Check Book: SXSW Edition

The gang goes to Austin and sees two perfect movies

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Mar 10, 2025

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IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:

THE BARDI PARTY REPORT

Good morning from our Airbnb off of South Congress in scenic Austin, TX! The frequent fliers of the Blank Check Crew traveled to SXSW this year because we got nominated (??!) for an AWARD (???!?!??!) at the iHeartPodcast Awards, which happen to take place in Austin on the first Monday of the festival.

A brief recap of our time thus far:

FRIDAY
We arrived in Austin on two separate flights—while Ben and I flew direct, Griffin’s flight included a brief stop in Atlanta, where he was able to sample the offerings at “Ludacris’ Chicken & Beer,” located in Concourse D of the Hartsfield-Jackson airport.

Upon arrival, we checked into our AirBnb (nice, chill), sampled some Torchy’s tacos (p good), and sifted through the racks at some vintage stores.

Unfortunately, Ben did not purchase this jacket.

Eventually, we ended up at a very fun toy and novelty store on South Congress called Monkey See Monkey DO. They had a “President Red Hulk” display at the front, so we immediately understood we were among friends.

Some packs of Austin Powers postcards were purchased, which led to yet another conversation about whether or not Mike Myers was “cut” in the first movie when we sat down for cocktails later. Our waiter joined in on the fun and told us that those V-shaped pelvic muscles we were referring to were called “Devil’s Horns,” which seems like it may not actually be a thing now that I’m googling it. Anyway—gotta love talking about Austin Powers in Austin, TX.

SATURDAY
After picking up our badges at the convention center and stumbling upon several random brand activations (free cooling towels at the Costa Rican tourism pavilion! Rivian test drives over giant mounds of dirt!), we ended up at the world premiere of the Michael Bay parkour documentary We Are Storror. Who are Storror? Just a group of seven British lads who are all best friends and have been doing insane parkour shit together for the past 12 or so years. In a perfect marriage of filmmaker sensibility and subject matter, We Are Storror is 90 minutes of high octane melodrama, featuring spellbinding drone photography, stunning action choreo, and hot guys being dudes. Needless to say, we loved it. It may rank up there with Bay’s best work, and we hope it gets the IMAX release it deserves (and that Bay clearly wants).

Later that night, we went to County Line BBQ on the outskirts of Austin and sampled some beef ribs, which made us feel like we were living out our Flintstones fantasy. Ben tried to order what he thought was a garish giant margarita, but it was just a fancy boy marg that came in a dainty martini glass.

SUNDAY
We started off our morning at the Criterion Closet Truck, sneaking in during the VIP hour right after Carey Mulligan (gorgeous) and Bradley Whitford (very distinguished white head of hair). Our picks:
Ben
Gummo (d. Harmony Korine) - duh.
Barry Lyndon (d. Stanley Kubrick) - “My favorite Irish scoundrel”
Real Life (d. Albert Brooks) - a blind buy for Ben upon our recommendation and the encouragement of Criterion’s Hillary Weston
Marie
Lone Star (d. John Sayles) - we’re in Texas.
Cure (d. Kiyoshi Kurosawa) - one of my favorites
The Mother and the Whore (d. Jean Eustache) - had to pick one of the newer releases!
Griffin
Paris, Texas (d. Wim Wenders) - we’re in Texas
No Country for Old Men (d. Joel & Ethan Coen) - see above
Thief (d. Michael Mann) - had to upgrade to the 4K

We’ve got to give a special shoutout to AJ’s son Hayes (aged 7), who snagged the Godzilla box set on Griffin’s recommendation. Another Hayes tidbit that must be relayed—when discussing Flow with my husband, he said, “It was good, but I wish Miyazaki had directed it.” Start ‘em young, folks!

After our Criterion morning, we attended a brunch in honor of 20 years of Fantastic Fest and 1 year of Mutant. There were a lot of cool folks and a guy with a giant python, but the real highlight of the experience was getting to explore the Mondo Archives. Griffin took full advantage.

