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Monday, March 15, 2010
SXSW live: ‘Lovers of Hate’ at the Paramount
For Austin filmmakers, showing your movie at the Paramount Theatre is a homecoming holy grail. As the Duplass brothers did Saturday night with “Cyrus,” Austin writer-director Bryan Poyser evinced excitement and awe at being inside the grand old palace, where he’s spent countless hours watching other peoples’ movies.
Bryan Poyser, at the Paramount at last.
Poyser was there Monday afternoon screening his sharp psychosexual comedy “Lovers of Hate” to a vocally supportive local crowd that seemed to fall hard for a movie steeped in Austin film.
“I’ve been fantasizing about playing the movie here,” said Poyser, who world-premiered “Lovers of Hate” in January at Sundance. From there, the movie was picked up by IFC Films for distribution.
“Those two words — ‘our distributor’ — are amazing to say,” Poyser said, beaming. (“Lovers of Hate” is now available on IFC Films video-on-demand and screens again 9:30 p.m. Thursday at the Alamo South during SXSW. Details and the trailer HERE)
Shot in Austin and Park City, Utah, and starring local actors Chris Doubek, Heather Kafka and Alex Karpovsky, the movie takes a skewed, shrewd and penetrating look at the complexities of desire and the cruel mutability of human emotions. It’s setting, a four-story mountain manse, is a narrative framing device, in which one loserish brother (the frazzy Doubek) hides, ducks and skulks as he watches his famous writer brother (Karpovsky) quite easily seduce his wife (Kafka). The unsettling premise plays out with creepy, voyeuristic kicks that are at once funny and painful and tense.
During the post-show Q-and-A, a viewer called the film “fun and twisted” and noted its tonal similarities to horror movies. Poyser said that some people had urged him to take his script in a horror-thriller direction but that he wanted it more real and grounded. His goal was “emotional and psychological violence” instead of physical violence.
Many familiar Austin names — Rebecca Campbell, Chale Nafus, the Zellner brothers, John Pierson, et al — popped up on the “Special thanks” part of the credits roll, and there was also a big thanks to the immeasurably supportive Austin Film Society, where Poyser is the director of artist services. Poyser, a UT film grad, co-founded the Cinematexas International Short Film Festival, wrote and directed the Austin feature “Dear Pillow” and co-wrote and produced “The Cassidy Kids.”
During the Q-and-A with Poyser and the cast, Doubek snatched the microphone.
“Part of why Austin film is so big is because of this guy,” Doubek said, pointing to Poyser. A loud ovation rumbled the house.
Read our pre-Sundance interview with Poyser HERE.
Poyser and his cast: Chris Doubek, Heather Kafka and Alex Karpovsky.
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SXSW live review: “When I Rise”
It was more than a little auspicious Sunday afternoon at the Paramount Theatre that opera singer Barbara Smith Conrad was greeted with waves of applause and standing ovations during the premiere of “When I Rise,” the intelligent, poignant and ultimately liberating documentary by Austin filmmaker Mat Hames chronicling Conrad’s life.
After all, when Conrad was a gifted young music student at the University of Texas in 1957 — part of the first group of African Americans to be admitted as undergraduates to Texas’ flagship university - she wasn’t initially allowed into the Paramount to see a film that her drama professor sent the class to see.
That was hardly the only injustice Conrad suffered in the still-segregated Texas of the 1950s.
Blocks from the Paramount Theatre, members of the Texas Legislature launched a campaign against UT to have Conrad removed from the lead role of a student opera production. Segregationist legislators couldn’t tolerate that black young woman was cast opposite a white young man in “Dido and Aenas.” Yet when UT officials bowed to the will of the legislature and removed Conrad, it ignited a drama that put the young mezzo-soprano in the national news.
Hames’ film starts not with the predictable flash of an historic headline — though a yellowed newspaper declaring “Negro Girl Withdrawn from UT Opera Cast” appears soon enough on the screen — but instead with Conrad’s upbringing in the nurturing, tight-knit African American community of Center Point in the bucolic woods of North East Texas. That grounding is important because later, when we learn that Conrad faces unconscionable harassment at UT (a white student spat in her face as she walked across campus), we’re remind that her mettle comes directly from an inner strength and pride instilled when she was a child. And that mettle sees her through to the present day: Conrad’s remarkably capacity to forgive is the ultimate star of “When I Rise.”
Hames and editor Sandra Guardado make clean, seamless work of stitching together an impressive stock of archival images and footage along with contemporary interviews. And that’s a good thing because Conrad’s story goes far beyond the Lone Star State, stretching over decades and continents. After leaving UT far behind her, Conrad launched a celebrated opera career that took her around the world, landing her on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera among other notable venues. However, it wasn’t until 2009 that she achieved a true reconciliation with her alma mater and the Texas state government when the legislature awarded her a honorific resolution.
But it’s not only Conrad’s story that unravels in “When I Rise.” UT’s arguably unresolved relationship with its racist past and Texas’ own continuing need for recognizing its civil rights history play major roles in the film. Admirably Hames doesn’t flinch from filling in this necessary context along with all its attendant complexities.
Produced under the auspices of UT’s Briscoe Center for American History — who raised the film’s approximately $500,000 budget and which maintains Conrad’s archive — “When I Rise” is ultimately about the extraordinary grace of an extraordinary woman.
It is imperative film viewing.
“When I Rise” screens again at 11:30 a.m. Wednesday at the Paramount Theatre.
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Event report: Elektra Luxx
When you make a movie for, as director Sebastian Gutierrez puts it, “[muffle-mumble]-thousand dollars,” you expect some difficulties. But you probably don’t expect glitches once you’ve met your deadline and delivered a finished cut to the festival championing your work.
The Paramount’s digital projector went kaput 62 minutes into Gutierrez’s “Elektra Luxx” premiere Sunday night, leaving an audience that was clearly into the film wondering what would happen to the adult-film actress, played with gusto by Carla Gugino, for whom it was named.
Though SXSW head Janet Pierson reassured the filmmaker by recalling a similar tragedy at the first screening of “She’s Gotta Have It” — things worked out okay for Spike Lee — Gutierrez remained flustered as he addressed the crowd while hoping for a quick repair.
Fortunately, he’s funny when nervous: he dished trivia on the production, hinted what was to come in the film’s climax, and geeked out over the new tech that made “Luxx” so much better looking than his previous movie.
Cast members including Gugino and Emmanuelle Chriqui (“Entourage”) eventually joined the director, revealing what it was like to act in such an oversexed movie. The party ended when Pierson admitted they couldn’t fix the equipment in time and would have to schedule a make-up screening later in the week.
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Summary: ‘Mr. Nice’
Beginning with a forced narrative device that allows the story to jump into flashback mode, the movie tells the story of Howard Marks, a massive hashish smuggler from Wales who became something of a counter-culture icon.
The inclusion of scenes at the beginning of the movie depicting Marks as a much-bullied, un-athletic kid is just the first example of the film’s need of editing. Nothing about his treatment as a child informs the dashing and risk-taking character we follow through the film.
The film is interesting in the sense that it reveals a figure likely not widely known and shows a gentle and human side to the rabble rousing Welsh folk hero whom Ifans admittedly idolized growing up, but it rambles on entirely too long and can not be saved by its lead. There are several times in this low-stakes “Gooodfellas” where an end seems perfectly fitting, only to give way to yet another run from the law or subsequent court trial. Unfortunately, by the end, I was left not caring too greatly about the eventual fate of this seemingly very likable man with the out-sized personality.
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