The films, music, and brands of SXSW 2015 – The Verge

Director Karyn Kusama talks about her ensemble horror film The Invitation

2015-03-22T10:33:28-04:00

Karyn Kusama is probably best known for her breakout first feature, Girlfight (2000), which won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize, the Prix de la Jeunesse at Cannes, and a Gotham Award for Best Feature. But in the following years, the industry came calling, and her following efforts, Aeon Flux (2005) and Jennifer's Body (2009) seemed to suggest a filmmaker with an auteur's soul doing her best to make it work in Hollywood. Now with her most recent effort, The Invitation, which made its world premiere this week at SXSW, Kusama is returning to her independent roots, with a horror film that chucks genre convention in favor of sharp social commentary …

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Protect the brand or die trying: inside a fake social media crisis

2015-03-20T15:07:13-04:00

Lucian Jacobs is the kind of Silicon Valley founder that makes the rest of them look bad. He gets drunk in public, gropes women at the bar, and is having an affair with an unpaid intern. And to top it all off, he's scheduled to speak at South by Southwest tomorrow - at a panel about women and technology.

Fortunately, Jacobs isn't real - he's a simulation organized by a company named Polpeo. Polpeo, a subsidiary of the social media management firm eModeration, specializes in a novel new corporate exercise: the simulated brand crisis. Police officers train for various crises all the time; so do airline pilots. But most corporations don't - ev …

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Beyond Gamergate: a conversation with GTFO director Shannon Sun-Higginson

2015-03-18T11:43:39-04:00

In 2012, a friend sent filmmaker Shannon Sun-Higginson a hard-to-watch video of fighting game player Miranda "SuperYan" Pakozdi being sexually harassed by her own coach on the Capcom reality show Cross Assault. Not a gamer herself, Sun-Higginson started doing research and began work on a documentary about the larger problem of video games and harassment. Speaking to journalists, developers, and players, she put together GTFO, an in-depth look at some of the worst parts of recent gaming history - from sexist trash-talking to the backlash against critic Anita Sarkeesian - and the attempts to make things better.

The film, which premiered this …

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Mr. Robot: finally, a hacking show that won’t make you facepalm

2015-03-18T11:18:38-04:00

The portrayal of "hacking" has been abysmal in movies and television ever since Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum took down an alien invasion with a PowerBook in Independence Day. There's something about the very notion itself that seems to foil most filmmakers, and even if they aren't using it as a superpower to backdoor their characters out of a jam, they stumble when it comes to visuals - turning keystrokes and problem solving into overwrought special effects sequences with the visual coherence of a Michael Bay movie.

So I suppose I was a little bit skeptical about the SXSW premiere of Mr. Robot, a new thriller series from USA about a cyber-s …

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Silicon Valley’s diversity problem followed it to SXSW

2015-03-17T17:58:11-04:00

At a time when diversity is an issue facing tech companies large and small, South by Southwest is taking action in the name of inclusivity. This year's convention featured a number of diversity-focused panels aimed at women and people of color in media, startups, and engineering, along with, ideally, those charged with hiring them. The panels are all too necessary; in the last year, several notable Silicon Valley companies released diversity reports detailing the racial and gender makeup of their staffs. The findings were almost uniformly dismal. SXSW overall has received some criticism in the past for failing to highlight difference, so the …

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Toy Story, 20 years later: how Pixar made its first blockbuster

2015-03-17T17:17:37-04:00

Pete Docter took the stage at Pixar's SXSW panel to rapturous applause, the kind of reception you'd expect for a movie star or rock god. But here at SXSW, where movies, technology, and music swirl together in a multimedia stew, he's pretty much the same thing. He waved at the crowd sheepishly before settling his lanky frame down into one of the overstuffed black chairs, where he and his colleagues were gathered to look back on Toy Story, the first computer-animated feature that Pixar made 20 years ago.

Docter was a writer on that film and a key part of Pixar's original brain trust: a core group of writers, animators, and directors that stee …

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Introducing our newest podcast: Verge Extras

2015-03-17T16:00:02-04:00

The Verge has been covering SXSW all week, and we've seen movies, we've Meerkatted, stood in lines, and activated more brands than we'd care to remember. The week has certainly been eventful, and it's time to unwind and reflect on it all in the form of a podcast. Emily Yoshida, Dieter Bohn, Kwame Opam, and Casey Newton are on the ground in Austin to weigh in on this year's convention.

And if you'd like to hear even more of this sort of discussion, we've set up a brand new podcast feed for your ears to bask in. It's called Verge Extras, and it's available right now on iTunes, on Soundcloud, or you can subscribe directly with RSS in your podc …

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How Meerkat conquered all at SXSW

2015-03-17T14:37:38-04:00

It's been a long time since the app world saw a breakout hit rise out of SXSW. Twitter blew up here in 2007, and Foursquare replicated the feat two years later. It's only natural that mobile social networks would get their start at SXSW: half a decade ago, the annual music and culture festival was one of the few places you could find a large concentration of smartphone owners. Then the rest of the world bought smartphones, and SXSW lost its status as a unique testing ground. Developers kept trying to launch here - 2011 brought us a bunch of flash-in-the-pan messaging apps; in 2012, "people discovery" apps like Highlight landed with a thud. It …

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The director of Creative Control explains his augmented reality nightmare

2015-03-17T12:26:49-04:00

Just as Sundance has its coming-of-age stories, the paranoid tech parable is beginning to emerge as a newly dominant "SXSW movie." It makes sense: with an audience that crosses over so heavily with the digital community, SXSW Film is an eager, receptive audience for your would-be Black Mirror episode.

Benjamin Dickinson's Creative Control, which appropriately enough started as a Kickstarter campaign, has all the elements of a juicy near-future nightmare: a potentially life-altering gadget, an anxiety-ridden protagonist who all too easily becomes addicted to it, and a sexual obsession that's only exacerbated by it. But Creative Control, with …

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We spoke with W. Kamau Bell about his new CNN show at SXSW

2015-03-17T11:03:30-04:00

Comedian, podcast host, and social commentator W. Kamau Bell is heading back to television. Last week, Variety reported that CNN had given the former FX host a documentary series, titled United Shades of America, alongside new projects led by Kevin Spacey and author Reza Aslan. Bell's show will follow him as he travels the country, talking to different people from different cultures as he uses his brand of comedy to speak to the issues affecting their lives.

Bell was in Austin for South by Southwest this weekend for a show when we caught up with him. It was his third year in a row at the festival - he was actually hoping to take this year o …

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