Free to watch ’til May 6

SXSW on Amazon—French electronica, Dark Web subcultures, and two great shorts

SXScreeners: Shorts and soundtracks rule this Amazon-hosted digital film fest

Nathan Mattise – May 2, 2020 10:00 am | 16

Fire up Amazon Prime in a browser, and here's the landing page for the platform's partnership with SXSW. Credit: South by Southwest

When Austin, Texas, Mayor Steve Adler took to the podium on March 6 and effectively prevented South by Southwest from happening with a new city health order, the longtime film and music festival simply became the first of what would be many COVID-19-related live-event cancellations. Given the late-breaking nature of this one—SXSW was scheduled to start the week after, on March 13—organizers suddenly had to scramble. And when it came to the film portion, SXSW officially settled on transitioning to an entirely digital experience.

Partnering with entities like Mailchimp (shorts-only) and Amazon (any film willing), any project selected for the festival was invited to become available digitally for a limited time so all that hard work could still find an audience this spring. The resulting Amazon initiative started this past week and runs through Wednesday, May 6, no Prime subscription required.

Ultimately… the selection feels a little lacking. Major studio films like Judd Apatow’s The King of Staten Island declined in favor of forging their own path (that one will go straight to VOD this summer with a theatrical run out of the question), and smaller but compelling movies like the arcade-documentary Insert Coin have kept the rights to their debuts for now in the hopes that a festival season will still exist later in 2020 (since a good debut there can help facilitate lucrative distribution deals and theatrical runs if all goes according to plan). As more film festivals face this reality—Tribeca is already digital, Canada’s Fantasia Festival just announced its intention to do the same—hopefully the industry warms up to the idea.

In total, the Amazon/SXSW initiative hosts only seven feature films out of the originally planned 125-titles-plus feature-film lineup. Even so, there are a few unique offerings (plus Amazon series’ Tales from the Loop, which debuted in full shortly after it was supposed to originally screen at SXSW) worth queuing up for a weekend in these quaran-times. And we’re only counting the stuff we’ve been able to watch so far: Shudder documentary series Cursed Films, about doomed horror productions, has gotten good buzz, and Selfie sounds like ideal satire for these Internet-times.

Le Choc du Futur: Jodorowsky’s tune

Le Choc du Futur, like any film focused on a fictional musician, has a big challenge right off the bat—the song this person or group will inevitably perform/write/release has to be good, or at least believably good within the film’s world. (That Thing You Do would have simply crashed without the late Fountains of Wayne songwriter Adam Schlesinger penning the catchy title track, for instance.) Here, young composer/musician Ana (played by Alma Jodorowsky, granddaughter of the would-be Dune filmmaker) writes commercial jingles and does masseuse work on the side to make ends meet, but she really wants to be a full-time recording artist writing a brand of electronica not really popular at the time. Fortunately, her manager has gotten a local record producer to RSVP to Ana’s next house party, so the young musician just needs to get her tape together quickly so she can get it in front of industry ears. A new, cutting-edge Roland CR-78 factors prominently.

Whether or not Ana’s song succeeds, Le Choc du Futur does in this aspect—the film’s central track (called “Future Shock”) eventually sounds like “Chromatics or Electric Youth, lite,” a laid-back, atmospheric synth song you might come across on a site like Gorilla vs. Bear. Just as important for this story, it feels totally believable as what an early, DIY electronic musician might gravitate toward, and the song particularly flows well from what we see of Ana’s tastes and stylings. Her initial sonic doodles in the film kinda, sorta resemble S U R V I V E (of Stranger Things soundtrack fame), then a wise old French hipster friend who evidently does home vinyl delivery later introduces her to early electronic-y acts like Throbbing Gristle, Suicide, and The Human League. Together, these impulses push Ana to more melodic, pop-oriented synth compositions. The result is something you could hear at a house party or chic retail shop in 2019 (back when those experiences existed) or in 1970s Parisian apartments of the young and trendy.

A fictional song, but realistically enjoyable. (Director Marc Collin is also an established French musician, and he recorded this track alongside musician Clara Luciani, who portrays the singer in this film.)

As for the film at large, my partner walked in mid-way through and perhaps summed up Le Choc du Futur for a non-zero portion of Amazon/SXSW’s potential audience: “This seems so pretentious.” She didn’t even hear director Marc Collin‘s plot description in the film intro, either (“A young woman invents a new way of doing music in Paris in the late 1970s. They’ll call it electronic music 10 years later, but she has to convince people she saw the future”). The dialogue can be a bit over the top, though some of that may be lost in the transition; Ana’s commercial jingle agent expresses his skepticism of electronic music as such: “I know what a stupid beatbox is for. You think it’s going to replace a live drummer? The sound? The energy? You believe there won’t be studios anymore? Musicians? There’s just gonna be this poor guy alone doing music in his home?” Scenes do tend to linger in silence or soft soundtracking often, and the film’s overall pacing can be slow. Musicians creating doesn’t make for really compelling action sequences, after all (montages include Ana in headphones looking at her synth while internalizing her melodic ideas). And if someone playing music for another person who is close by and staring as if they’re a CBS Sunday Morning interviewer makes you uncomfortable, Le Choc du Futur is not for you.

But for me, a self-identified music nerd, things generally worked. Le Choc du Futur‘s aesthetic may ultimately be the point more so than its story, and I’ve found myself queuing up its soundtrack on Spotify more than once in the last few days. Think of it as one long, narrative electronic music video, perhaps, and choose whether or not to hit “Play” accordingly.

