Austin, Texas, the cosmopolitan state capital, plays host to the sprawling music, film and technology festival that is South by Southwest.
South by Southwest is, surprisingly, a lot like college. The ten-day festival behemoth, which runs in March in Austin, Texas, brings together individuals from all corners of the globe in the same way that a university does, but requires no application, interview, or test-taking (a student ticket will cost you around $400; regular prices run from $1300 to $1700). Downtown Austin transforms into what is almost a campus: the convention center, a quad-classroom hybrid, is flanked by chain hotels, which function as residence halls, not only because everyone staying at them is a festival-goer, but because many events take place in their conference rooms (think Lit. Hum in Carman). Rainey Street is eerily evocative of Frat Row—the classic version, not Columbia’s—with historic buildings repurposed for enormous parties, big crowds and borderline alcoholics, plus gourmet food trucks. Oh, and Netflix is hosting, not Fiji. And they turned the basement into a “speakeasy” to plug their new Bonnie and Clyde film. And Father John Misty showed up for a surprise concert.
The decadence that streaming giants like Netflix and tech players like Amazon bring to the festival—fully themed promotional environments serving free food, wine, beer and merchandise—would on its own make for a worthy attraction. But these destinations are merely supplements to the main event: thousands, literally thousands of screenings, panels and workshops, themed to technology, music, and cinema. Over 100 films will screen at SXSW this year, the majority of which are world premieres. Around 2,000 acts fill the music schedule. Heavyweight politicians have already made appearances, from Beto to Warren to AOC, and Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, co-founder of Dreamworks and former CEO of eBay, respectively, unveiled new content for their mobile platform Quibi on the festival’s second day. To score a SXSW slot, as an entrepreneur, a filmmaker, a musician, is to put yourself on the map, if you aren’t already on it. South By is where Brie Larson starred in Short Term 12, which launched her career. Twitter essentially debuted here in 2007. Katy Perry leveraged a 2007 set to secure a record deal, and soon after produced a smash hit.
Amazon promoting its new series Good Omens with a pavilion that merges the Garden of Eden and the apocalypse.
CUFP flew to Austin for four days of the festival, surviving off minimal sleep, missing lunch to secure seats, grumbling about wait times and volunteer mismanagement when we were turned away from Us, and reveling in the endless supply of creativity, commentary and celebrity. We attended nine premieres, and many more conversations with journalists, actors, directors and talk show hosts. We tried out virtual reality and haptic sound technology, passed an unnoticed Shia Labeouf in a convention center hallway—he really isn’t famous anymore—and goggled over Willie Nelson, who sat in our row at a screening, but wasn’t on hand for a Q&A afterward. He lives in Austin, and likes movies set in Texas, which this one was.
The beauty of premieres is that we entered each theater without pre-settled determinations of the films’ quality obtained from Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic. The very critics who shape public opinion scribbled notes next to us, and they bore no impact on the films’ immediate responses, the hearty laughs and eagerness to enjoy, absent retrospective judgment. CUFP found something to like in almost everything we saw, even if the commercial prospects of some pictures may ultimately be hindered by critical drubbing. That said, we had favorites.
Yes, God, Yes and South Mountain were both narrative feature contenders, eligible for the Grand Jury prize, which rewards small-budget films from little-known directors and writers. The former concerned a Catholic high school senior’s experimentation with masturbation, and her experience at a school retreat. The latter exposed the cracks in a middle-aged woman’s marriage, as she spends the summer with friends and family in a bucolic region of upstate New Jersey. Women helmed both films, which complexify the female experience typically depicted on screen. In Yes, God, Yes, after accidentally viewing porn stills in an AOL chat room (the setting is turn-of-the-twenty-first-century), Alice starts to practice self-pleasure, using her mobile phone as a vibrator, while learning from teachers and counselors that sex with yourself is as much of a sin as sex before marriage. Though the script trips up over triteness more than once (we get the post-retreat inspirational speech), there are valuable insights into the struggle of deciphering, through conservative education and the confusion of young adulthood, what it means to be sexual as a woman, how talking about sex has for women necessitated whispers and a certain degree of self-abnegation, when men enjoy the benefit of open conversations about their hard-ons and fantasies. Lila, the protagonist of South Mountain, must process her husband’s affair, and in doing so make sense of her own sexual identity. She derives anguish from abandonment, but also liberation, seducing her daughter’s friend, and forgiving the man with whom she has spent decades, while also attacking his dishonesty. Lila is, in short, unpredictable. Talia Balsam, who plays her, displays a self-importance that limits her ability to excavate more meaning from the role, but the low-key fashion in which director Hilary Brougher constructs a network of relationships—between Lila and her cancer-stricken best friend, between their daughters—is notable.
