SXSW 2017: all the news, panels, and brand activations – The Verge

Rob Mockler’s surreal film Like Me explores loneliness through YouTube culture

2018-01-26T17:10:31-05:00

This review was originally published in March 2017, when the film opened at SXSW in Austin, Texas. It is being republished to coincide with the film's limited theatrical release on January 26th, 2018. It will be available on streaming rental and VOD platforms on February 20th, 2017.

It's easy to read Like Me as a fatalistic commentary on social media. Kiya, the film's star, is a teenage YouTuber who makes the antics of personalities like PewDiePie seem quaint. In the film's first 15 minutes, she holds a convenience store clerk at gunpoint just for the pleasure of recording his meltdown and posting it online.

But Kiya - who seems to have a …

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The Disaster Artist review: a hilarious meta-commentary on filmmaking and misplaced ambition

2017-12-01T10:29:22-05:00

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"So bad they're good" movies tend to be overambitious productions that get away from their creators, with ludicrous plots and bad special effects. The Room, the 2003 anti-classic from eccentric writer-director-star Tommy Wiseau, is a strange exception. On paper, it's a simple drama about a man betrayed by his cheating girlfriend, set in modern-day San Francisco. But its disjointed pile-up of abandoned subplots, inhumanly stilted acting, and anatomically improbable sex scenes have cemented its place as one of the worst films of all time. Conversely, The Disaster Artist - a new film about the making of The Room - is not only the rare example o …

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Atomic Blonde cements Charlize Theron as an action star

2017-07-25T11:07:27-04:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special-event releases. A version of this review originally ran on March 13, 2017, in conjunction with the film's premiere at SXSW.

Charlize Theron became an action star with her role as Furiosa in 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road, but before that, she spent decades fighting for roles in a genre that favors men. She played support in The Italian Job and Reindeer Games, and leads in Aeon Flux, Snow White and the Huntsman, and its sequel. But Theron has never been given a solitary spotlight in a revved-up thriller of her own. That changes with Atomic …

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How director Darren Lynn Bousman created The Tension Experience

2017-03-22T15:57:12-04:00

Last year in Los Angeles, a mysterious cult began recruiting people through emails, phone calls, and one-on-one consultations. For nine months individuals were drawn into the group's web of intrigue, discovering that a young woman from Ohio had been taken in and brainwashed. In September, the cult finally opened its doors, and people had the chance to walk its halls and try to find the young woman inside - or die trying.

The only thing was, none of it was real.

The Tension Experience represented a key moment in the evolution of immersive entertainment. Combining alternate reality gaming, haunted house techniques, and a two-hour immersive t …

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How escape rooms became the future of advertising

2017-03-18T13:30:02-04:00

The Game of Thrones room in HBO: The Escape. | HBO

The SXSW conference has a history of being home to some of the most elaborate marketing events imaginable. Whether it's a chance to stay over at the Bates Motel, visit the restaurant from Breaking Bad, or see Kanye and Jay Z perform (courtesy of Samsung), it's as much a part of the show as technology talks and movies. But this year, a new style of tie-in swept the festival: the escape room.

Disney launched a pop-up escape experience tied to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Fox took over the "Prison Break" room at The Escape Game Austin to promote the new season of, yes, Prison Break. And HBO had a multi-room installation in place to promote Ga …

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Kesha is done making internet trolls her ‘higher power’

2017-03-16T10:58:06-04:00

"Over the past couple years, I feel like I've become a woman in a lot of ways," said Kesha during her SXSW 2017 panel, "because I'm reclaiming my personal space, my body, my confidence, my music, my life."

To say this period has been hard for Kesha, the musician behind hits like "Tik Tok" and "Die Young," would be an understatement. The artist has been open about her struggles with an eating disorder throughout her career; in 2014, she checked into rehab for it. Later that year, she sued her producer, Lukasz "Dr. Luke" Gottwald, for sexual abuse and battery; Dr. Luke responded with a countersuit. Fans rallied to Kesha's side using social me …

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At this year’s SXSW, the hard questions have all gone unanswered

2017-03-16T09:30:01-04:00

One of the most anticipated SXSW panels of this year featured Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. They are responsible for producing the televised conclusion to George R.R. Martin's sprawling, wildly popular fantasy series, and the audience in Austin was hungry to hear new details. With a packed crowd in the ballroom and a line that snaked through the convention center down a staircase to a lower floor, fans were salivating for even a sliver of information to hold them over until the season premiere in July. Oh - and perhaps some insight into that ill-fated ice block live stream reveal.

Instead, the crowd got a cheery …

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America may miss out on the next industrial revolution

2017-03-15T17:51:14-04:00

A robotic arm manufactured by KUKA, a German industrial robotics company, installing the cockpit section of a Mercedes Benz S-Class. | Photo by Thomas Niedermueller / Getty Images

Robots are inevitably going to automate millions of jobs in the US and around the world, but there's an even more complex scenario on the horizon, said roboticist Matt Rendall. In a talk Tuesday at SXSW, Rendall painted a picture of the future of robotic job displacement that focused less on automation and more on the realistic ways in which the robotics industry will reshape global manufacturing.

The takeaway was that America, which has outsourced much of its manufacturing and lacks serious investment in industrial robotics, may miss out on the world's next radical shift in how goods are produced. That's because the robot makers - as in, t …

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The co-writer of WarGames says he didn’t anticipate the dark side of hacking

2017-03-15T16:26:25-04:00

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In the 1983 film WarGames, Matthew Broderick's character David Lightman played a huge role in shaping the public image of computer hackers. But for co-writer Walter F. Parkes, it's left a complicated legacy. "When I look at that movie, certainly there were some things we got right. Mainly, I think, that the world would not change because of things that IBM and Ma Bell or the government would do - but it would change because of things that people in their garages or bedrooms would do," Parkes told an audience at SXSW during a panel on film and technology. "But the thing we didn't think about was the dark side of David Lightman."

Lightman's c …

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The SXSW chatbot doesn’t want me to die

2017-03-14T19:35:01-04:00

Like the term "robot" or "AI," "chatbot" covers a wide spectrum of machine intelligence, from eerily smart digital assistants to the equivalent of multiple-choice quiz delivery systems. That's why they're so much fun to mess with: you don't know if you'll get something that can explain the finer plot points of The Matrix to you, or something that responds to every query with a random Google search. The SXSW festival app has a chatbot, and unsurprisingly, it's pretty dumb. But occasionally, you'll find a topic where the creators decided to specifically craft a response - and one of them is my death date.

The bot is named Abby, and I started …

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