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SXSW: A film festival that travels to your living room.Mar 15, 2009 (Fort Worth Star-Telegram - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- If you couldn't make it to the South by Southwest film festival this year, despair not: Courtesy of an intriguing new program by IFC Films, you're able to see a number of the films screening here on "IFC Festival Direct" in your living room. IFC announced this experiment at Sundance, and now they're putting it into action. Saturday brought the simultaneous premiere of Joe Swanberg's latest mumblecore drama Alexander the Last at the Paramount and "on demand" on most cable systems. The movie will bypass a traditional theatrical release, but it's likely to find a larger audience than any of Swanberg's previous works, which have been confined to confined to the film festival ghetto. After all, a $7.99 pay-per-view fee is a lot cheaper than purchasing a festival pass and traveling to Austin. (Fair warning: Swanberg's movies drive me batty, and I patently refuse to sit through another of them, no matter how gushing the reviews.) Among the other titles included in the SXSW Festival Direct program: Zift, an odd, hyper-stylized film noir that was Bulgaria submission this year for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar; and Three Blind Mice, a much-praised Australian drama about three marines about to ship off to Iraq. Sure, all of this might just be a desperate gambit by film distributors to try to scare up any dollars they can in a rough-and-tumble economy. But when the end result is the opportunity to see movies you would never encounter otherwise, who's complaining? And even after SXSW concludes, the fun will continue: The Festival Direct program will release a number of other worthwhile efforts -- including David and Nathan Zellner's Goliath, which played at Sundance and SXSW in 2008 -- later in the year. To see more of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.dfw.com. Copyright (c) 2009, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email [email protected], call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA. |