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SXSW in 60 Seconds: Thursday, March 19, 2009

Filed under: Independent », SXSW », Festival Reports », Cinematical Indie »

SXSW in 60 Seconds

I returned home from Austin yesterday and am still suffering from SXSW Separation Anxiety. Shawn Levy of The Oregonian sums it up well: "Frankly, music people are nuts compared to the film people (who are nuts compared to the interactive people). And as Austin seems genuinely nuts itself, the whole thing works out nicely."

SXSW kept rolling along, even without me and Shawn. While downtown streets were filled with crowds and music, the film venues had somewhat lighter attendance, making it easier for out of town visitors and local residents to catch up with repeat screenings of buzz titles like Alexander the Last, Goodbye Solo, My Suicide, Made in China, and Humpday.

Tonight, an attendee exulted over getting into the Playboy party and seeing Jane's Addiction, while a film critic observed "people in pirate gear blasting 'Kickstart My Heart' in front of [the] Austin Hilton," and another writer "accidentally had another five-movie day." And you wonder why some of us are addicted to Twitter?

Cinematical Coverage. Eugene Novikov called The Slammin' Salmon, the latest project from the Broken Lizard comedy troupe, "90 minutes of truly inspired comic mayhem." Speaking of mayhem, this critic felt Australian revenge flick The Horseman was brutally effective: "It's a testicle for a vagina instead of an eye for an eye."

Eric D. Snider says that Craig Johnson's True Adolescents is "an acerbic but realistic coming-of-age story ... the tone gradually shifting from hipster-funny to hipster-introspective." Mark Duplass and Melissa Leo star. Jette Kernion liked Tommy Pallotta's documentary American Prince even more than American Boy, the 1978 Martin Scorsese doc that featured the same subject, Steven Prince, "probably because I preferred watching the older Prince over the younger one."

You can check out all of our SXSW 2009 coverage right here.

SXSW Review: American Prince

Filed under: Documentary », SXSW », Theatrical Reviews »



More than 30 years ago, Martin Scorsese decided to spend an evening -- more than a day, really -- filming his friend Steven Prince as he told all kinds of strange and fascinating stories about his life. The result was the short documentary American Boy, which had no official release in 1978 but floated around "unofficially" for decades. Tommy Pallotta saw one of these bootleg copies when he was in college, and never forgot it. He and Richard Linklater included one of Prince's stories from American Boy in Waking Life. And more than 30 years after American Boy, Pallotta and Linklater spent a similar evening hearing more of Prince's tales, which are the backbone of Pallotta's documentary American Prince. Both films screened back-to-back at SXSW.

Steven Prince in American Prince has mellowed a lot -- he sits comfortably in a chair sipping cognac and genially relating stories about his years in Hollywood. You might remember him as the gun salesman in Taxi Driver, and he had a few other minor roles in films, as well as working on some other Scorsese films. As a result, he has some very colorful stories to share with the guests in the room as well as the film's audience. The setting of the documentary might remind you of Steven Tobolowsky's Birthday Party, which played SXSW in 2005, but more tightly focused, and without a lot of interaction from the other guests.
 
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