I branched out a little this year at SXSW by attending my first of the many discussion sessions available during the fest, which are held in the Austin Convention Center ballrooms. It wasn’t a movie, but the conversation was certainly movie related, as it was an interview with actor Kyle MacLachlan, hosted by Jenni Kaye, who is a contributor to Letterboxd.
The pair talked extensively about MacLachlan’s decades of screen work, his non-acting related projects, and even the top four movies on the Letterboxd accounts of some of MacLachlan’s characters. The hour-long talk provided ample opportunity for the actor to plug his various products, like his wine label and coffee brand. We all had to fight through that bit of capitalism, but I won’t deny that I might be looking in the near future to acquire a bottle of MacLachlan’s Pursued by Bear wine, which is made in one of my favorite places in the world, the Pacific Northwest, specifically the actor’s home state of Washington.
Other current and future projects for MacLachlan include his podcast, Varnamtown, which he is currently adapting into a television series. He’s also working again with Amazon Studios. In addition to his excellent work on that streaming service’s breakout hit video game adaptation, Fallout, he will be appearing this year in a new show for Amazon, titled Overcompensating.
That was all enjoyable enough – I was especially pleased to hear MacLachlan twice name-check his character The Captain from the series How I Met Your Mother – but the real reason I attended the discussion was to hear about the actor’s experiences working with David Lynch. I knew that his reminiscences would be especially poignant, as Lynch died only two months ago at age seventy-eight.
It was delightful to hear MacLachlan so warmly remember his dear friend, artistic collaborator, and the man responsible for launching MacLachlan’s career by casting him in his first movie (the ill-received Dune) and then putting him in the lead of one of the best films made in the 20th century, Blue Velvet. Kaye even elicited a Lynch impression from MacLachlan. At one point during the discussion, he did his best interpretation of the daily weather reports that Lynch released for years on YouTube.
Kale! and Letterboxd’s Jenni Kaye (photo by the author)
My main takeaway from MacLachlan’s memories and description of Lynch was how kind and present the late director was each and every time MacLachlan encountered him. Lynch practiced and was a strict adherent of transcendental meditation – he even wrote a book about the subject titled Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity – and I could tell from the way that MacLachlan talked about his old friend that Lynch was dedicated to living in the moment and being a supportive artistic partner.
Lynch was obsessed from the time he was a teenager with living what he called “the art life.” He wanted to create, and MacLachlan confirmed that Lynch did exactly that. He talked for a few minutes about how the director was always and forever working on one project or another, whether it be painting, sculpting, music, or writing. Kale – as Lynch playfully nicknamed MacLachlan when they first met in the early 1980s – related a few highlights from his work with Lynch. Sitting in the back seat of a car with Dennis Hopper driving while playing the wildly unstable Frank Booth in Blue Velvet was one. The most inspirational thing MacLachlan said about Lynch was that he was able to conceive the characters and worlds he created as fully formed, real people and places. His creativity knew no bounds.
Kaye also brought her Letterboxd bona fides by asking MacLachlan a few questions about his movies in relation to the movie social media service. He was surprised to learn that the movie he’s in that appears most in Letterboxd users’ top four movies isn’t Blue Velvet, as he expected, but instead is Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. (MacLachlan related that he felt Lynch’s work in Fire Walk with Me was the director’s attempt at reclaiming Twin Peaks after the debacle of the show’s ignominious cancellation.) He listed two of his favorite older movies that might be overlooked in the current movie discussion: Ridley Scott’s The Duellists and The Last Run, starring George C. Scott, both from the 1970s.
MacLachlan also inexplicably listed Scott’s Blade Runner as one of his favorite “comfort movies.” As we all laughed at such a bleak comfort movie choice, he pointed out that Blade Runner isn’t as odd a choice as his other pick, another Ridley Scott movie, the horror sci-fi classic Alien. Kaye set a relaxed, inviting atmosphere during the interview, which sounded to this member of the audience like a warm chat between old friends. The interview was a highlight of SXSW 2025 for me, and I’ll remember it fondly for years to come.