The cast of Yes, God, Yes at a post-screening Q&A about the film.
These films will likely find distributors for indie releases later in the year, especially if they win the Feature Competition (they are running against eight other films), but as of now they remain festival exclusives, contained to Austin’s playhouses. That’s the case for Midnighters, too, a special category of festival entries reserved for twelve-o'clock showtimes. They deal in thrills, at least the ones that CUFP saw. Tales from the Lodge, about a group of friends who gather in a remote cabin and take turns telling scary stories, was mostly a flop, but an acting showcase. Boyz in the Wood provided us with a tour-de-force of editing, and presented a foursome of young boys—teenagers embarking on a hiking trip in the Scottish Highlands—that delighted with their raucousness and stupidity. An open casting call for the film resulted in unknown actors assuming the spotlight, but each of their inclinations toward earnestness, vulgarity and vulnerability suggested significant experience. Director Ninian Doff demonstrated little interest in developing the villains that motivate the boys’ journey, and the action gags grew repetitive as the novelty of rabbit-shite-induced acid trips wore off, but the “Boyz” emerged as a memorable crew, calling to mind those Trainspotting addicts, and individually established potential for future careers.
Important though it may be to gain a sense of new talent, and to support the platform that festivals like SXSW provide for discovery, CUFP did not sacrifice study time and a day of classes solely to feel like good people. We also came for the stars: Woody Harrelson, Kevin Costner, Jesse Eisenberg, Matthew McConaughey, Ethan Hawke, Olivia Wilde, Jason Sudeikis. We were on hand for these professionals’ project debuts, which comprised a small percentage of the total impact from household names. We missed Jordan Peele, Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, Seth Rogen. And that was during the days of our visit. For the entire week following our departure, SXSW will play host to dozens more prominent film industry guests.
Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots introduce their new film, The Art of Self-Defense.
From our survey of the movies on offer, though, we were able to make several judgments. One is that any inclinations of a second McConaissance were unfounded. The Beach Bum, Harmony Korine’s new feature, screened on Saturday, and expressed a gorgeous vision of ocean bohemia, Pirates of the Caribbean by way of reality television, inflected with visual cues from recent geographically-related masterworks Moonlight and The Florida Project. Unfortunately, McConaughey inhabits this vision. He plays Moondog, a drugged-up drifter who “belongs” in the Keys, but whose real home is Miami, where he depends on his wealthy heiress wife for financial security. Some form of McConaughey’s stoner persona was witnessed in Dazed and Confused, but in that film he was more of an enigma, fleeting and romantic, while The Beach Bum focuses too much of him. He does not evolve, instead shifting between two or three variations of the same slow-moving, quasi-enlightened emotional plane. The tragedy that splits the first third of the film from the second two is understood as a lazy narrative initiator, but then registers as a distraction, because McConaughey is barely affected by it. Korine writes his dialogue like it’s filler, so maybe Moondog would be more interesting if he had something to say. Maybe.
The Beach Bum director Harmony Korine joins stars Mathew McConaughey, Isla Fisher, Martin Freeman and Jimmy Buffet on stage at the Paramount
Theater, after a screening of the film.
The Highwaymen, Netflix’s new period drama, brought Woody Harrelson and Kevin Costner to the Paramount Theatre, a short distance from the convention center. After a screening of the film, the two actors discussed their turns as legendary Texas rangers Frank Hamer and Maney Gault, who gunned down Bonnie and Clyde in Louisiana after a government-ordered manhunt. The film, directed by John Lee Hancock, succeeds mostly because of Harrelson and Costner’s star power, and with Dolby Surround Sound and a cacophonic full house, it was easy to buy into their antics. Netflix has improved its title intro, too, imitating Hollywood studios with a suitably grand expansion of the color spectrum animation it debuted online a month ago. A question for the dozens of company executives with reserved seats in the audience: do you really want your fancy title card on a four-inch phone screen?
