Image via Complex Original
Only two days in, this year's SXSW movie lineup is already top-notch. These four films are proof.
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Prince Avalanche
Director: David Gordon Green
Stars: Paul Rudd, Emile Hirsch
Running time: 94 minutes
✭✭✭✭✭✭✭✭✩✩
Score: 8/10
Who are we to knock David Gordon Green for indulging in his Hollywood-minded interests? Mostly abandoning everything that he'd previously established via his string of terrific independent dramas (George Washington, All the Real Girls, Snow Angels), Green took a sabbatical in Tinsel Town and made the big-budget, sporadically humorous, but ultimately rudimentary comedies Pineapple Express, Your Highness, and The Sitter. It was only a matter of time, though, before he returned to his roots, and with the first-class two-hander Prince Avalanche, Green has married both sides of his artistic mentality: his knack for raw character drama and his love for laughs. That it's a remake of a recent Icelandic film only slightly diminishes DGG's return.
The film's narrative set-up is simplicity exemplified: Two road workers (Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch) draw yellow paint lines on a Texas highway surrounded by fire-ravaged woods and trees and shoot the proverbial shit with each other. Hirsch is the young slacker who, at first, is only interested in talking about his shallow pursuits of the opposite sex; Rudd, on the other hand, is the uptight, doofy boss who also happens to be dating Hirsch's older sister.
Prince Avalanche is an endless showcase for the perfectly paired Rudd and Hirsch, two subtle performers who sell the sneaky one-liners. They're both in pristine form here, each giving his best on-screen performance to date in a quietly emotional and always just-goofy-enough melting pot of modestly screwball comedy that's definitely funnier than any of Green's earlier laugh projects.
During the post-screening Q&A, Green said that he'd love to make another pricey movie within the studio system. But if Prince Avalanche proves anything, it's that he doesn't need large amounts of loot to attract names like Paul Rudd and make them as funny as ever. And, more importantly, more effective than ever.
Drinking Buddies
Director: Joe Swanberg
Stars: Olivia Wilde, Jake Johnson, Anna Kendrick, Ron Livingston, Ti West, Jason Sudeikis, Frank V. Ross, Mike Brune
Running time: 90 minutes
✭✭✭✭✭✭✭✭✩✩
Score: 8/10
Joe Swanberg's first foray into mainstream-accessible filmmaking, Drinking Buddies, couldn't come at a better time for the rom-com genre. Diluted in recent years by a barrage of trite carbon copies, cinematic love stories are in dire straits, which is why Drinking Buddies is such a formidable injection of new blood. Give credit to indie stalwart Swanberg's experience working in the lo-fi movie scene, where his improv-based sensibilities (we're not gonna say mumblecore) have all led to this moment.
With Drinking Buddies (written, directed, and edited by Swanberg), he dabbles in the familiar tropes of the rom-com and then cleverly subverts them, all without making a forced point of it. The film feels as breezy and loose as his previous efforts—only this time, he's working with some big names. Olivia Wilde and Jake Johnson star as a couple of beer-loving pals who work at a Chicago brewery together and, unbeknownst to them, have similar romantic lives: They're each dating someone with whom they're not entirely compatible (played by Ron Livingston and Anna Kendrick, respectively).
A weekend couples' getaway leads to a conflict that, at first, seems telegraphed, as if Swanberg was falling victim to romantic storytelling conventions. But as Drinking Buddies proceeds, with the genuine laughs stacking up and the actors continuing to give naturalistic and charming performances, it becomes clear that Swanberg knows exactly what rom-com haters are expecting, and he keeps zigging where others would be zagging.
Drinking Buddies is the opposite of a Hollywood romance. Which makes it all the more crucial that Hollywood types pay attention.
A Teacher
Director: Hannah Fidell
Stars: Lindsay Burdge, Will Brittain, Jennifer Prediger, Julie Dell Phillips, Jonny Mars, Chris Doubek
Running time: 76 minutes
✭✭✭✭✭✭✭✭✭✩
Score: 9/10
As the old saying goes—and the prophetic Nasir Jones once turned this into a song title—no idea's original.