After the mid-afternoon MacLachlan interview, I made my way back over to the Lamar Street Alamo for three screenings. The first was Lifehack, a new entry in the movie subgenre known as Screenlife. These movies are presented almost exclusively through the computer screens that the characters are using and through which they interact with one another.
Lifehack tells the story of four chronically online slacker teenage friends who decide to stick it to an obvious stand-in for Elon Musk. The villain is a callous billionaire who doesn’t deserve what he has, and the collective resolves to pull off a high-tech heist, all via their computer screens, to teach him a lesson. Things get more dangerous when the group learns exactly how this oligarch made all of his money.
The movie was a labor of love for director Ronan Corrigan, who stressed his own past as a chronically online teenage slacker during the post-screening Q&A. He never got up to planning cyber-heists with his online buddies, but he did his best to capture in the movie the sense of camaraderie that can be built with nothing more than an internet connection and shared interests. While it’s maybe not the most realistic thing you’ll see on screen, Lifehack is a non-stop thrill ride that kept surprising me with what would happen next.
Movie two was American Sweatshop, a drama about social media content moderators and the hellish existence that their jobs create. The disturbing content that moderators regularly encounter is a documented problem, and American Sweatshop uses it to build a thriller when our hero, Daisy – played by Lili Reinhart – comes across a disturbing snuff film of a woman being tortured to death with a hammer and nails. Everyone tries to convince Daisy that the video is fake, but she is convinced that it’s real and does whatever she can to find the killer and bring him to justice.
It feels disingenuous to mine human misery and callousness for your movie, and then to build your thriller around an imagined version of that same misery and callousness. One of Daisy’s coworkers – played by Joel Fry in a performance that can most charitably be described as “really going for it” – goes through cycles, as we’re told most of the employees of this company do, of having a breakdown, destroying things around him, then pulling himself back together.
In a disastrous miscalculation by the filmmakers, these episodes are mostly played for laughs. The worst examples of this play like they belong in a sitcom. Again, it’s hard to take the emotionally and mentally destabilizing traumatic experiences in your movie seriously when some of the characters are running a betting pool on who will melt down next.
My last film of the day was a bonkers 1980s pastiche named New Jack Fury. Have you ever seen the short film named Kung Fury? That movie takes the cheesy convention of the 1980s buddy cop movie and turns it on its head by making one of the cops in the story an anthropomorphized triceratops, named, gloriously, Tricera-cops.
New Jack Fury contains the same type of bonkers aesthetic, but it’s made by a predominantly Black cast and crew, and they make sure to pay homage to touchstone Black comedies like I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, and skewering Black dramas of the ‘80s and ‘90s like New Jack City. The story centers around Dylan Gamble, a cop cleaning up the neon-soaked 1980s streets. Fired from the force, Gamble is still determined to take down the Styles Syndicate, a ruthless crime organization.
The cast and crew of New Jack Fury (photo by the author)
Things become more personal for Gamble when his sweetheart, Tanisha, is kidnapped by the Syndicate. He must team up with a local criminal named Leslie Kindall – played as a hilarious tribute to Michael Jackson by Dean "Michael Trapson" Morrow – and small-time hood Hendrix Moon, played with reckless abandon by Paul Wheeler, to rescue Tanisha and save the city. Director Lanfia Wal has crafted a loving homage to the Blaxploitation of another age, and he keeps the laughs coming, whether by means of moonwalking street toughs or characters getting slapped in the face with 18-inch dildos.
This will be my last update from SXSW 2025! I’m going to take the last remaining days of the fest to relax and see as much as possible while not having to worry about getting anything written or published. Check back here in about two weeks for the post-mortem follow up to my experience at this year’s SX. If you want to continue following everything I see at the fest, check out my meticulously maintained Letterboxd account.