Film Science
Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg wrote, directed and starred in "Nights and Weekends."
AUSTIN, Texas -- There's no point coming to South by Southwest if you're not open to movies that bite back, that are adventurous if imperfect, that shove you out of your comfort zone and send you out into the street feeling nettled and uneasy. There are plenty of the other kinds of movies here, too -- call them the gratifiers. Like all film festivals, SXSW needs to host brand-name premieres that will fill up its largest venue (the 1,300-seat downtown Paramount Theatre), and in Austin that's likely to mean quirky but nonconfrontational indie comedies and sober political-agenda documentaries espousing positions with which the audience already agrees.
We had some of those gratifier-movies this weekend, and at least two were definitely worth catching. Steven Conrad's "The Promotion," which premiered on Sunday night, is a good-natured but slightly off-balance comedy, with a twinge of 21st century economic desperation. Seann William Scott and John C. Reilly play assistant managers at a Chicago supermarket dueling over a promotion. Although Scott's character is the narrator, Conrad keeps you guessing not just about who'll get the job, but which one of these overextended, overstressed guys will be man enough to end the petty Machiavellian warfare between them.