movies
BY MOLLY TEMPLETON
“Trees for
Concrete”
On Satuday, April 10,
from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.
Mayor Piercy will kick-off the celebration in
front of the Eugene Weekly offi ces at 1251
Lincolin Street, and will bring together Wil-
lakenzie Junior Grangers, Girl Scouts from
Troop 20275, REI staff, Eugene Tree Foun-
dation (ETF) and community volunteers.
Motörhead’s frontman
in the documentary Lemmy
Spring Spectacular
At SXSW, movies crowd the schedule
S
outh By Southwest (SXSW),
Austin’s sprawling, wonderful
music/fi lm/interactive festival, is a
place to keep really, really busy. SXSW’s
fi lm track, now in its 17th year, hosts fi ve
days of panels, interviews and discussion
and nine days of screenings — screenings
for which there are increasingly fewer seats
than there are would-be attendees. At more
than one screening, SXSW fi lm producer
Janet Pierson asked, while introducing the
fi lms, whether people had had problems
getting into screenings. Her response to the
grumbling was to say that having too many
people is a better problem than having too
few. Though the audience (understandably)
didn’t see it the same way, the expanding
crowds are a sign of the increasing
relevance of SXSW’s fi lm festival, for
which registration was up 25 percent this
year.
It wasn’t impossible to see a wide array of
fi lms at SXSW, provided you planned well
and picked carefully. What I saw in Austin
ranged from an unforgettable documentary
about Motörhead’s oddly charismatic
frontman (Lemmy) to a coming-of-age-
in-the-’80s story (Skateland) that wore
its John Hughes infl uence proudly on its
sleeve and a slasher-fl ick send-up starring
Alan Tudyk (Dollhouse) as one of two
backwoods buddies unexpectedly menaced
by a gaggle of college kids (Tucker
and Dale Vs. Evil, which picked up an
audience award). There were shorts, music
videos and feature fi lm world premieres;
there were panels, packed Q&As with the
likes of Michel Gondry and events hosted
by hitRECord.org, actor Joseph Gordon-
Levitt’s collaborative online production
company (of a sort). The hitRECord.org
Spring Spectacular was half performance,
half fantastic exploration of what the site
does (in short: People upload all kinds of
art; other people make it even better) and
half participatory experience; the number
of fl ashes popping and iPhone screens
glowing seemed to make Gordon-Levitt,
the evening’s host, almost giddy.
Of the movies I missed, some were big-
name fi lms that’ll land here soon enough
(MacGruber, Kick-Ass, The Runaways),
while others may require more patience
(juried prizewinners Tiny Furniture and
Marwencol; the Oregon-set documentary
Hood to Coast). Getting to see Micmacs,
the latest from director Jean-Pierre Jeunet
(Amelie), was a treat, even if the fi lm, with
its burnished Rube Goldberg playfulness
overwhelming the emotional aspects of its
narrative, wasn’t quite up to Jeunet’s best
(you can have Amelie; my vote is on The
City of Lost Children). It’s still worth your
time to watch former mime Dany Boon,
playing a man whose existence is waylaid
by a pair of rival arms dealers, conspire and
coordinate with a host of oddball characters
who live in a junkyard.
Portland music video director Matt
McCormick debuted his fi rst feature fi lm,
Some Days Are Better Than Others, which
stars James Mercer (The Shins), Carrie
Brownstein (Sleater-Kinney) and Renee
Roman Nose (not in a band, to the best of
my knowledge) as three Portlanders whose
lives intersect in small, believable ways as
they go about their quiet and often lonely
days. I want to call Some Days an indie
rock movie, but that might sound more
dismissive than I intend; it’s the aesthetic,
though, the vintage sweaters and plaid
shirts interspersed with fl eeting transitional
shots of bridges and birds.
Skeletons, director Nick Whitfi eld’s
peculiar, gently surreal fi lm about two
traveling businessmen and the unusual
procedure they perform, was among my
favorites from the week, as was Cold
Weather, which opens with a beautifully
damp shot of a Portland apartment courtyard.
Doug (Cris Lankenau), who walks stiff-
armed and slouchy and looks like a rough
copy of Mark Ruffalo, loves Sherlock
Holmes and once studied forensic science,
a subject he puts to use in Cold Weather’s
latter half — only to have writer-director
Aaron Katz remind us, at the close, what
his fi lm is actually about: the grounded,
understated connection between Doug and
his sister Gail (Trieste Kelly Dunn).
The candy-colored, campily enjoyable
Elektra Luxx was just picking up steam
when the projector broke. Grumbles
and complaints changed, mostly (no
contingency plan? Really?), to laughter as
Luxx director Sebastian Gutierrez (Women
in Trouble, to which Luxx is a sequel) leapt
onto the stage at the Paramount Theater
and conducted a breathless, entertaining
Q&A that virtually guaranteed the audience
wouldn’t hold the projection snafu against
his fi lm — or the festival, which smartly
added make-up screenings later in the
ew
week.
celebrating 420 a few days early
Grand Opening
420 Celebration
Friday 4-16 and Saturday 4-17
••••••
noon to 10pm
••••••
GLASS SMOKING
ACCESSORIES
862 Olive
“across from Horsehead”
best prices in town.
DRAWINGS + FREE STUFF
MUSIC ALL WEEKEND LONG
For full reviews of most of these fi lms and other pieces
about SXSW, see blogs.eugeneweekly.com/molly
WWW.EUGENEWEEKLY.COM • BLOGS.EUGENEWEEKLY.COM
EUGENE WEEKLY APRIL 8, 2010 21