Tag: SXSW Preview

SXSW Preview: MARS

During the week or so leading up to the start of SXSW 2010, I’ll be providing a glimpse into some of the films I am looking forward to at the festival. SXSW will feature many great films, many more than I can cover, ranging from narrative fiction to documentary, comedy to horror, foreign to animation, independent to studio films.

SYNOPSIS: A new space race is born between NASA and the ESA when Charlie Brownsville, Hank Morrison, and Dr. Casey Cook compete against an artificially intelligent robot to find out what’s up there on the red planet. MARS follows these three astronauts on the first manned mission to our galactic neighbor. On the way they face adventure, self doubts, obnoxious reporters, and the boredom of extended space travel. This romantic comedy is told in the playful style of a graphic novel – using an animation process that director Geoff Marslett developed specifically for MARS. Underneath the silliness it is an exploration of exploration. Why do we want to know whatÕs out there? How do we react when we find it? Is it really that important? And where does love fit into the whole thing?

Official Website of MARS

SXSW Preview: AUDREY THE TRAINWRECK

During the week or so leading up to the start of SXSW 2010, I’ll be providing a glimpse into some of the films I am looking forward to at the festival. SXSW will feature many great films, many more than I can cover, ranging from narrative fiction to documentary, comedy to horror, foreign to animation, independent to studio films.

SYNOPSIS: For Ron Hogan, life is fine… not great, not good, just… fine, and on the verge of retiring any sort of dream heÕs harbored of a life less ordinary. Pushing thirty and working a thankless office job, internet dating is one more routine in Ron HoganÕs well-ordered life. God knows his lonely roommate and lonelier co-workers have tried, but not even a dart to the back of the head can shake him out of his funk. Until he meets Stacy, a fellow working stiff who disarms him by speaking the language of his loneliest moments. Featuring a score by acclaimed jazz composer John Medeski, Audrey the Trainwreck is Frank V. RossÕs 5th feature film, an exploration of what might happen if one manÕs silent desperation got a little bit louder.

SXSW Preview: SKELETONS

During the week or so leading up to the start of SXSW 2010, I’ll be providing a glimpse into some of the films I am looking forward to at the festival. SXSW will feature many great films, many more than I can cover, ranging from narrative fiction to documentary, comedy to horror, foreign to animation, independent to studio films.

SYNOPSIS: In this surreal comedy, DAVIS and BENNETT are a mismatched pair of traveling salesmen in the business of cleaning skeletons out of closets. Together they travel across Britain, performing ‘the Procedure’ whereby secrets and lies are exposed. Bennett is a stickler for the rules and finds that Davis has been using their special procedure illegally to reconnect with comforting moments from his past. Their boss, THE COLONEL assigns the pair to their biggest challenge yet, a graduation test that could see them moving up the company ladder. But when they arrive at a remote family home and can’t get the job done, they discover that you can’t always get away from your own skeletons and you can’t always leave and never come back.

SXSW Preview: CRYING FROM LAUGHTER

During the week or so leading up to the start of SXSW 2010, I’ll be providing a glimpse into some of the films I am looking forward to at the festival. SXSW will feature many great films, many more than I can cover, ranging from narrative fiction to documentary, comedy to horror, foreign to animation, independent to studio films.

SYNOPSIS: Joey Frisk is a stand-up comic whose life just stopped being funny. In the most important week of his career, with a talent scout coming to check him out, his ex-wife threatens to take custody of his daughter and his landlord promises to evict him. Joey retaliates that night during his act and threatens the landlord in front of a captive audience. The next morning, his landlord is in the hospital with a fractured skull and Joey is arrested for Grievous Bodily Harm. To make matters worse, he has no memory of what happened. Looking for help, Joey turns to Frank Archer, a school friend who has recently walked back into his life. Frank is keen that he and Joey get reacquainted and offers to take him into his home. But as Joey finds out, friendship is the last thing on Frank’s mind.

Official Website of CRYING WITH LAUGHTER

SXSW Preview: TINY FURNITURE

During the week or so leading up to the start of SXSW 2010, I’ll be providing a glimpse into some of the films I am looking forward to at the festival. SXSW will feature many great films, many more than I can cover, ranging from narrative fiction to documentary, comedy to horror, foreign to animation, independent to studio films.

SYNOPSIS: 22-year-old Aura returns home to her artist mother’s TriBeCa loft with the following: a useless film theory degree, 357 hits on her Youtube page, a boyfriend who’s left her to find himself at Burning Man, a dying hamster, and her tail between her legs. Luckily, her trainwreck childhood best friend never left home, and ill-advised romantic possibilities lurk around every corner. Aura quickly throws away her liberal-arts clogs and careens into her old/new life: a dead-end hostess job, pathetic Brooklyn “art shows,” drinking all the wine in her mother’s neatly organized cabinets, competing with her prodigious teenage sister, and desperate sex in a giant metal pipe. Surrounded on all sides by what she could become, Aura just wants someone to tell her who she is.

Tiny Furniture Trailer from Lena Dunham on Vimeo.