TFW NO GF: Trying to shake the past and the baggage

“Pepe and Wojak represent the dichotomy of man,” begins Kantbot, a person on screen in TFW NO GF who is better known by his online handle. “Pepe is the troll, your public self trying to get under people’s skin. But then we have our Wojak, who is depressed, can’t fulfill his own goals, and has all these feelings he can’t manage… This is what social media creates—the fragmentation of our personalities.”

The documentary TFW NO GF is pitched as being about the Wojak meme, but really the film focuses on a handful of young people (here, all young white dudes) who have spent a large swath of their lives caught up in online communities like 4chan. Now, these individuals have left that behind and are trying to determine what’s next. They have mostly moved from the Pepe stage to the Wojak stage, so to speak.

If you’ve seen documentaries about people who have been in any kind of destructive community—from gangs to cults to hate groups—TFW NO GF might broadly feel familiar. The documentary doesn’t hide the kind of filth you can find on Dark Web-ish forums (the misogyny, racism, calls for violence, threatening “pranks,” etc.), but it does ask you to sympathize with the individuals who end up in these spaces. They’re not bad people, TFW NO GF seems to argue, but they’re easily influenced and up against tremendously tricky societal forces (bad job market/economy, the predatory bad-actor groups leveraging digital media, etc.). Some of the film’s participants even describe ballooning forum usage as a past addiction.

“What’s making these young people the way they are, these young men, I can’t put it into a sentence,” says former 4chan user Kyle, who now struggles to find steady work in El Paso but genuinely wants to move his life forward. “It’s not like anyone I know, but anyone who’s lonely and angry like that… it’s completely possible they’d do something.”

Kyle’s thoughts kind of fade there, but anyone queuing up this documentary likely knows what he’s referring to with “something.” Search for “4chan” in the Ars archives, and you’ll find stories about ominous messages potentially linked to school shooters, images of extreme violence, and a slew of DDoS or doxing initiatives seemingly stemming from forum activity. “What the punks would do was have concerts, break shit, and have fights—people in this demographic have the digital world because maybe they can’t do these things in the physical world,” as Kantbot later puts it. And though TFW NO GF at times can make you empathize and sympathize with individuals caught up in this lifestyle—particularly participants like Kyle, who now appears determined not to go back but at a dead-end, or another man named Sean, who seemingly acts as a mentor for others trying to escape constant online-forum life—ultimately it remains so hard to overlook all the negativity associated with these kinds of online communities and disassociate all the people on the screen from it. This documentary will act as an intro and interesting glimpse at a particularly unique 2000s subculture, but it may not change how those of living as contemporaries understand or feel about it.

Must-see shorts: Still Wylde and Waffle

Honestly, the best use of would-be SXSW/Amazon viewers’ time might be to focus on the shorts. To start, these are the creators who need eyeballs and may suffer the most from the lack of a 2020 festival circuit—shorts typically act as proof-of-concepts, they play at festivals because people who might be able to collaborate on or finance a larger project tend to attend, and the goal might be a future deal more than audience distribution. If that ecosystem gets wiped away, shorts aren’t going to be saved by becoming VOD offers (see The Hunt, Emma, Trolls: World Tour) or by finding a second-life on a streaming platform down the line.

But more pertinent to any upcoming viewing this week, SXSW shorts might be the most interesting things available in this free screening initiative. Simply put, participating in a digital film festival is less risky for short films, so the best of the available shorts have signed up while the best of the available feature-length works skipped.

The best thing you can watch through this Amazon/SXSW partnership is actor/writer Ingrid Haas’ Still Wylde. It centers on an underdiscussed real-world topic that is equally underrepresented in entertainment: lost pregnancies. But as heavy as that experience is, Still Wylde approaches the topic with humor and heart (kinda, sorta similar to how Juno tonally approached teen pregnancy). Haas’ script has unexpected laughs side-by-side with emotional sequences you’ll think about long after these 12 minutes even if no one you know or loved has gone through this. And even in this short form factor, the lead performances—Haas as the would-be mom, Barry Rothbart as her seemingly flimsy but ultimately supportive partner, and Juzo Yoshida as an endearing sales clerk—all demonstrate the kind of relatability necessary to pull off this tonal high-wire act happening against the backdrop of a very emotional, difficult subject. If karma exists in the film industry amid the destruction COVID-19 continues to unleash, Still Wylde will become a full-length feature in the next few years.

If you need something more bizarre and high-concept-y (another good use for the short film format, after all), Carlyn Hudson’s Waffle would be the recommendation. This film has a premise that’s equal parts Black Mirror and astute 2020 culture observation: a rich waffle heiress has utilized a friends-on-demand app to arrange a sleepover, and our central friend has to do whatever she can to not let her rating drop for fear of losing customers. The intellectual concepts here are all resonant and heady (Capitalism! Gig-workers! Performative relationships! Financial privilege!), but Waffle is more interested in leaning into the odd, precarious situations such a world could lead to. Everything plays out in a clever, darkly comedic manner that will have you glued till the end. Like Still Wylde, it’s easy to imagine a fuller version here, too. Waffle could maybe become a solid B-horror from Blumhouse, but it’d be best as a single episode of some kind of near-future techno-warning series (like Black Mirror or Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone reboot).

Listing image: South by Southwest

Nathan Mattise Features Editor Emeritus

16 Comments