SXSW 2018: news, films, panels, and activations from Austin, Texas’ multimedia festival

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review was originally posted after the film’s world premiere at the 2018 SXSW Interactive Festival. It has been updated for the film’s release.

It’s often better to go into films completely blind, without watching trailers, reading lead-up features, or engaging in the internet’s seemingly bottomless appetite for baseless speculation. Letting a movie exist on its own terms, rather than the terms anticipation and spoilers have set up for it, is usually the best way to experience it. But the one exception to the rule may be horror movies, given that the genre runs such a wide and unpredictable gamut. People who are game for a tense, socially provocative horror-thriller like Get Out aren’t necessarily on board for gross-out fests like The Human Centipede, and while part of the tension of any horror movie is not knowing just how violent the story is going to get, one viewer’s quality extreme cinema is another’s overwhelming nightmare fuel.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review was originally published from the 2018 SXSW Interactive Festival. It has been updated for the film’s wide release.

Anybody who knows their folklore is going to be pretty clear on what’s going on in the first act of Sebastian Gutierrez’s Elizabeth Harvest. Henry (Ciarán Hinds), a wealthy, successful Nobel-winner, has just married wide-eyed, naïve young Elizabeth (Abbey Lee). Taking her on a tour of his luxurious home, he tells her there’s just one room she must never enter. Shortly thereafter, while he’s away on a business trip, her curiosity gets the better of her, she unlocks the taboo room, and she’s changed in ways she can’t hide. This is the Bluebeard myth, popularized in the late 1600s by Charles Perrault. It’s part of a long tradition of stories about women whose curiosity and inability to obey orders causes a lot of trouble. Eve, Psyche, and Pandora would all sympathize with Elizabeth here — the lure of forbidden fruit can be powerful, but the punishments for seeking it are severe.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review was originally posted after the film’s premiere at the 2018 SXSW Film Festival. It has been updated to reflect the film’s HBO release.

The midnight premiere of an Unfriended: Dark Web at SXSW was somewhat of a botched surprise reveal. At the time, it was still an untitled feature being promoted by Jason Blum, founder of the Blumhouse studio, and producer of the Oscar winner Get Out and essentially every lauded horror movie of the last five years. But many horror fans had already guessed on Twitter that the film, written and directed by newcomer Stephen Susco, was a sequel to 2014’s Unfriended. The eventual title reveal came later, possibly after a necessary tweak — a film called Unfriended: Game Night was listed on Susco’s Wikipedia page for weeks, but eventually changed, perhaps to prevent confusion with the 2018 Jason Bateman comedy Game Night.

After the premiere of A Quiet Place at SXSW, the film’s director, John Krasinski, explained that he picked up the script after a simple pitch: “What if it’s a family, and they can’t make noise, and you have to figure out why?” This explanation goes a long way toward illustrating A Quiet Place’s goals. The film hits all the necessary beats for a straightforward horror film in an eerie post-apocalyptic setting. But it’s more effective as a portrait of a family that’s constructed a deceptively peaceful life under the constant, inescapable threat of death.

A Quiet Place is open about its premise, but sparing with the details. In the very near future, a species of large, seemingly unkillable spider-like monsters appears and wipes out most of humanity. While the creatures are blind, their hearing is so keen that a shattering plate, the thump of boots, or any speech above a whisper could draw them. A few humans survive, including a nameless couple played by Krasinski and Emily Blunt (who are married in real life). The pair retreats to a farmhouse with their son (Noah Jupe) and daughter (Millicent Simmonds), and when they conceive another child, they begin making elaborate preparations for the nigh-impossible task of raising the baby.

Fans tend to either love or hate Ernest Cline’s bestselling 2011 novel Ready Player One. There are legitimate reasons for both reactions. On the love side: it’s a light, airy pop confection, crammed with familiar cultural references, which Cline recontextualizes in surprising ways. On the hate side: the prose can be extremely clumsy, as it is in this paragraph where teenage protagonist Wade Watts describes the virtual car he constructed for himself in the vast online world where he spends most of his waking hours:

That’s a lot of awkward verbiage to say two pretty basic things: people in virtual reality can express their personal tastes through their avatars in hyper-specific ways, and Cline is so obsessed with the culture of the 1980s — the geek-fodder of his youth — that he thinks it’s compelling even in the form of a shopping list. The book is a fast-paced adventure, but this kind of unwieldy lump of mix-and-match nostalgia acts as a roadblock. There’s no attempt to consider why Wade finds these specific objects appealing, out of the billion options available to him. The book assumes up front that readers find everything in this list as unbearably cool as Cline does, and that just running down an exhaustive list of Wade’s favorite things is enough to make him appealing, relatable, and enviable.

