Ranking the 2018 South by Southwest Film Festival, Part 3
The end of the 2018 South by Southwest Film Festival came not with a whimper, but with a bark. The closing night film, Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, saw badge-holders line up hours early for a chance to see the Texas-born director and some of his cast members, including internet mascots Bill Murray and Jeff Goldblum. Smaller but no less artful and entertaining films also continued to please and challenge crowds right up to the end of the fest, and some of them will soon be available on big and small screens nationwide. For others, SXSW is likely the end of the road.
Below each recap and at the bottom of this post, you’ll find our ranking of the 15 features we reviewed in Parts 1, 2, and 3 of our 2018 SXSW Film Festival coverage. All of those titles can all be ranked on Flickchart now, so if you’re one of the lucky few who have already seen them, you can log on and make your own chart. Otherwise, come back after you track them down and let us know what you think.
Sorry to Bother You
Sorry to Bother You by Boots Riley is a confection with a piquant core. It is meme-able, quotable, fashionable, but always on-message. Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson have an easy chemistry as a couple living in a garage and working low-level jobs in a stratified, near-future Oakland. They are perhaps improbably sexy and stylish for the setting, but their aesthetics match their ambitions: Thompson’s character is an artist, and Stanfield’s is in line for a promotion to a cushy top-floor job. Taking that job requires serious ethical compromises, though, and alienation from his friends who are protesting exploitative company practices is just the beginning. The second half of the movie should not be spoiled, but when Armie Hammer shows up it gets bogged down in an increasingly elaborate mythology that is neither funny enough nor weighty enough to fully actualize Riley’s thoughts about race and activism in late-stage capitalism. The movie’s parodies of YouTube and reality television feel reheated and extraneous even as they provide some of its clippiest soundbytes. Despite the recent success of Get Out at blending racial commentary with trippy science fiction, Sorry to Bother You may prove too weird to find traction with mainstream audiences. It will, however, bring joy to fans of outre satire in the vein of Black Mirror.
Matchups
Sorry to Bother You beats Galveston
Sorry to Bother You beats American Animals
Sorry to Bother You beats Elizabeth Harvest
Sorry to Bother You loses to Damsel
Ranking
1. First Reformed
2. Support the Girls
3. Final Portrait
4. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc
5. Wildling
6. A Quiet Place
7. Damsel
8. Sorry to Bother You
9. Elizabeth Harvest
10. American Animals
11. Galveston
Heavy Trip
Bring on the laughs and reindeer blood in Heavy Trip, a warm-hearted black-metal comedy from Finnish directors Jukka Vidgren and Juuso Laatio. We’ve all seen the plot before — misunderstood young people in a small town, a band trying to move from the practice garage to the stage, the pretty girl with a jerk boyfriend and overprotective dad — but what could have been a forgettable coming-of-age roadtrip flick is saved by perfect casting, a brutal original song, and a steady stream of “metal as fuck” situational humor. The directors know metal and metal fans, and their adept hands marry a family-friendly underdog story with “symphonic post-apocalyptic reindeer-grinding Christ-abusing extreme war pagan Fennoscandian metal” in a way that is sure to be a crowd-pleaser. Like the members of its fictional band, Heavy Trip has a guileless charm and total dedication to music that will win hearts and have audiences calling for an encore. – Kathryn Swilling
Matchups
Heavy Trip beats Galveston
Heavy Trip beats American Animals
Heavy Trip loses to Elizabeth Harvest
Ranking
1. First Reformed
2. Support the Girls
3. Final Portrait
4. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc
5. Wildling
6. A Quiet Place
7. Damsel
8. Sorry to Bother You
9. Elizabeth Harvest
10. Heavy Trip
11. American Animals
12. Galveston
Don’t Leave Home
In rural Ireland, a girl goes missing just a day after posing for a portrait in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary. At the same time, her image vanishes from the portrait itself. Years later, an artist inspired by this eerie event is invite to visit the reclusive ex-priest who painted the portrait. He describes what happened to the girl as an “evil miracle” — a neat notion sure to appeal to fans of religious horror. Beyond the basic allure of a pastoral Irish ghost story, though, this movie offers little to tantalize, frighten, or ponder. The dialogue lacks either subtlety or spark, the acting is just serviceable, the directing, production design, and editing are flavorless and monotonous. Don’t Leave Home‘s strong conceptual footing makes the inadequacies of its execution all the more regrettable.