On Sunday night, we saw the second perfect movie of the festival - Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie. Griffin got really into the Matt Johnson/Jay McCarrol surrealist comedy universe earlier this year and encouraged the rest of us to come along to the premiere only with the context of, “It’s a really funny show about two guys in a band and they’re just trying to perform at this venue in Toronto called The Rivoli.” Honestly? That’s all the context you need. What we had the privilege of seeing last night was one of the most spectacular, creative, inventive, and hilarious magic tricks ever put to screen. The movie had TIME TRAVEL. It had STUNTS. It had ORBITZ NON-CARBONATED, FRUIT FLAVORED BEVERAGES. It had actual news footage from the shooting outside of Drake’s Toronto mansion. This movie distilled so many aspects of the Blank Check ethos / sense of humor into 100 minutes, and Donald Trump needs to stop messing with Canada so it can be released widely in the states. Mark our words, we’re gonna get Matt Johnson on the pod.

Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie The Screening The Picture

LET’S CRACK OPEN THE DOSSIER

When Steven Spielberg initially conceptualized his adaptation of Alice Walker’s celebrated 1982 novel The Color Purple, the director’s “first instinct was to shoot the film in black and white.” His reasoning: “I was flirting with telling the story in black and white because I was afraid of myself. I was afraid that I was going to sugarcoat the book and if I at least shot it in black and white, there would be no sugar to coat anything with.”1 So when Spielberg traveled to New York to shoot the first screen test for lead actress Whoopi Goldberg, he brought along famed Godfather cinematographer Gordon Willis, who had worked memorably in black and white on a number of recent collaborations with [REDACTED DIRECTOR], including Manhattan and Stardust Memories. But Spielberg and Color Purple cinematographer Allen Davieu ended up shooting the film in color, a decision that Spielberg felt uncertain about two decades later: “[M]aybe the first time I chickened out was the decision to make the film look beautiful. … [We] decided to make this look beautiful—faces, interiors, exteriors—and I think that beauty might have overwhelmed people’s memory of the violent poetry of Alice Walker’s book.”2 When Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński later opted to shoot their 1993 film Schindler’s List in black and white, Spielberg’s reasoning in Premiere magazine felt as much like it was an artistic justification for the format’s usage in that film as it was a response to the criticism made of the beauty of The Color Purple’s cinematography: “Black and white doesn’t distract the way color distracts. Often even when you light a scene to look depressing, it comes across looking beautiful. Because if you use soft light coming in through a window — what an overcast day looks like — even if you print it toward the blue side, there’s still a kind of Merchant-Ivory beauty about it. The beauty is in its frankness. It’s completely unforgiving. Black and white is about texture; it’s not about tone.”3
Long before Oprah Winfrey attended the 58th Academy Awards on March 24, 1986, she had already resigned herself to losing the award for Best Supporting Actress, which she did—to Anjelica Huston for Prizzi’s Honor. But before awards season concluded, Oprah had already ensured she wouldn’t be leaving the winter empty handed, on advice from another Chicago media titan: “I knew I wasn’t going to win. Gene Siskel told me, ‘You’re not going to win, so when you go to the luncheon, take the biscuit and bronze it.’”4 Though Winfrey would eventually receive an honorary Oscar—the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award—in 2012, it was her Academy luncheon keepsake—you know, the biscuit—that was featured prominently amongst other artifacts at the 2018 “Watching Oprah: The Oprah Winfrey Show and American Culture” exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.5
One of the things you learn when you read every Steven Spielberg interview you can—because it’s your job, improbably and amazingly—is that things seem to just have a way of happening to him… or that he, at the very least, seems to just have a certain way of telling the things that have happened to him. For instance, here’s how Spielberg described the June 13th, 1985, arrival of his and past-and-future guest Amy Irving’s son, the video game designer Max Spielberg, which occurred just a week and a half into the production of The Color Purple: “[W]hen Celie was giving birth to Olivia. Just as we were pulling the rubber baby out from the bed—the little rubber baby that you had to shake to make it look like it was alive—the phone call came and one of the assistant directors ran in and said, ‘Your baby’s on the way. Your real baby is on the way.’ It was a wonderful moment in my life.”6
And—for no real reason in particular—here’s a link to a great song, which I called the 5th best track of 2019… and which I obviously know starts with the letter Z:

MARCH MADNESS UPDATES!

Here’s where we stand after the first week in March Madness. Voting has been closer on Patreon than on main feed, although Linklater/WKW was a bit of a close one!

Today, you can vote for either Mel Brooks (4) or Todd Haynes (5) in our main-feed challenge, and for either Richard Curtis Rom-Coms or the Three Colors trilogy on our Patreon.