In the world of immersive entertainment, high-end activations like HBO’s sprawling, real-world re-creation of Westworld or Disney’s upcoming Star Wars expansion lands get most of the attention. But at this year’s South by Southwest, one of the most exciting and forward-thinking pieces of immersive work wasn’t there to promote a movie or TV show. It was an interactive story experience called OpenMind, which played out in hotel rooms, office buildings, and public locations across Austin, Texas, over a period of four days.

OpenMind told the story of a protagonist — in this case, me — leaping between two parallel dimensions, tasked with stopping a nefarious tech genius from overtaking both worlds with an insidious thought-reading technology. It was an example of what its creators, the creative lab Interactive Deep Dive, call a “SimuLife” — an experience that uses live actors and real locations to blur the lines between fantasy and reality, mapping a fictional narrative onto the real world.

At 2018’s South By Southwest Conference, HBO and the marketing agency Giant Spoon created an epic promotion for Westworld, HBO’s series about a far-future Old West theme park where the rich elite play out their fantasies of heroism and villainy. Giant Spoon significantly rebuilt Texas’ existing J. Lorraine Ghost Town as a two-acre, real-life version of Sweetwater, a small Westworld town packed with plot hooks for visitors. They populated it with more than 60 costumed actors playing “hosts,” realistic humanoid robots that play a significant part in the Westworld story. Our SXSW culture team visited Sweetwater, and in these three linked articles, we each explore our versions of the experience, both within the story and behind the scenes.

The woman in the blue dress leaned in close to the sheriff of Sweetwater, whispering something into his ear — and he suddenly froze.

At 2018’s South By Southwest Conference, HBO and the marketing agency Giant Spoon created an epic promotion for Westworld, HBO’s series about a far-future Old West theme park where the rich elite play out their fantasies of heroism and villainy. Giant Spoon significantly rebuilt Texas’ existing J. Lorraine Ghost Town as a two-acre, real-life version of Sweetwater, a small Westworld town packed with plot hooks for visitors. They populated it with more than 60 costumed actors playing “hosts,” realistic humanoid robots that play a significant part in the Westworld story. Our SXSW culture team visited Sweetwater, and in these three linked articles, we each explore our versions of the experience, both within the story and behind the scenes.

When Westworld premiered on HBO last year, there were two very different ways to watch the show. The series could be watched as a drama about free will, economic exploitation, and the nature of fantasy. It could also be a puzzle-box. People debated whether the Westworld theory mania was ruining the show, either by making every revelation a disappointment, or by turning Westworld into the sum of its plot twists. So maybe it’s not surprising that an actual visit to Westworld — or at least, the elaborate real-world reproduction that HBO set up at this year’s SXSW show — would leave me wondering if I’d done the whole thing wrong.

At 2018’s South By Southwest Conference, HBO and the marketing agency Giant Spoon created an epic promotion for Westworld, HBO’s series about a far-future Old West theme park where the rich elite play out their fantasies of heroism and villainy. Giant Spoon significantly rebuilt Texas’ existing J. Lorraine Ghost Town as a two-acre, real-life version of Sweetwater, a small Westworld town packed with plot hooks for visitors. They populated it with more than 60 costumed actors playing “hosts,” realistic humanoid robots that play a significant part in the Westworld story. Our SXSW culture team visited Sweetwater, and in these three linked articles, we each explore our versions of the experience, both within the story and behind the scenes.

Everybody approaches wish-fulfillment fantasy differently. That’s one of the major themes in HBO’s Westworld, which centers in part on the choices visitors make — whether to chase outlaws or join them, whether to help innocent victims or become rapists and murderers. Just as in the 1973 Michael Crichton movie that inspired the series, Westworld visitors are invited to live out their best and worst fantasies, free of consequence. SXSW’s real-life Westworld couldn’t possibly go that far, but it still opened up a small world of choices for its guests. And one of the most engaging parts of the experience was watching people explore it, revealing what they want — and what they’re prepared to handle — when they go to Westworld.

Arriving roughly one hour into a full-day blockchain-themed event called “Initial Taco Offering,” I’m greeted by a sight familiar to many attendees of Austin’s South By Southwest Interactive Festival. There is a throng of badge-wearing, drink-craving conference goers — and there are free tacos.

The event, a play on the initial coin offerings that have turned digital currencies into some of the buzziest and most fraught investment opportunities on the planet, is being held at a steakhouse on Lavaca Avenue in downtown Austin. The organizers, a group called the Founders Organization, lured attendees away from more traditional sessions in the city’s convention center and nearby hotels with the promise of complimentary food and spirited discussions about the future of cryptocurrencies.

