SXSW: "Sister Aimee" and an actress to watch

Abe Fried-Tanzer reporting from SXSW

It’s fitting that the last film I got to see at SXSW is actually one I missed at the Sundance Film Festival, brought to Austin as part of the “Festival Favorites” section which also included buzzy titles like Apollo 11 and Little Monsters. Billed as a comedy, drama, musical, romance, and western, Sister Aimee is certainly ambitious. It's also one of the most intriguing films currently on the festival circuit. In its opening title card, Sister Aimee bills its story as five and a half percent truth; the rest: imagination...

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Showbiz History: Nat, Kurt, "She's the Man" and "Goodfellas"

9 random things that happened on this day in showbiz history should you feel like commemorating any of them in your own way...

1906 Brigitte Helms, immortalized in Metropolis (1927) as "Maria / False Maria" is born. 

1919 Iconic musician Nat 'King' Cole born 100 years ago on this very day in Montgomery, Alabama

1941 The National Gallery of Art opens in DC. This month (right now, 2019) they're showing "films from Poverty Row" a series of low budget B films from Hollywood's glory days but made outside the big studios...

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SLO Film Fest: Wolves, Sharks, and that "Delicate Balance"

Nathaniel R reporting from the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival

After a delightful trip back to 1969 iconography and disturbing peek back at 1933 fascism, the San Luis Obispo's 25th festival threw us directly into the immediate now with three engaging documentaries exploring very real, very urgent problems with our ecosystems, relationships with animal life, and the dehumanizing dangers of globalism and late stage capitalism. That may sound depressing, and it was to an extent, but all three films were suffused with enough passion and optimism to make their bitter pills easier to swallow.

The shortest and "lightest" of these with Collin Monda's hour-long documentary The Trouble With Wolves, which is locked but not quite finished (needing funds to complete its rights clearances and such). It's a surprisingly nuanced look at the success and aftershocks of a 1995 federal program to reintroduce gray wolves to the US via Yellowstone National Park.

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SXSW: "X & Y"

Abe Fried-Tanzer reporting from SXSW

X & Y's stars Mikael Persbrandt and director Anna Odell

If you’ve ever wondered what the Scandinavian version of a Charlie Kaufman movie would look like, here’s your answer. The Oscar-winning writer of such imaginative explorations of inner machinations within the movie business as Being John Malkovich and Adaptation and director of Synecdoche New York. The latter serves as the best comparison for this film, featuring a copy of New York City built inside a warehouse designed to have life truly imitate art, or rather the other way around, for his new play. Synecdoche is broader and more tinted with science fiction than this film, but those who have seen it will see an immediate parallel...

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SXSW: Elle Fanning has "Teen Spirit"

Abe Fried-Tanzer reporting from SXSW

It feels like every other movie these days is directed by a famous actor. There are a handful of them at SXSW this year, including Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart (reviewed) and Logan Marshall-Green’s Adopt a Highway starring Ethan Hawke. Both of those make sense given the type of films those actors have starred in, which match up decently with what they have made behind the camera. Max Minghella’s Teen Spirit, on the other hand, is a less expected debut.

Minghella is probably most recognizable from his starring role as the kindhearted Nick on The Handmaid’s Tale, and he also had a memorable part in The Social Network, among other things. His father was the late Oscar-winning Anthony Minghella (The English Patient). That piece of trivia makes the subject of Max’s first film even stranger since it doesn’t track with that kind of serious prestigious filmmaking either...

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