All three films premiered in the Lone Star States category at the 2009 South by Southwest Film Festival. PBS estimates that 2 million viewers will tune in to Independent Lens this year.

On Tuesday, March 2, UT professor/local documentary filmmaker Paul Stekler (Last Man Standing) will moderate a panel discussion at the Austin City Limits studio with directors Michel O. Scott (The Horse Boy), Karen Skloss (Sunshine) and Keith Maitland (The Eyes of Me). Following the discussion, KLRU will host a live screening of the Independent Lens broadcast of The Eyes of Me at 9 pm. Doors are at 7 pm, with the panel discussion at 8 pm before the screening. Space is limited, so be sure to RSVP here.

SXSW may have a lot of splashy marquee films from all around the globe, but some of us here in Austin want to see what our hometown is bringing to the film festival this year. I'd say it's a good year for Austin and Texas at SXSW but I say that every single year.

Here's the annual Slackerwood list of features playing SXSW 2010 that have Austin connections of one kind or another. The list begins with films shot in Austin, then moves onto other local ties. If we left your film off the list and it was shot here or includes local cast or crew, post a comment or drop us a line and we'll be happy to include it.

• Dance with the One -- This feature was produced by the University of Texas Film Institute (UTFI). Director Michael Dolan and many cast/crew members are from Austin. It's set in Texas, but I don't know yet if/how much it's set here in town.
• The Happy Poet -- I don't know much about this film by Paul Gordon, except that more than one filmmaker going to SXSW this year has told me to see it. But many of the film's stills (like the one pictured above) show recognizable local spots, and a movie about a poet who opens his own organic food trailer sounds very Austin-ish to me.

As someone who closely follows Austin film news, it's impossible for me to talk about Whip It -- or to watch it -- without facing the issues of its setting and production. The rollerderby movie was written by a former Austinite, is set in Austin and a nearby small town, makes Austin practically a character ... and apart from a few days of shooting scenes of notable locations here, was shot in Michigan. Should we count it as an Austin film? Does it matter, especially for non-locals?

Regardless of where it was filmed, Whip It -- now available on DVD and Blu-Ray -- is a charming film, aimed at a teenage crowd but enjoyable by grownups as well. I don't need to tell you how refreshing it is to watch a movie written and directed by women, in which the girls and women are all fairly strong and well-rounded characters who do much more than dream about or follow the menfolk.

Bliss (Ellen Page) is a high-school girl in small-town Central Texas. Her mom (Marcia Gay Harden) has pushed Bliss and her younger sister into the regional beauty pageant circuit, insisting that it will help them later in life. Bliss is also working part-time with her best friend Pash (Alia Shawkat) at a local diner with a giant pig on it. While in Austin shopping for clothes, Bliss finds out about rollerderby and is fascinated. She decides to sneak off to join a banked-track rollergirl team, the Hurl Scouts, lying about her age. A whole new world opens as she becomes Babe Ruthless.

The SXSW 2010 Film Festival feature-film lineup was announced Wednesday night, and it's full of goodies. I am still sorting through them all with lots of "oooh!" noises. Some of these are films I wished I could have caught at Sundance (but I'm allergic to snow), some are films I've been hearing about for awhile, some are very cool-sounding surprises.

You can find the whole feature lineup over at the SXSW Film website -- the shorts haven't been announced yet -- but here are a few of the highlights:

• Headliners include the Duplass brothers' film Cyrus (I told you so); MacGruber, starring Val Kilmer, Jason Bateman and the underrated actress of 2009, Kristen Wiig; Jean-Pierre Jeunet's film Micmacs -- which played BNAT in 2009 along with Kick-Ass, the fest's opening-night film; Mr. Nice, which stars Rhys Ifans (and Christian McKay in a small role ... don't swoon, Debbie); and Sundance favorite The Runaways.
• Spotlight premieres include Audrey the Trainwreck (edited by St. Nick director David Lowery), Aaron Katz's Cold Weather, and Tim Blake Nelson's Leaves of Grass.

It's hard to believe it's been almost six months since the slacker revenge film Red White and Blue wrapped shooting in Austin. An update in August from writer/director Simon Rumley revealed that he was hard at work editing the film. Simon and co-producer Bob Portal have now completed work with the last stages of post-production with their sound editors and Post house Prime Focus. The film is now fully color timed/graded and sound mixing is completed, ready for Hi Def delivery.

Great news, as it has been officially announced that Red White and Blue is having its world premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival in the Netherlands on January 29. Rotterdam is the festival where Simon first premiered his previous film The Living and the Dead, which had its American premiere at Fantastic Fest in 2008.  