The new Syfy show Krypton premieres on Wednesday, March 21st, but audiences got a sneak peek at the show on March 15th at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. Set two generations before Superman (aka Kal-El) or his later nemesis General Zod were born, the series’s 10-episode season tells a political story about members of the El and Zod families and about a Kryptonian society in flux, struggling with class warfare and other internal conflicts that occupy the ruling class and keep them blind to the external force posed by the alien Brainiac.

The story largely takes place in the domed city of Kandor, long familiar to Superman fans as Krypton’s capital city, before Brainiac miniaturized it and stuck it in a bottle. It revolves around Seg-El (Cameron Cuffe), a young man from the disgraced house of El, and his lover Lyta Zod (Georgina Campbell, from Black Mirror’s “Hang The DJ”), a ranking member of Kandor’s military police force. The rise of Kandor’s theocratic overlord and a variety of conflicts in the city keep Seg and Lyta apart and busy, but the outside threat dominates. Shortly before Krypton’s SXSW premiere, I sat down with showrunner Cameron Welsh to talk about how the show developed, what went into designing its world, what the show’s long-term plans look like, and how no one’s planning for Krypton to cross over with any other DC Comics media property.

At SXSW 2018, I was invited to take part in a four-day immersive story experience called a SimuLife. Mounted by the Austin-based creative lab Interactive Deep Dive, SimuLife is meant to blur the line between fantasy and reality by letting me interact with the story as part of daily life. It’s like David Fincher’s movie The Game, executed in the real world. Other than those broad edicts, I wasn’t given any advance information about the experience. I’m documenting my journey through the story — wherever it leads.

The story starts with Part 1: I’m a transdimensional dopplegänger.

At South by Southwest, everyone is a VIP and no one is a VIP.

Your $1,600 badge gives you access to everything in the world and nothing at all. You can breeze through the door at a startup’s private party with the flash of a business card or you can stand in a line wrapping around the block to get into a cable TV network’s “sensory house,” which has already run out of Sugarfina gummies.

At SXSW 2018, I was invited to take part in a four-day immersive story experience called a SimuLife. Mounted by the Austin-based creative lab Interactive Deep Dive, SimuLife is meant to blur the line between fantasy and reality by letting me interact with the story as part of daily life. It’s like David Fincher’s movie The Game, executed in the real world. Other than those broad edicts, I wasn’t given any advance information about the experience. I’m documenting my journey through the story — wherever it leads.

The story starts with Part 1: I’m a transdimensional dopplegänger.

Whistleblower Chelsea Manning was released from prison less than a year ago, after being arrested in 2010 for leaking military secrets. Since then, Manning has filed to run for the US Senate in Maryland, campaigning on a platform of prison abolition, healthcare expansion, and open immigration. She’s also a critic of digital surveillance. At SXSW this week, she condemned the way that ubiquitous data collection and powerful algorithms have expanded into more parts of American life, asking software developers to take more responsibility for the unintended consequences of their work.

We met with Manning yesterday at SXSW to ask more about her views on the current state of hacking, online hate policing, and net neutrality — and why we shouldn’t lose sight of issues like privacy whenever a new crisis hits.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 SXSW Interactive Festival.

Just a couple of days before I saw Adam Bhala Lough’s documentary Alt-Right: Age of Rage, the white nationalist “alt-right” leader Richard Spencer said he would no longer hold publicized events at college campuses. “When they become violent clashes and pitched battles, they aren’t fun,” he complained, blaming the anti-fascist antifa movement for preventing people from attending lectures. “Antifa is winning.”

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 SXSW Interactive Festival.

For the documentary More Human Than Human, which premiered at SXSW 2018, directors Tommy Pallotta and Femke Wolting started with a hooky premise: to explore the current state of artificial intelligence, Pallotta (producer of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life) was going to try to replace himself with a robot. The directors set a robotics lab to work on the project, building a “camerabot” that was meant to scan faces, recognize emotions, train its camera on its subjects, generate questions, and interview them. As the dev team works on that project, Pallotta — a frequent onscreen presence, as interviewer and the intended final interviewee — fills the time by talking to other programmers, roboticists, and futurists about their AI projects or research, trying to build a sense of the state of AI art. “Are we witnessing the birth of a new species?” the film asks. “What will this tell us about intelligent machines… and about ourselves?”

We live in a post-Juicero world, and yet somehow, inexplicably, startups continue to push the limits of what is a socially acceptable expenditure of engineering effort. Case in point: Lunavity, a hover backpack for augmenting one’s jumping ability from a team of University of Tokyo students that seems to draw most of its inspiration from the sheer aesthetic absurdity required to reliably float a human being for brief amounts of time.

