For all our coverage of SXSW Film 2017, click here.
What a great South By Southwest it was. There were some truly incredible premieres, some mild disappointments, and a truly excellent television pilot shown at this year’s festival. Here’s almost everything else I saw there this year (we’ll have some reviews of the SXSW films showing at the Boston Underground Film Festival coming later this week), excepting the one movie I walked out of, A Critically Endangered Species, whose first 30 minutes had experienced a combo of pretentious and boring that I didn’t exactly find palatable.
Like Me
Rob Mockler’s Like Me is one of the most frustrating movies I saw at SXSW this year, only because of how close it gets to being interesting before the quality drops. A woman named Kiya (Addison Timlin) dons a mask, robs a convienece store in the middle of the night, makes the clerk piss his pants with fear, and records the whole thing, all for the views and for the lulz. Sure enough, she catches some small fame, and encounters criticism and resistance. She’ll only have to go further next time to prove she’s real, that’s she’s dangerous, and it’ll lead her down a pretty dark path.
Despite the occasional stunning image (there’s one of Timlin, masked, sitting in an abstract hotel room that’s absolutely gorgeous), there’s just not enough going on inside of Like Me deeper than your grandfather’s ranting about how social media is breeding a bunch of fame-obsessed sociopaths. The actors do their best (especially the perennially under-appreciated Larry Fessenden, who takes a super creepy character and makes him absolutely personable), and Timlin, great as always, is certainly game as fuck for whatever Mockler throws at her, but the Adult Swim glitch art gross-out aesthetic is already seeming cliche for that network, and it gets really, really tired during this film’s eighty minutes. I look forward to seeing what Mockler does for his next project, but this one just didn’t do it for me.