SxSW Coverage: Day 5

Published by Jeff Leins on March 18, 2009

I want to apologize to the regular readers.  I’m a little behind on news and I have about ten reviews to write from all the South by Southwest films, but I’ll try to get to it all as soon as I can.

Extremely exhausted, I opted to sleep in this morning rather than catching the Observe and Report panel.  I heard it was funny, but so was the movie.  I did, however, check out three new films today.

I watched Four Boxes, starring Justin Kirk from “Weeds.”  It was a slow, bizarre crawl through what was supposed to be a clever take on the world “wild” web.  I suppose it won points for an interesting plot turn, but lost them for painful length and a drawn out conclusion.  I know, I’m being vague.  Bottom line is I would like to check the fourth box, labeled “Poor.”

The Hurt Locker was excellent though.  Finally an Iraq movie that isn’t bogged down in the overdone post-traumatic stress angle or the politics involved.  Instead it draws from the immersed first-hand experience of its writer for an authentic full-contact combat flick with intense scenes and loud explosions.

Finally, I saw the midnight showing of The Haunting in Connecticut, which hadn’t been screened for audiences until tonight.  They were probably better off keeping it to themselves.  Lionsgate should have just titled this “The Haunted House” it was so generic.  I wanted to check my phone for how much longer we would be expected to endure this average horror, but I didn’t want to alert the unnecessary security force in case my iPhone turned into a video recording device.  This PG-13 movie is out at the end of March.  I recommend you skip it.  Here is my review.