The device, a non-functioning prototype version that was shown off in the expo hall of Austin’s SXSW festival this week, uses a circular series of rotors to provide enough downward thrust to let the human wearer jump higher and for longer than is normally physically possible. The team behind the product says it should allow someone to jump two to three times higher than normal. The overall effect seems designed to replicate low-gravity environments, hence the moon-themed named.

At SXSW 2018, I was invited to take part in a four-day immersive story experience called a SimuLife. Mounted by the Austin-based creative lab Interactive Deep Dive, SimuLife is meant to blur the line between fantasy and reality by letting me interact with the story as part of daily life. It’s like David Fincher’s movie The Game, executed in the real world. Other than those broad edicts, I wasn’t given any advance information about the experience. I’m documenting my journey through the story — wherever it leads.

The story starts with Part 1: I’m a transdimensional dopplegänger.

Ev Williams last came to Austin for the South by Southwest Interactive Festival eight years ago. The entrepreneur, who previously founded Blogger and sold it to Google, was then a regular attendee at SXSW, where he relished an opportunity to gather with like-minded technologists who believed in the potential of the web. In 2007, he and his co-founders came to Austin to promote their latest project — a fast-paced, text-based social platform called Twitter — and it exploded in popularity, eventually becoming a global phenomenon.

“Fifteen years ago, when we were coming here to Austin to talk about the internet, it was this magical place that was different from the rest of the world,” said Williams, now the CEO of Medium, at a panel over the weekend. “It was a subset” of the general population, he said, “and everyone was cool. There were some spammers, but that was kind of it. And now it just reflects the world.” He continued: “When we built Twitter, we weren’t thinking about these things. We laid down fundamental architectures that had assumptions that didn’t account for bad behavior. And now we’re catching on to that.” 

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said today that the video platform has started limiting the number of hours its part-time content moderators can view disturbing videos to four hours per day. The news, announced during a Q&A session during Wojcicki’s South by Southwest Interactive talk here in Austin, comes as companies like YouTube are struggling to parse through the sheer volume of user-uploaded content and ensure it abides by its policies. Platforms including YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter have faced criticism for subjecting low-paid contractors to content that can be extremely disturbing.

“This is a real issue and I myself have spent a lot of time looking at this content over the past year. It is really hard,” Wojcicki said about content moderation. Recent solutions the company has landed on include both limiting the hours per day contractors perform this work and providing what Wojcicki referred to as “wellness benefits.”

YouTube will add information from Wikipedia to videos about popular conspiracy theories to provide alternative viewpoints on controversial subjects, its CEO said today. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said that these text boxes, which the company is calling “information cues,” would begin appearing on conspiracy-related videos within the next couple of weeks.

Wojcicki, who spoke Tuesday evening at a panel at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, showed examples of information cues for videos about the moon landing and chemtrails. “When there are videos that are focused around something that’s a conspiracy — and we’re using a list of well-known internet conspiracies from Wikipedia — then we will show a companion unit of information from Wikipedia showing that here is information about the event,” Wojcicki said.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 SXSW Interactive Festival. Upgrade will be released theatrically on June 1st.

Leigh Whannell’s Blumhouse collaboration Upgrade premiered at SXSW in the wee hours of Sunday morning. Whannell is the Australian director best known for writing the first three installments of the Saw franchise and all four Insidious movies, so his expertise has long been megaplex horror and critical disdain. This movie — smaller and financed by the most acclaimed horror producer of the last decade — is something new for him.

Whistleblower, activist, and Senate candidate Chelsea Manning spoke extensively at SXSW about the dangers of unchecked data collection and misplaced trust in algorithms. “The algorithms that I worked on in Iraq have found their way into policing, and also into the way the corporate world works, whether it’s your credit report or advertising data,” said Manning, who was released from prison last May after former President Barack Obama commuted her 35-year sentence for leaking classified intelligence. “All these different tools that we saw being used in one context have found their way everywhere else.”

In a conversation with Sally Singer of Vogue, Manning compared her work on predictive analysis in the Army a decade ago to how she fears modern programmers have approached artificial intelligence. “The idea of using algorithms in government, and in making decisions about credit reporting, for instance, is that it’s ‘better.’ That if we just write a better algorithm, more accurate algorithm, if I just math the crap out of this problem ... ‘If I just math it really well, I can problem-solve.’ And I came into Iraq with that mindset,” she said. “The algorithms themselves are not unbiased. we put our biases in there when we write it. And we also feed it data that might be biased to begin with.”