Austin360 blogs > Austin Movie Blog > Archives > 2010 > March > 14 > Entry
SXSW capsule: “Mars”
As the Alamo Ritz’s lobby filled with cast and crew of “Mars” before the Austin sci-fi film’s Saturday premiere, it was hard not to notice Kinky Friedman, unlit cigar in mouth, admiring the theater’s Davy Crockett statue.
Friedman plays the president of the United States in the film (Kinky getting elected to something? now that’s what I call science fiction), and appears to be reading from cue cards in many scenes. He’s a weak link balanced by an enjoyable performance by Mark Duplass, who plays a has-been astronaut hired for a Martian expedition mainly to do interviews with talk-show hosts.
The most noteworthy thing about Geoff Marslett’s homemade, cult-ready movie is its novel animation style, a computer-heavy rotoscope technique that leaves everyone looking grainy and took about two years to complete. It’s a greenscreen-friendly process allowing live-action footage to mesh with pure animation, which made one bit of the Q&A surprising: The loopy zero-grav bedhead hairstyles worn by crew members weren’t drawn in by animators after shooting, but were done the old-fashioned way by stylist Nancy Rankin.
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