Matchups
Don’t Leave Home loses to Galveston
Ranking
1. First Reformed
2. Support the Girls
3. Final Portrait
4. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc
5. Wildling
6. A Quiet Place
7. Damsel
8. Sorry to Bother You
9. Elizabeth Harvest
10. Heavy Trip
11. American Animals
12. Galveston
13. Don’t Leave Home
PARADOX
First-time director Daryl Hannah (Blade Runner, Kill Bill) displays a marvelous eye for the life and landscapes of the American West in a concert movie/hybrid Western that she describes as “more pot than plot.” The roots of this unique collage of music, environmentalism, Western pastiche, and magical realism can be traced to the formation of Lukas Nelson’s band, Promise of the Real, after Nelson attended a Neil Young show several years ago. The band eventually began touring with Young, most notably at socially-conscious Americana gatherings like Farm Aid (perennially headlined by Lukas’s father Willie Nelson) and to protest the construction of an oil pipeline threatening the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Before a big gig a couple of years ago, Young and Nelson and their bandmates and crew spent a few days of downtime jamming and playing poker at a cluster of rustic buildings “somewhere in the Rockies.” Hannah, recognizing an opportunity, brought cameras and a (very) loose script to give the boys something to riff on. The result is a series of relaxed, impressionistic neo-Western vignettes in which the bandmates dress as cowboys and trade puerile one-liners, go “mining” for anachronistic trinkets buried in them thar hills, and admire the elk, horses, marmots, and crickets that wander the fringes of their time-bending campsite. There’s a dash of steampunk in the form of Micah Nelson’s “Particle Kid,” a cameo from Willie as “Red” (an homage to his album and movie Red Headed Stranger) that leads to a clever visual gag, and an intriguing bookend in which a community of gun-toting women barter seeds and water with the restive cowboys. It has the flavor of a Robert Altman Western, but is even more improvisational. Hannah and her DP rotate through lenses and filters to add flair, and the editing arranges the disparate threads into a kind of dreamlike cinematic poem. The core of PARADOX, though, is the music: on stage and off, electric or unplugged, Young and his band are wizards, and their powerful instrumentality and painterly lyrics will elevate, recharge, inspire, and mellow you. PARADOX is the most fun I’ve ever had with a concert movie. See it on Netflix on March 23.
Matchups
PARADOX beats Don’t Leave Home
PARADOX beats Galveston
PARADOX beats American Animals
PARADOX beats Heavy Trip
PARADOX beats Elizabeth Harvest
PARADOX beats Sorry to Bother You
PARADOX beats Damsel
PARADOX beats A Quiet Place
PARADOX beats Wildling
PARADOX beats Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc
PARADOX beats Final Portrait
PARADOX beats Support the Girls
PARADOX loses to First Reformed
Ranking
1. First Reformed
2. PARADOX
3. Support the Girls
4. Final Portrait
5. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc
6. Wildling
7. A Quiet Place
8. Damsel
9. Sorry to Bother You
10. Elizabeth Harvest
11. Heavy Trip
12. American Animals
13. Galveston
14. Don’t Leave Home
Isle of Dogs
Whether live action or stop motion, a Wes Anderson movie is unmistakable, even though the director seems to shift geographical and cultural settings with every new feature. For Isle of Dogs his locale of choice is a futuristic Japan, where a fictional megacity (Megasaki) has shipped its overabundance of diseased dogs to an offshore dumpsite called Trash Island. The humans in the movie are mostly Japanese and speak Japanese, while the dogs speak English and are voiced by Anderson’s usual stable of actors including Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Bob Balaban, Harvey Keitel, as well as new collaborators in Bryan Cranston, Liev Schreiber, and Scarlett Johansson. Anderson’s tolerance of linguistic disconnect, and his decision to translate the Japanese for the audience only if an actual interpreter is present in the scene, serves several purposes. First, it is a reminder that humans and dogs cannot communicate verbally — a truth often overlooked in mainstream animated fare, but one mined by Anderson here for its poignancy and plot-complicating potential. Second, it marks the film as, if not exactly inaccessible to children, at least not primarily for younger viewers. (Frequent allusions to dog death are another such barrier that may be uncomfortable even for adults, but fans of morbid comedy should appreciate them in the darkly humorous spirit Anderson intends.) Third, and perhaps most importantly from Anderson’s perspective as an aesthetic-focused filmmaker, the heavy use of the Japanese language underscores his commitment to Japan as a fully-realized setting. From stop-motion sumo and kabuki to realistic architectural renderings of schools and houses and bars, it’s clear that Anderson hasn’t just relied on the expertise of Japanese co-writer and voice actor Kunichi Nomura (though he did lean on him heavily, as the two explained in their Q&A panel), but has really done his homework. Most impressive in this respect is the pounding, energetic taiko drum score that runs throughout the film. All that said, visual and sonic landscapes are what Anderson does best, so the fact that they succeed here is no great surprise. Where the film loses points is in the script, characterizations, and emotional impact or lack thereof. Isle of Dogs has a strong central character arc, and it isn’t the one you expect, but the supporting players are largely interchangeable, something that can’t be said of the best Anderson films. Particularly weak are the underwritten female roles, both dog and human, though a lady dog called “The Oracle” is the subject of a nice running gag. The dialogue has the deadpan humor and quasi-military use of jargon and euphemism that have worked so well for Anderson before, but Isle of Dogs fails to find moments of emotional truth and childlike wonder that give his meticulous creations resonance and purpose. In Anderson’s previous stop-motion film, Fantastic Mr. Fox, those moments occur between the characters and also arise naturally from their unusual world. This time around, although much energy is spent perfecting the world, the elements of beauty and mystery and meaningfulness remain elusive.
Matchups
Isle of Dogs beats Don’t Leave Home
Isle of Dogs beats Galveston
Isle of Dogs beats American Animals
Isle of Dogs beats Elizabeth Harvest
Isle of Dogs beats Sorry to Bother You
Isle of Dogs loses to Damsel
Ranking
Scroll down for our final SXSW 2018 chart.
The Best Movie We Didn’t See
South by Southwest audiences voted First Match their favorite narrative feature. It tells the story of a girl who competes against boys in a high school wrestling program in order to gain the approval of her father. Netflix is releasing the film on March 30.
Final Ranking
We reviewed a total of 15 features in Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, and here’s how they rank:
Dang! A quiet place over Isle Of Dogs? So stoked for both, and that Paradox sounds good!