The two films that stole CUFP’s weekend bookended that Highwaymen premiere. One was The Art of Self-Defense, directed by Riley Stearns, in which Casey (Jesse Eisenberg), a man violently mugged one night, signs up for karate classes at a Dojo, so that he can better protect himself. What starts out as a variation on Wes Anderson quirk—matter-of-fact dialogue, gorgeous color scheming—gradually and unexpectedly evolves into a dark exploration of masculine insecurities and cultish violence, as Casey learns from Sensei (who has no other name) and a band of dedicated senpai, but grows unnervingly obsessed. Stearns blends humor and terror masterfully, suffocating and isolating his characters, daring the audience to laugh and then making them pay for it. He is aided by Jesse Eisenberg, who expertly layers his trademark Zuckerberg-ian robotism with melancholy and naiveté.
Then there is Booksmart. Booksmart, you bubblegum pop dream of a movie. Perhaps it is because of high school’s lingering impact on the college consciousness that Booksmart resonated with CUFP so deeply, or because there were doubts as to whether first-time director Olivia Wilde could turn pre-festival buzz into concrete praise, and then she dropped a colorful, fully realized and wildly funny film, and decimated expectations.
Booksmart stars Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein gush about their on-set experiences.
Booksmart revolves around Amy and Molly, two seniors who realize on the last day of school that they’ve spent the past four years pursuing Ivy League educations (Amy’s Columbia-bound) at the expense of their social lives. The solution: cover their losses in one night. The search for the cool kids’ party involves many detours and over-the-top supporting performances, with most young actors embodying conventional yet entertaining stereotypes. The film is influenced by a wide range of 20th-century cinema, from the teen-centric to the auteur-ish; Superbad and Clueless come to mind, of course (Booksmart is funnier than both of them), but in the Q&A Wilde cited The Big Lebowski as an influence, surely for the fantastical montages that interrupt the narrative to communicate Molly and Amy’s inner monologues. An ambitious long take at hot-boy-Nick’s mansion is reminiscent of Boogie Nights, and follows Molly underwater, out of a swimming pool, through a series of hyper-stylized rooms and back outside, onto the patio, where she delves into a heated argument with Molly. Wilde said stars Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever nailed the shot after two tries.
The best part about Booksmart’s delightfully imaginative narrative flourishes are grounded by its script. The film’s screenwriters find sincere and understated avenues for conversations about female empowerment and depictions of homosexuality. Amy and Molly give each other hyper-complimentary, faux-argumentative pep talks whenever they get together. We watch as Amy awkwardly tries to have bathroom sex with another girl, but her gay identity isn’t reduced to a single existential struggle (hey, Love Simon), nor does it prevent the development of a dynamic friendship with a straight woman. Feldstein and Dever enliven these narrative nuances with their performances. Feldstein, who has graduated from Lady Bird sidestick to fully commanding lead, enriches Molly’s smart-girl shtick with wit and comic timing. Dever, playing Amy, is a hero, too, her doubt and self-deprecation beautifully intertwined, her level-headedness an added texture, not a bore.
All these films captured a moment in moviemaking notable for its inclusivity, but the films also lacked a thematic unity, which is actually what makes South By so exciting, in a cinematic sense and in the context of its broader lineup. CUFP felt so many different ways about what we saw, in an alarmingly concentrated period of time. Cultural overload proved a necessary consequence of our experiences. Trevor Noah and the Daily Show team made us laugh and cringe about the state of U.S. race relations; Kathy Griffin shocked with her acerbic brand of character assassination, which has been strangely shaped by the F.B.I. investigation of her now infamous beheaded-Trump post; Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti supplied a somewhat unconvincing solution for internet evil; New Yorker staff writers made us hopeful about the state of meaningful journalistic criticism; Ethan Hawke endeared us with a sincere, albeit misguided, mantra of inherent human same-ness.
Our biggest takeaway from the festival is probably hope, as cliché as that sounds (and hypocritical, given the cheese-bashing above) if only because we were reminded of the prevalence of talent, and good ideas, and healthy discourse that obviously still exists in this country but which is remarkably easy to forget about. Attending the festival is a privilege, of course, one which CUFP was ecstatic and grateful to be afforded, but hey, student passes are cheap relative to the alternative, and you won’t be a student forever. And if you want to meet a presidential candidate and a tech billionaire and a movie star in the same day, you probably (definitely) won’t find another place where that’s possible. Just saying.
Jonah Peretti discusses Buzzfeed’s campaign to “ecosystem of good content” on the Internet, instead of trying to police bad content.
Jake Tapper moderates a conversation with Trevor Noah and the Daily Show team.
Kathy Griffin discusses her experience with ISIS accusations and criminal investigations, which interrupted in the wake of a photo leak, which featured her
holding a bust of President Trump’s head.
Fergus Campbell is a freshman in Columbia College.