The first feature from Austin's filmmaking team of David and Nathan Zellner, Goliath, hit the DVD shelves (and Netflix) on Tuesday. David Zellner wrote and directed the locally shot comedy, and plays the main character; Nathan produced and edited the film, and has a small but quite memorable role. I interviewed the Zellners before their film played SXSW 2008.

The movie is about a nameless everyschlub (David Zellner) who is dealing with a divorce and some nastiness at work, and at the same time can't find his beloved cat Goliath. Every move he makes is strange and unworkable: shouting a message onto his ex-wife's voicemail, firing a coworker (Wiley Wiggins) at exactly the wrong time, trying to use a balloon to sail a Missing Cat poster through the air. A quick look at his Web browser history seems to tell it all.

Goliath is not a plot-heavy movie. Here's this poor guy who just wants one thing in life and because it's withheld, it makes him crazy. He's not quite sympathetic -- at times I would almost want to give the guy a hug except for that horrible mustache. And then he says or does something really horrible or unforgivable, like the conversation he has with his wife after they sign the divorce papers.

I am not only a sucker for 1930s comedies, but I also love movies that are set in the 1930s. The dialogue! The costumes! The music! And especially the hats. I love a good hat in a movie, right up there with a well-written script and a lack of treacly sentiment.

Fortunately for me, Me and Orson Welles has a well-written script, no treacle, and lovely Thirties period costumes, including a few sharp hats. The latest film from Austin filmmaker Richard Linklater is set in New York City in 1937, when Orson Welles decided to stage Julius Caesar at the newly dubbed Mercury Theater. Local screenwriters Holly Gent Palmo and Vincent Palmo, Jr. adapted the novel by Robert Kaplow.

Austin filmmaker Richard Linklater and actor Christian McKay were recently in town for the regional premiere of Me and Orson Welles. This is McKay's first major film role -- he plays Welles, staging his now-famous version of Julius Caesar in 1937. Zac Efron plays a teenager who is pulled into the whirlwind of the stage production.

I managed to catch up with Linklater and McKay before the red carpet and talk about the film. Here's what they had to say.

Christian, you've done Orson Welles on stage, and now on film -- how do the two feel to you?

Christian McKay: They are completely different characters. On stage, I played him up to the age of 70  with a fat suit -- my dad used to say you don't need that -- and the stick-on beard. To play him right at the beginning of his career, at 22 starting out with the Mercury Theatre -- it's extraordinary, it's a brave time. To make such an astonishing success of it, that it is still considered one of the greatest Shakespearean performances in North American theatre history. It's just amazing and this is of course before War of the Worlds and Kane, to do all that by the time you are 26.

The Sundance 2010 lineup was announced over several days last week, and you can find Austin connections everywhere. We may not have had a huge amount of representation in the Spirit Award nominations, but Sundance is almost as Austin-y as SXSW this year. Okay, I'm exaggerating, but it's still exciting.

The biggest Austin-y news is that local filmmaker/AFS staffer Bryan Poyser's feature film Lovers of Hate is one of the films in competition at Sundance this year. If you've been reading Poyser's blog, you know all about it (well, not all, but a lot of interesting stuff). The film is about two brothers attracted to the same woman.

Lovers of Hate was shot in Park City last year after Poyser (pictured above) attended Sundance, and also here in Austin. The cast includes a number of locals, including filmmaker Alex Karpovsky (Trust Me, This is All Made Up; and Poyser played his roomie in Andrew Bujalski's Beeswax), Chris Doubek (Harmony and Me, Poyser's The Cassidy Kids), and Heather Kafka (the "unfit mother" at Carl's Jr. in Idiocracy). The cinematographer is David Lowery (St. Nick), sometimes of Austin and Dallas, the producers include Jay and Mark Duplass, I could go on and on with local ties. I hope we'll get the chance to see it here at SXSW 2010.

The 25th Annual Film Independent Spirit Awards were announced on Tuesday, and two Austin-related projects were honored with nominations:

• Christian McKay was nominated in the Best Supporting Male category for his portrayal of Orson Welles in local filmmaker Richard Linklater's latest feature, Me and Orson Welles. You can see photos of McKay and Linklater in our photo essay from the Me and Orson Welles red carpet in Austin.
• Dia Sokol, producer of Beeswax, was nominated for the Piaget Producers Award. Beeswax was filmed locally and starred many local filmmakers in acting roles. Jette reviewed the movie at SXSW this year; the above photo, with Sokol in the middle, was taken at the SXSW Q&A for Beeswax.

Austinites may recognize many other titles on the list, which you can read in full after the jump. A number of the nominated films played at SXSW or at Austin Film Festival this year. Beeswax director/editor Andrew Bujalski now lives in Austin, and can be seen below with SXSW Film Director Janet Pierson, who was also featured in the film.