When it comes to storytelling, what matters is how one gets to the heart of a narrative, not the narrative itself. Case in point: Hannah Fidell's taut character study A Teacher. It's centered around a familiar concept, that of an attractive high school instructor conducting a secret love affair with one of her male students. Notes on a Scandal, much?
Yet, regardless of her script's surface-level familiarities, Fiddell's devastating knockout of a motion picture (which first caught a strong buzz during January's Sundance Film Festival) never feels rudimentary. Creating a pair of believable, honest characters, she's delivered a controlled and intricately volatile moment in time: the phase of the student/teacher relationship in which one person's sexual interest transforms into infatuation.
Ms. Diana Watts (newcomer Lindsay Burdge in a powerhouse turn) is an Austin, TX, high school English teacher whose obsession with likable hunk Eric (the equally strong Will Brittain) is leaving her in a perpetual state of on-the-verge internal combustion. Fidell takes full advantage of Burge's dynamite face, keeping the camera fastened on Burge's reaction to news of a freshman female's recently discovered, topless camera phone pic (which brings to mind a photo Watts took for Eric). Burge conveys near eruption without so much as blinking.
As A Teacher swiftly moves towards its intelligent and downbeat resolution, Fiddell captures a mood that's reminiscent of Michael Haneke's similarly dour The Piano Teacher—and that's one lofty compliment. Once her film receives its Labor Day release via Oscilloscope Laboratories, you'll appreciate the comparison.
Haunter
Director: Vincenzo Natali
Stars: Abigail Breslin, Stephen McHattie, Peter Outerbridge, Michelle Nolden, David Hewlett
Running time: 97 minutes
✭✭✭✭✭✭✭✭✩✩
Score: 8/10
Vincenzo Natali does what every filmmaker should do: He always takes big creative risks. In his 1997 debut, Cube, the American-Canadian director brought a little Franz Kafka into violent science fiction; 12 years later, he reinvented the Frankenstein mythos with the perverse creature feature Splice. For Natali, genre movies provide a platform for rich, intelligent, and ambitious ideas, and he applies that philosophy to his latest film, Haunter (which had its world premiere last night at SXSW). This time, he's left the science behind in favor of a supernatural backdrop: the haunted house.
Written by Brian King, Haunter is a twisty, brain-warping take on domesticated ghosts from the point-of-view of an actual spirit. In that way, it has a lot in common with The Others, except here the viewer knows from the first frame that the protagonist, Lisa (Abigail Breslin, who plays front-and-center terrifically), is already dead, as are her parents and little brother. Thing is, they don't realize that, a la Groundhog Day, they've been endlessly repeating the exact same day—more specifically, the day before Lisa's 16th birthday. There's always macaroni-and-cheese for lunch, meatloaf for dinner, Murder She Wrote to watch before bedtime, and some clarinet practice for Lisa. But then, one day, little details about the routine changes, and as Lisa slowly figures out why, Haunter quickly enters a rabbit hole of nightmarish horror, dreamlike visuals, and time-leaps.
To give anything else about Haunter away would be criminal, since the film will work best for those who know little beyond what I've just described. It's not a spoiler, however, to say that Natali's unnerving film is dealing with some very challenging material, both of the thematic (be warned, little ones die just as graphically as adults) and narrative varieties. King's script demands a great deal from viewers, and those watching Haunter casually will probably feel bewildered as the film enters its no-holds-barred finale, triggered by a standout sequence in which Natali frames the house as a cigarette-burned reel come to life, complete with jerky character motions, as if they're walking on a jumping turntable.
The haunted house movie is one of the horror genre's oldest staples, and it's been done so much to death that Marlon Wayans recently made a spoof about the current wave of ghost-home flicks. Throughout Haunter, though, Natali maintains a palpable sense of far-reaching invention that, most impressive of all, holds up as the film ends and you start piecing everything together that happened in an effort to find any possible holes. This house is built on a sturdy foundation, its bricks comprised of original ideas, repurposed elements from classics like The Shining, and startling imagery.
